Monster Chain Jerker

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
54,837
Most enthusiasts know that Monster Cables are usually a Monster Rip-off, but Mr. Bob Dean, over an audiophile at Audioholics, have put them to the Pepsi Challenge..get this…against a coat hanger. Great stuff.

Keeping us blind folded, my brother switched out the Belden wire (are you ready for this) with simple coat hanger wire! Unknown to me and our 12 audiophile buddies, prior to the ABX blind test, he took apart four coat hangers, reconnected them and twisted them into a pair of speaker cables. Connections were soldered. He stashed them in a closet within the testing room so we were not privy to what he was up to. This made for a pair of 2 meter cables, the exact length of the other wires. The test was conducted. After 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire.
Click to expand...
 
BS! Nothing tops my "specifically engineered high-purity multi-stranded triple-layer shielded copper conductors with nitrogen gas-injected dielectric and 24k gold connectors." Nothing!


:eek: Everything quoted above is actually from monstercable.com (I'm not kidding) and written about their HDMI cable! :rolleyes:
 
I knew they were a ripoff, but that's even more funny when someone puts them up to the test via a coathanger.
 
If monster can figure out a way to charge $80 for a coat hanger, they will!
 
lol, owned

Were those coathangers digital? Can you put a VTEC on it? :D
 
Finally...... Ive been saying monster is shite for years, and all I ever got was blank stares and arguments.
 
If you sprinkle copious amounts of glitter on anything and charge a ridiculous prices for it, some sucker will create justification to purchase it. ,
 
The only good monster stuff is their cheap stuff. I've used their lowest level instrument cables plenty of times. The reason they're good? The lifetime warranty. You get a cable at the same price as anybody else's cable but if you fuck it up you can swap it out for free. Any level above their lowest isn't worth it. I'm sure they've just read that and said "Shit... Let's get rid of our lowest level." LOL
 
This made me lol at work, so I sent it to my coworkers who are now guilty of the same thing. Great article.
 
Speciality cables are one of the biggest examples of snake oil for audiphiles. The only time cables are an issue is if need shielded cables and those don't cost that much.

Now only if he could pull that trick at a audio gathering and YouTube it.:D
 
hahahaha! My wife will wonder why suddenly movies sound so great and our coats are all over the floor. :D
 
The only Monster cables I can recall that I use are the component cables used for our ED plasma tv (ED not HD) and they are a lot easier to connect than coat hangers (got them for free).
 
Funny thing is, if you delete all the piss contest paragraphs from "For the record" to "One last thing", you can still get the idea of the post. Most audiophile posts I've read on the web are basically "Look at how much money I had."

It seems like most "audiophiles" ignore the input and output of their systems. They'll have a $2000 AC power cable plugged into a Home Depot wall socket fed by Home Depot romex. Then they'll put all this testing equipment on their systems to insure the best possible reproduction, but most of them probably haven't had their ears checked in quite some time.

I bought a "good enough" system for myself when I got my current job (which is all 10 years old now and obsolete.) When I was trying to get the speakers balanced to where the couch was, I kept noticing I had everything balanced to the right. I had my ears checked, I can't hear between 9kHz and 12kHz in my right ear.

I wonder how many of these "audiophiles" have the same issue.
 
This is one of the greatest "pepsi challenges" I've ever seen. Bravo
 
Now that is classic, haha.

I paid 6 bucks and change for the last hdmi cable I bought...and that's about all they should cost.
 
I always used to use Cat5/5e for speaker wire. That was back in the old days when it was 4 cents per foot :) Now that copper is 3x the price, its more like 12 cents/foot.

I mean really, its some really high quality oxygen free copper or copper clad steel in networking cable. Its not fully sheilded, but if you keep the twists, it actually does a pretty decent job.

Very occasionally you would have to double up the wires (16 instead of 8) if hooking up a subwoofer.
 
The same test was done in the 70's by Stereo Review, they tested monster cable against 16 gauge lamp cord that you can buy in bulk with the same results, no one could tell the difference. Problem is, people still want to believe, if it's expensive it has to be good.
 
Thanks for pointing me to this. I bought into the hype just a little but never wanted to pay the high price for the cables so I thought I was getting poor performance from my cheaper cables.
 
coat hangers FTW

I've always wondered if the self proclaimed audiophiles (who also tout the vast amounts of cash reserves they have) would subject themselves to such a test. I just find it pitiful when someone says oh I can "hear" the difference between $10 cable and $500.

I'll be honest when I've said I've done a blind test and found a thresh hold where I could simply not tell the difference in quality. I did the whole speaker selection thing at a large audio store once (not CC or BB) got to hear a plethora of speaker combos that would probably be better spent making my car faster or a new gaming rig (or 3 depending on the price).

The cheaper and smaller speakers had a disadvantage of NOT being able to play a complete soundstage. When going back and forth between some setups, one noticed that certain midrange instruments became quite dim or muffled, or highs changed pitch, or lows became distorted or over amplified. Balance between the instruments became more refined as the value of speakers and size increased. Then it got to a point where you hit a plateau, nothing more was revealed or changes so subtle you could not tell if this was the way it was meant to be heard or not.

I didn't have to jump to the 10k territory to discover that thresh hold, let alone higher than that. I think after a certain point, it's not whether the sound reproduced is true to what you perceive, but rather how loud I wanted that accuracy to be. That's where the $$$ add up. If you have a large entertainment room then something to fill that room is necessary.

This is where wire comes in, as long as you have the wire that can transmit the signal cleanly to the speakers and not pick up noise along the way, you will be fine. Quality of wire should increase with distance and power being fed, but I think physics dominates here rather than the $$$. Companies would have you believe that a $80 wire will perform better when in reality both have been engineered to a point that under the circumstances both will be equal from a conductive standpoint.
 
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