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Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

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Re: Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

#51

Post by avidiax »

interpol_p wrote: post #43
tqi wrote: post #22

Monster Cables is a name I hadn't thought about in ages... I mostly remember them as the company that tried to convince people that digital images would look better via a more expensive cable.

When wiring up my projector, I needed a 10 or 20 meter HDMI cable. The first one I got produced a snowy image on the screen — it wasn't like analogue static, but it was definitely a poor quality image. I replaced that cable with a more expensive one and the image looked correct. It surprised me that there would be a difference in HDMI cables, because I thought exactly the same way — a digital signal is a digital sign…

This is what happens with a damaged or underspecced cable.

The HDMI standard doesn't have a way of telling you that you really need an HDMI 2.2 cable and you actually have an HDMI 1.x cable. It just tries to send the signal, and if the analogue bandwidth of the cable is insufficient, then the error correction will be insufficient and you'll get no signal or snow and blocks.

This is somewhat of a good thing, since many short HDMI 1.x cables will work for standards that require HDMI 2.x.

Re: Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

#52

Post by bolognafairy »

m463 wrote: post #48

I remember buying audio gear (think receiver, amplifier, cd player) and being the focus of the upsell for 2-5x more expensive monster cables. Once I patiently explained that a cable shouldn't matter for digital as long as the bits got there, and seeing the young sales guy pause and then "get it". And I got the (relatively) cheap cables. Also speaker wire. You can get perfectly good copper cables for less, probably in…

> Once I patiently explained that a cable shouldn't matter for digital as long as the bits got there.

Emphasis mine.

As someone that sold AV equipment, including cables, in the late ‘00s / early ‘10s, nerds that misunderstood the nuances of this were the single worst group of customers to work with.

You could see them coming a mile away. By the time “gold-plated HDMI cables are a scam” gets down to their level of pseudo-intellect, it becomes “all cables with the same physical connectors are the same”. Patently untrue, and 99.9% of the time they won’t have any of it. Some of the most snide, belittling, insulting shit ever sneered at me in a professional context has been from some socks-and-sandals nerd practically accusing me of genocide because I dare suggested that the cheapest HDMI cable on the shelf explicitly doesn’t support whatever insanely expensive TV, blu-ray player, or whatever else, that they’ve purchased.

15+ years later, purchasing the ‘right’ HDMI cable is if anything a more Byzantine process. Made worse by the fact that any conversation on the topic inevitably has at last one person butting in to say “they’re all just cables bro aha”.

Re: Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

#53

Post by bolognafairy »

interpol_p wrote: post #43
tqi wrote: post #22

Monster Cables is a name I hadn't thought about in ages... I mostly remember them as the company that tried to convince people that digital images would look better via a more expensive cable.

When wiring up my projector, I needed a 10 or 20 meter HDMI cable. The first one I got produced a snowy image on the screen — it wasn't like analogue static, but it was definitely a poor quality image. I replaced that cable with a more expensive one and the image looked correct. It surprised me that there would be a difference in HDMI cables, because I thought exactly the same way — a digital signal is a digital sign…

This isn’t even true with other common ‘digital’ cables.

Not all ‘Ethernet’ cables are the same. Someone will give you 100mbit. Some will give you a gigabit. Some will give you even more. They’ve all got RJ45 on them.

“All HDMI cables are the same” is an almost-baseless corruption of a very valid critique of Monster et al.

Re: Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

#54

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

gorkish wrote: post #47
1-6 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still see commenters claiming that better cables yield better digital images even after you made this statement. Digital signals usually have some sort of error correction and it’s an all or nothing deal with digital.

It’s technically not an all or nothing deal with hdmi/dvi. That is to say that bit errors do indeed manifest as image artifacts, though normally imperceptible. I think some people understand that error correction is normally present in digital audio, so they naturally assume that video would be the same. But that is not quite true. For one thing there weren’t cheap chips that could do that at gbps data rates when DVI…

> I think some people understand that error correction is normally present in digital audio

The only such error correction I'm aware of is when reading data from a CD, which at this point is a tiny part of digital audio. Is there something I'm missing?

Re: Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

#56

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #54
gorkish wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s technically not an all or nothing deal with hdmi/dvi. That is to say that bit errors do indeed manifest as image artifacts, though normally imperceptible. I think some people understand that error correction is normally present in digital audio, so they naturally assume that video would be the same. But that is not quite true. For one thing there weren’t cheap chips that could do that at gbps data rates when DVI…

> I think some people understand that error correction is normally present in digital audio The only such error correction I'm aware of is when reading data from a CD, which at this point is a tiny part of digital audio. Is there something I'm missing?

most digital signaling has error correction. pcie,SSDs, Ethernet etc

Re: Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

#57

Post by kopirgan »

rendaw wrote: post #15
kopirgan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last paragraph with upside downside comments are legendary Plus the threat to impose even bigger costs with anti trust violation claims! Need to imagine the face of the in-house counsel reading it.

But in the end did monster actually face any penalty at all? They threatened the guy, the guy said no, end of story. The bully moves on to threaten the next guy. The story insinuates lasting damage but it seems kind of subtle...

Lol it is not subtle at all - it basically says you will get pennies if you take us on and win, but if we win, you get screwed big time incl damages for anti-trust.

Guess BJC was content with letting them just go away...but once this was generally known, it does reduce the value of those threats.

Re: Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

#60

Post by somat »

rendaw wrote: post #15
kopirgan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last paragraph with upside downside comments are legendary Plus the threat to impose even bigger costs with anti trust violation claims! Need to imagine the face of the in-house counsel reading it.

But in the end did monster actually face any penalty at all? They threatened the guy, the guy said no, end of story. The bully moves on to threaten the next guy. The story insinuates lasting damage but it seems kind of subtle...

Most importantly, it was also popularly published. So the critical but tricky to measure metrics now are "how much sales do we loose because we are now firmly labeled as a bully in peoples minds" and "how much potential licensing revenue have we lost because people know they don't need to fold immediately"
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