I have no idea what the fuck this meme is about. I gather from the comments it’s something to do with audio stuff? Why is this cable bad? What the fuck is it even supposed to be? I’m so confused
The cable is fiber optic, which is to say light. Light don’t care about gold and silver. The highly polished lens bit is probably also bullshit, but at least light cares about lenses.
More generally, it’s not that cables are bad, it’s that audiophiles have way more money than sense. I’m not exaggerating when i say that I’ve seen short speaker cables sell for £6,000. Anything more than £5 will be of exactly the same quality as the £5 cable. You could maybe argue me up to £15-20.
I miss when being an audiophile was just using vintage equipment and/or opting for lossless formats over compressed mp3s.
There’s always been a group of audiophiles with more money than sense. To the point that “audiophile” almost feels like an insult to me, and I’m a man who…well…loves his audio. They should have a word for that.
The one good use of Monster cables I saw was a buddy who played guitar and was pretty energetic in his sets and not disciplined enough to take proper care of his cables.
Monster cables really were pretty tough compared to the cheap stuff, but the bigger deal was the lifetime free replacements. He bought 2 Monster cables for 1/4 cable to his amp, and when one broke he’d swap to the backup while waiting on the replacement in the mail.
The biggest impact I ever saw was an electrical filter for advanced audio systems. It’s basically an alternator. And it was the most impressive piece of any audio system I sold.
My favorite story along these lines…
Someone compared Monster cables to un-bent coat hangers.
https://gizmodo.com/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger-363154
“Seven songs were played while the group was blindfolded and the cables swapped back and forth. Not only “after 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire,” but no one knew a coat hanger was used in the first place.”
But do coat hangers hold up to repeated use ?
Yeah babe, my wardrobe is worth 100k.
This is a classic.
A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore “prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal”.
So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.
Earth: look at my mighty magnetic field that pushes back the very radiation of the sun!
Wooden block: hold my beer
That’s a classic and I am glad it see it passed around again. The best part is the people that start delving into the snake oil absurdity that is “audiophile cables” before, you know, getting better actual speakers/headphones. Like for fucks sake, your $200 fancy cable isn’t going to make your bullshit bargain bookshelf speaker into the voice of god. Just get some half way decent equipment and listen to your actual music.
I worked at a big box electronics store back in the day. Problem was we only sold two kinds of cables.
1 - shitty cables with the ends crimped on that will fall off after three uses.
2 - way overpriced gold plated cables that cost 10x or more.
I’d love it if we sold something in-between, but you absolutely could tell the difference between those options. Mostly cause the RCA ends didn’t make an actual decent connection to the equipment, so it wiggled around and induced static into the signal.
I am sure it was no coincidence that those were the two options. I fell into that trap when I was a teen and had my first stereo. I had to buy some cables I couldn’t really afford because they literally didn’t offer RCA cables longer than 6’ in the other brand.
I have friends that are hardcore record collectors of obscure 70s punk, power pop, glam, etc. They have Marantz receivers and top of the line turntables, setups that approach like 10 grand. Then they listen to some of the most poorly recorded, cheaply pressed vinyl you can imagine.
Makes sense, I like vinyls for the deliberate retro experience of putting on the record and listening, but I have never agreed that they actually sound better. When CDs became mainstream I was personally thrilled.
Um you mean greatest music ever made vinyl SIR. The hiss and pop is part of the experience!
Seriously though, I love old punk records, especially when you can find self pressed shit from the 70s. Yea the quality sucks but god damn I’d rather hear that than overproduced, built by focus group crap today /rant
I admit there’s a part of me that wants a custom turntable, but you know what? I spent enough on what I’ve got. The whole system was just a few hundred bucks, and it sounds, plays, and looks perfectly fine for me. I’ll never spend that much on an audio system. I’ll just keep sinking stupid money into just records.
I should stop.
Yup, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. The worst instance I saw was someone posting about an intermittent buzz in their system. Multiple people were recommending a full rebuild, (which would cost thousands of dollars). From what they described, it was pretty obvious that OP just needed a ~10¢ ferrite bead on a power cable, to make it stop acting as an antenna.
I was like “okay, you could try rebuilding your entire system like everyone else is suggesting… But maybe start with a ferrite bead. Here is a link for a multipack on Amazon. Worst case scenario, you’re only out like $5. And even if it doesn’t fix this specific case, the multipack is handy to have around anyways, because manufacturers often cheap out and skip adding them when their devices really do need them.” Like three days later, I got a “holy shit this actually worked. You just saved me thousands of dollars (and a ton of time) on a complete rebuild.”
Classic issue and I am a bit shocked they hadn’t run into it before, I had figured that out when i was a teen with my first stereo setup. I am also not surprised at all that they were recommended to fully rebuild lmao
I’m curious about other cases where ferrites are actually useful. I have done some access point installations where I was required to loop a patch cable through a ferrite for each. The majority of APs I install don’t get this treatment. Is it bullshit? I assumed it was, but of course I used them anyway.
