User Panel
Posted: 7/27/2009 12:26:01 PM EDT
Just got a new flatscreen and I've connected it to the HD converter using the component cable.
Problem is, when I use this big ass cable it occupies the RCA jacks that I would normally use as audio outputs to my stereo system. So, I can either spend $70 on an HDMI cable that will supposedly give me a better picture, or I can buy a couple of inexpensive RCA splitters to get tv audio out of my stereo speakers. Has anyone "upgraded" to this HDMI cable and is it really a better picture? The picture quality on the HD channels is already great, I don't see how it can really improve. |
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If you are spending $70 on an HDMI cable you are doing it wrong...I bought 3 six foot pieces last year for $9..and yes if you have a HD feed the picture is waaaayy better
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Quoted: Just got a new flatscreen and I've connected it to the HD converter using the component cable. Problem is, when I use this big ass cable it occupies the RCA jacks that I would normally use as audio outputs to my stereo system. So, I can either spend $70 on an HDMI cable that will supposedly give me a better picture, or I can buy a couple of inexpensive RCA splitters to get tv audio out of my stereo speakers. Has anyone "upgraded" to this HDMI cable and is it really a better picture? The picture quality on the HD channels is already great, I don't see how it can really improve. I would take the digital picture/sound in a heartbeat. Everything that I use is connected to my audio system via HDMI. |
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$4?
The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 yep, the famous monster cable scam |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 Because he gets bonuses for doing that. Go to monoprice.com and thank us later. |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 My company installs low voltage and AV systems and we have had great luck with monoprice.com cables. They are the real deal for a tiny fraction of the price. Their TV mounts arent bad either |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 Yup.. Get them from monocable. I got 2 six foot HDMI cables for about 6 dollars last year. Works just as well as a 70 dollar cable. |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 Screw that......its the worst kept secret in the business...the $5 cable you buy on the net is equal to the $70 cable you buy at the chain stores.....search the archives...tons of threads on this |
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I replaced my hdmi monoster cable with a hdmi cable form monoprice. They have a huge selection and sizes that u don't find in the stores. I have order several things form them. They have cheap wall mounts also.
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true, BUT you will want a cable with good shielding or you will get interference from other devices |
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Quoted: $4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 Is a he also a car salesmen? |
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Quoted: HDMI cables are $4 at monoprice.com and they work fine |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 Yup.. Get them from monocable. I got 2 six foot HDMI cables for about 6 dollars last year. Works just as well as a 70 dollar cable. same here. Digital either works or it doesn't |
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Monster cables are a waste of money.
EVERYTHING they sell can be found elsewhere for 10% of the price or less. I remember before CompUSA went out of business, I was looking for a short Cat5 jumper... 3 foot cable was like $15, a 10 foot cable was $10, I spent $30 on some crimp-on RJ-45's and a 50 foot spool. |
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HDMI cables are $4 at monoprice.com and they work fine Yup. |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 yep, the famous monster cable scam Back in the days of analog signals, you COULD measure the difference. Digital....if the signal gets through it gets through. |
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As an aside, Monster Cable is notorious for filing frivolous lawsuits against anyone who dares to use the word "monster" in their product names. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
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true, BUT you will want a cable with good shielding or you will get interference from other devices Wrong. This is the kind of BS Noel Lee wants you to believe. |
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<map id="mblMap" name="mblMap"> <area target="_blank" href="http://www.vxm.com" coords="358,66,450,103" shape="rect" /> <area href="file:///Macintosh%20HD/Original%20Items/www.vxm.com/21R.9.html" coords="2,69,100,101" shape="rect" /> </map> What do you do about a speaker cable that was clearly spec'd for 1990's wretched excess, yet so dramatically rockets high-end audio into the 21st century? Anybody contemplating shelling out $10,000 for a four-meter pair of Nordost "Valhall" Reference speaker cables will be facing this marketing/product conundrum Up until the day the Valhalla cables arrived, I had been very happily using Nordost SPM speaker cables, along with the company's Quattro Fil interconnects, and was convinced I was pretty much wringing out all the sonic truth possible via any available wires. My German-made MBL 101D speakers are amazing transducers capable of picking out a flea fart in a crashing crescendo, and if there was anything more to be gained from changing wires, especially to ones as costly as the Valhalla's, it surely was in the vastly diminishing returns noise level At the end of about two weeks of Valhalla burn-in, I sat down Gordana, my-wife-with-even-more audio-critical-ears-than-me, in front of the system. Four hours later we reluctantly turned off the rig and looked at each other in dumbfounded amazement. How could it be that just a pair of speaker cables could make such an incredible difference? Bass? It was way tighter, with a hard fist to the belly, sofa-shaking punch. Treble? Another sweet octave seemed to appear out of thin air. Soundstage? People were forced to vacate neighboring apartments as a vastly expanded orchestra abruptly moved