PCA Forums

Had a lovely argument with a co-worker the other day over HDMI cables. He was putting together a new home theater system and was asking my opinion about some stuff on it. What he wasn't asking my opinion on was HDMI cables. Knowing full well he was buying his equipment from Best Buy, I made sure to make a point of suggesting he pick up his cables off of Monoprice or Amazon, because of the price difference between cables (and BB trying to screw the customer out of as much money as they can.) Of course, he'd already been talking to the BB guys and had been convinced he had to buy the latest and greatest Monster cables to get his set-up to work correctly.

I found these great and very informative articles on Cnet discussing exactly why those cheapy $5 cables from Amazon will work just as well as the $100 cables from Monster and sent them to him. Unfortunately, his brain had been corrupted past the point of reason, but hopefully, if any of you ever run into anyone in a similar situation, or if you even have any doubts yourself, these will help you out!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-200 ... -the-same/

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57 ... me-part-2/

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57 ... -the-same/

Now please excuse me while I go and order a few cheap HDMI cables off of Amazon. I love Monoprice, but $8 to ship $5 worth of cables is just not worth it to me.

Monoprice is the bomb.

Several months ago my parents CRT finally died and Dad wanted to step up to HD. We went to Best Buy and I picked out a TV (Samsung) and a BluRay player to go with it. I picked up the "cheap" HDMI cable because I didn't have any laying around. The salesman suggests that I should get the gold plated ones for best picture quality. I know he'd probably been told to push the $40 cables so I politely declined. HDMI cables either work or they don't. I'd rather have a $6 cable fail than a $40+ cable.

By the way, newegg has these for $3.99 + free shipping: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812189053

Yeah, Monoprice is where it's at for cables. And yeah, and HDMI cable either works or it doesn't. So yeah, even a cheap $5 cable will do fine. When you get into longer ones, it's worth getting a bit better quality, but still not $100 cables.

They min wage blue shirts are about as knowledgable as a walmart employee-maybe slightly more- last time I heard they get a 20% spiff for selling the expensive cables, thats the only reason the lie to people about them, its rather disgusting

I remember the monster audio cable vs. coat hangers test FP posted a while back - I guess HDMI wouldn't do well on coat hangers

If you made some breakout connectors for it I bet you could get it to work.

I have used 1sale.com to pickup cables. They are decently quick, not super fast. but you can get them in bulk for less than $2 a cable. There are even longer cable choices.

Most salesman either lie or don't know what they are talking about for HDMI cables. as mentioned before, they either work or they don't. Nothing more to it.