Was this in a radio station (or was someone nearby acting as a radio operator, like a police station or dispatch center), by chance? Or maybe in a lab setting where they may have gear that is affected by interference? They tend to be picky about RF interference, and Ethernet can be fairly noisy on certain RF bands. In that case, the ferrite bead was likely to do the exact opposite; They wanted to stop the Ethernet cables from acting as an antenna and broadcasting RF interference.
Yes, all the ones I’ve installed that required ferrites were in hospitals or clinics.
Rebadge them with a fancy name and sell them for $20 to the gullible. 😉 “Toroid Choke Core”.
Sell gold electroplated ones with “extra EM protection” for £150
Installing cable TV at a man’s house, ripped his Monster coax connector off. He was appalled! (I was appalled!) Showed him what I was replacing it with. Parts guide.
“The shield is quad-woven steel. Yours was 1x of angel hair copper. The dielectric is solid, not a noodle. See? (bendy, bendy) Foil shield? Uh, did yours have one? Oh, I see the shredded bit right there!”
Bent the center conductor on his Monster cable with my pinky. “Try that with mine.” Stopped him before he hypodermic-needled himself.
tl;dr: Whatever the cable guy cuts for you is miles above Monster grade.
It’s like Yeti gear. “So you paid $35 for a cup that’s simply a vacuum sealed canister? I got a 6-pack off Amazon for $25. Cute colors too!”
Been 15-years ago, but I bet an audiophile coworker, who had a physics degree, he couldn’t tell the difference in a coat hanger and proper wires.
“Well, yeah, but, bla, bla, bla…”
Now I wish I could shove that article up his butt! 😈
I once had a Best Buy sales person tell me “the improved shielding helps with magnetism”. I stared at him for a sec and said “if there is enough magnetism in my house to bend light, how my stereo sound really won’t be one of my main concerns”
Hey man, you realize everytime you turn on your stereo your couch starts sliding towards it?
I used to sell TVs for Best Buy back in the day. The Video Department manager, my boss, set up a display side by side to show the difference between $40 Monster cables and the normal cables that came with a DVD player.
When there was no noticable difference, he went into the TV settings and adjusted the settings for the normal cables to make the picture look like shit. Not all customers are that gullible though, so usually one of the more savvy ones would fix the settings. So my boss would have to go in and fuck the settings up again once or twice a shift.
This is for-profit deception AKA fraud.
Does this legally qualify as fraud?
If this kind of thing were legally actionable, all salesmen would be imprisoned.
But how many people do you think he used that line on and it sealed the deal?
Given the results of the 2016 and 2024 elections in the United States? Way way WAY too many!
It’s for those occasions when there’s a black hole passing through your house. Gotta be prepared.
There is exceptions to this. So for USBC Alt DP mode you want a fast responding cable which costs slightly more. Otherwise the cable is slow to announce itself and will only activate on the OS. You want it to be fast and respond to the BIOS. But it isn’t the most big deal. And no I am not fully aware of why how or what solutions there are.
ABS Silver Shell
silver-colored plastic
It’s actually anti-lock breaking system, super high end; not many cables have it
Same bullshit with guns.
“Hi-tech polymer slide, boolshit, boolshit, boolshit…”
It’s fair-quality plastic, painted silver. My Smith & Wesson EZ is wearing off. :(
Making no difference to sound is a very expensive addiction.
This is even funnier considering the fiber element in toslink is actually plastic which was chosen to make it really cheap since the distance was not of concern like a proper multimode fiber cable made with glass.
I only scrolled enough to see the tip before feeling like I would throw up
If I had a nickel…
Those 128kbps are going to be well delivered, that’s for sure.
They’re going to look damn good getting where they’re going.
FWIW toslink supports up to 125mbps theoretically
Much lower in practice of course, but it’s a bit better than 128k
Yeah but my mp3’s from Kazaa are all 128. I want to hear them perfectly as the original ripper intended without distortion from the cables. The gold connector adds warmth to the sound.
now that’s a name i haven’t heard in a while
I preferred Gnutella.
Edonkey (also for 9 second 240p porn videos called 1.mpeg)
What about BearShare?
Overnet. Or Shareaza.
I wondered why the PS5 didn’t have optical out when the PS3 did, then thinking back on it, I probably never owned content/speakers that were good enough to really tell the difference. I had routed the PS3 audio to a receiver with 5.1 surround, and video to a projector via HDMI. Then just played media from an external/had a dual boot to yellowdog Linux at the time. Was fun for young me, hell the projector was probably only 720p at the time
You can sell aluminum free baking soda and convince someone baking soda contains aluminum. Fads and marketing are becoming an epidemic
I’m so glad this is illegal where I’m from
You’re no true audiophile until you have audio graded solid state drive in your PC!
But it’s Monster and costs 17x as much as Monoprice, it has to be better!
Septendecupleprice