in. Midrange? Female singers got a sudden upgrade from torch to red-hot as their lovelorn lyrics singed our silk rugs. Don't even ask about clarity and detail. Here is just one example: There is a recording we have played many a time of an outdoors live performance that suddenly sprouted birds singing in the trees. We had never heard their chirping before. It was this sudden upsurge in heretofore-obscured audio information that floored us more than anything. This was detail that was not etched in grating audible shards. The presentation was complete in total panoramic detail yet never overwhelmed. There was also this uncanny, relaxed quality about the musical flow, almost as if someone had dropped the tempo, yet obviously it hadn't been touched. It's almost as if once the subliminal audio grunge was stripped away by the Valhalla's, the listener's mind suddenly relaxed because it no longer had to subconsciously work to make sense of the experience. This highly relaxed, yet totally unhesitating, pulled into the music effect was one of the truly distinctive qualities of the Valhalla's. Overall, the Valhalla's made for an unbelievably gripping listening experience. We heard newly suspended in midair overtones as a gently pedaled piano note melted away; a delicately bowed viola string slowly decayed in soul soaring air; a last faint breath exuded from the lungs about love lost gently misted down to the floor, and so much more was now to be heard on nearly every recording we owned. The result with the Valhalla's was this is really real, with equally real player emotions. Whoever thought cables could deliver such compelling emotional goods, a quality typically associated only with the best in high-end vinyl? According to Nordost literature (www.nordost.com), the Valhalla loudspeaker cable consists of forty conductors divided into four groups of ten. Each conductor is made from optimized diameter solid 99.999999 Oxygen Free Copper that has 78 microns of extruded silver on the surface. The surface of each conductor is highly polished before a high precision micro monofilament wrap is applied. This micro monofilament is helically wound over the conductor, and a precision Teflon jacket is then extruded over the conductor. Proprietary methods are also used that reduce dielectric contact by a factor of more than 80%. But whatever Joe Reynolds, the president of Nordost, is doing to them in their manufacturing, the transient response of the Valhalla's is so blindingly fast they could suddenly propel the first generation starship Enterprise to warp 11. When the music says, engage! the Nordost Valhalla's instantly reply aye-aye, sir. And who needs a holodeck when you can enjoy almost holographic sound in your earthbound living room? Prior to installing the Valhalla Reference cables, I had recently upgraded Bob Carver's Sunfire "Classic" tube preamp to its most recent remote control incarnation and was surprised to find that this terrific preamp now offered even more detail, air, and musical truth and beauty than its non-remote predecessor. With the Valhalla's installed, the Carver preamp was vaulted into an even higher realm of sonic capabilities. (If only the Valhalla's could also have made using the confusing Carver preamp remote control as clear as the music!) If there were any diminishing price/performance returns on audible display here, it would have to be why anyone would spend thousands more for a tube preamp. The Carver Classic is simply that good, and with the Valhalla's installed this preamp's sonic superiority over its vastly overpriced competition is critically clear. The same could also be said about the two Sunfire Signature amplifiers used to power the MBL 101D speakers, which, at their rated 4 ohm impedance, were happily being fed 1200 watts per channel by Carver's amplifier wunderkind. The Sunfire Signature amps, rated at 600 watts into 8 ohms and 1200 at 4 ohms, suddenly found deeply new ways to blast the bass jams with the Valhalla's hooked up. And this amplifier's midrange, already musically great, became even greater with the Valhalla's making the wattage connection to the MBL 101D's –– Which also happens to be a good way to think about the Valhalla Reference speaker cable; namely, as a system quality amplifier. In the context of system quality amplification, the $10,000 price tag for a 4-meter pair of Valhalla's suddenly seems reasonable. It is not uncommon for the very best source components to cost that much, and fabulous loudspeakers pretty much start at around that price mark. But what good is spending all that money if the wires that tie everything together muddle the final result? Which is better: Spending $10K on one new component for a hopeful audio upgrade, or spending that sum on something that will absolutely leverage the quality of an entire high-end system? If installing the Valhalla's can immediately catapult your existing rig into a new high-end audio league, then these wires can be viewed as hamster-in-a-spinning-wheel-upgrade-money saved. The mind boggles as to what an all-up system with both Valhalla speaker cables and Valhalla interconnects might accomplish in offering an arrow-through-the-heart-musical experience. The Valhalla cables are more than just wires––They are in the same product league as astoundingly great speakers or source components that radically transform the capabilities of your system and how you perceive state of the art audio reproduction. In sum, the Valhalla Reference speaker cables are astounding and astonishing. They are astounding in what they do for sound and musical reproduction. And they are astonishing in how they force you to rethink the whole high-end audio price/value equation. 21st Pub date: April 2002 Copyright 2002, Francis Vale, All Rights Reserved <form action="http://www.google.com/search" method="get"> </form> 21st, The VXM Network, http://www.vxm.com |
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Make sure your HDMI cable meets the v1.3 specification (a, b, or c doesn't matter.) But you must have 1.3 for 1080p source programming. It's a bandwidth issue. |
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as stated by others - monoprice for all my cabling needs unless i make my own, which i hardly do anymore because monoprice is so cheap and they work so well. even if you read on audiophile sites you will see they use monoprice too.
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WalMart is your friend. You can get a nice cable for $25 or so. Or you can order online and get a decent one for $5 plus shipping.
If I was going to have one longer than 25ft, I would spend a lot to get one with GOOD shielding. Get the Monster Cable version for long installs. |
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If your component cables are occupying your RCA jacks, something sounds wrong.
If they don't leave enough space for your RCA audio connects, then I understand (this can be worked out using cables with angled terminals sometimes). But you should have all three component (blue, green, red) in the three component holes and then there should be analog RCA jacks available for your audio input. (The component cables don't carry audio - only video). Or just run some RCAs from the back of the HD convertor to your stereo. The HD convertor should have some analog audio outs too. |
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true, BUT you will want a cable with good shielding or you will get interference from other devices Wrong. This is the kind of BS Noel Lee wants you to believe. whatver dude, shielding and interference are real things. The $4 cables do work fine, but i dont know about the .70 cents version as the cable looks thin |
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Quoted: If your component cables are occupying your RCA jacks, something sounds wrong. If they don't leave enough space for your RCA audio connects, then I understand (this can be worked out using angle connector wires sometimes). But you should have all three component (blue, green, red) in the three component holes and then there should be analog RCA jacks available for your stereo. Or just run some RCAs from the back of the HD convertor to your stereo. The HD convertor should have some analog audio outs too. This. I can't think of any reason why you'd ever plug a video cable into an audio connector. Unless the instructions are just completely forked. |
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I wouldn't go as cheap as $4 for an HDMI cable, but the one I paid $25 for works great. I bought one of the cheaper ones and it broke after a couple of months.
Depending on your receiver, the HDMI cable can run both audio and video. If your receiver has HDMI pass through, one cable is all you need. Mine is not HDMI-pass through, but I hooked up my audio with the optical wires. Even compared to component, the HDMI should produce a visual difference on the HD channels coming out of your cable box. |
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Monster cables are a waste of money. EVERYTHING they sell can be found elsewhere for 10% of the price or less. I remember before CompUSA went out of business, I was looking for a short Cat5 jumper... 3 foot cable was like $15, a 10 foot cable was $10, I spent $30 on some crimp-on RJ-45's and a 50 foot spool. Ahh that was belkins fault mostly. The monster cable of the computer world. Belkin is worse because not only is everything they make overpriced (unless you get a really big rebate or something on it), everything they sell is inferior. Not only were network cables way overpriced so were the parallel port cables for printers. They must have scammed millions of people with those cables. |
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true, BUT you will want a cable with good shielding or you will get interference from other devices Wrong. This is the kind of BS Noel Lee wants you to believe. whatver dude, shielding and interference are real things. The $4 cables do work fine, but i dont know about the .70 cents version as the cable looks thin Learn the difference between analog and digital signals, DUDE. |
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That's the weird thing, I don't have any "extra" audio jacks on the tv.
When the component cable is plugged in, the white and red audio jacks are used and there are no audio outputs on the back of the converter. |
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I have two of the $4 amazon ones that are about 6 months old now and are starting to tweak out. Signal will cut out sometimes.
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Quoted: I wouldn't go as cheap as $4 for an HDMI cable, but the one I paid $25 for works great. I bought one of the cheaper ones and it broke after a couple of months. Depending on your receiver, the HDMI cable can run both audio and video. If your receiver has HDMI pass through, one cable is all you need. Mine is not HDMI-pass through, but I hooked up my audio with the optical wires. Even compared to component, the HDMI should produce a visual difference on the HD channels coming out of your cable box. Lmfao, $25. |
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Monoprice.com, and as others have said you will thank us later.
Monster Cable indeed. |
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Quoted: I have two of the $4 amazon ones that are about 6 months old now and are starting to tweak out. Signal will cut out sometimes. Shoulda bought monoprice/meritline cables. Almost 2 years on them, including 2 moves and not a single problem whatsoever. |
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That's the weird thing, I don't have any "extra" audio jacks on the tv. When the component cable is plugged in, the white and red audio jacks are used and there are no audio outputs on the back of the converter. Are you sure the TV has component inputs? Component input terminals will be blue, green and red (and these only carry video signal). Composite terminals are yellow (video), white (left audio) and red (right audio). Sounds like you might have component wires hooked into the composite input jacks. Or you might have composite wires, which aren't HD and only carry standard def. Sounds like you might have no choice but to use an HDMI with that TV of you want to see HD. But as far as pic quality with component vs. HDMI, the rule of thumb I've seen is to try both and go with the one that gives you the best picture, since it seems to vary among set-ups. |
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Monster cables are a waste of money. EVERYTHING they sell can be found elsewhere for 10% of the price or less. I remember before CompUSA went out of business, I was looking for a short Cat5 jumper... 3 foot cable was like $15, a 10 foot cable was $10, I spent $30 on some crimp-on RJ-45's and a 50 foot spool. Ahh that was belkins fault mostly. The monster cable of the computer world. Belkin is worse because not only is everything they make overpriced (unless you get a really big rebate or something on it), everything they sell is inferior. Not only were network cables way overpriced so were the parallel port cables for printers. They must have scammed millions of people with those cables. Holy crap, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. Belkin was shit, and compusa WAY overpriced that shit. I laughed when they went out of business. And the Canadian Broadcast company did some real research on hdmi cables. The $4 ones did EXACTLY the same thing as the $150 monster cables, but for less money out of your pocket. They had actual engineers doing the testing, right there from start to finish. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON ANY HDMI cable over $20 I bought 10 of them from Freys at $4 apiece. 10 foot cables TXL |
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HDMI cables are $4 at monoprice.com and they work fine +1. That's were I got mine! |
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I have a monoprice hdmi from my notebook to my LCD. It works great
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Quoted: July 13, 2008 World's most expensive AV cable Hjiii http://bookofjoe.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/12/hjiii.jpg Pictured above, it's made by Nordost. From the website: Whitelight Glass Fiber Optic Cable Designed for the discerning customer who requires the highest level of signal transfer performance from this medium. Developed by Nordost, this cable provides outstanding results when utilized in high-end 2-channel audio or multi-channel home theater systems. Whitelight glass cable uses an extremely high grade of glass fiber conductor which has very highly polished surfaces to ensure an optimum signal path for digital data streams. The 3 layers of very low loss insulation as well as an internal damping mechanism are designed to preserve the integrity of the digital signal. Each cable is terminated with high quality composite Toslink connectors whose precision polished lenses ensure absolute signal integrity at the point of connection. This cable is the ideal choice where the highest quality optical link is prerequisite. .................... $32,825 (£16,500; €20,630) a pair. [via Jonathan Margolis's "Technopolis" column in the July 12, 2008 Financial Times "How To Spend It" magazine] They should tattoo a big red "STOOPID" into the forehead of anyone who buys something like this. Tell them it means they are special. |
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I bought two of the generic, cheap HDMI cables from walmart, and both of them broke. One while i was initially plugging it in, and one while I was moving my TV and entertainment center around to paint etc.
the one 50 dollar cable I have has been perfect, been through hell and no problems at all. For me, it's worth the extra money. |
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This. I can't think of any reason why you'd ever plug a video cable into an audio connector. Unless the instructions are just completely forked. I can. Video RG6 coax makes great subwoofer cables. |
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HDMI cables are $4 at monoprice.com and they work fine This |
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$4? The cable guy tried to sell me one made by Monster Cable for $69.99 yep, the famous monster cable scam How can you bash monster!!!?? don't you know the are the most awesome cable maker ever, you can smell the pure sound and your eyes will burn out from the crispness of the picture, they are doing us mere citizens a favor selling them so cheap. |
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I run the Philips HDMI cables from Wally World and they work great. I think they were about $20 a pop, maybe a little less.
Fuck Monster right in the ear. |
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