With any sort of specialty hobby, you’ve got enthusiasts. Some of those folks will spend massive amounts of money for the best equipment they can get. There are more than a few companies who are eager and willing to take advantage of that.
Case in point: AudioQuest makes a “high end” HDMI cable that runs $1650.99. I’ve no clue what advantage you get for that kind of scratch. Neither does anyone else, and the reviews have subsequently taken on a David Hasselhoff vibe.
What’s great about it: Color matched my shag carpet and futon, allowed me to see further past the visible light spectrum.
What’s not so great: Went blind, girlfriend captured by winged livestock, may have unleashed Armageddon.
No, I would not recommend this to a friend.
The truth of the matter is, there’s no reason to buy this instead of an off-the-shelf $30 cable.
HDMI is digital. That means it facilitates a throughput of zeroes and ones, not actual sound. While a defective cable can cause signal loss (which is immediately apparent and usually total), an expensive cable won’t do a better job than a cheap one. Either the bits get there or they don’t.
Still, someone’s willing to pay $1600 for it, so AudioQuest makes it.
This is one of the essential quandaries for audiophiles. You can spend a week’s pay on a good amplifier, or you can spend six months’ pay on one that does the same thing, just slightly better. How much better it may be is up to the person who owns it, and they usually feel the need to justify the expenditure, so there’s no doubt something of a placebo effect there.
A friend has a preamp from a company called Red Wine Audio. I have to admit, it sounds remarkable, especially through the $2000 speakers, $1700 receiver, and $1100 turntable he’s got. I’ve got trained ears, and when I listen to the same thing through my $900 home setup (with a Chinese preamp I got off eBay), I don’t hear any perceptible difference in clarity, separation, or soundstage. I think my system might slightly emphasize a small bit of sibilance in high-register female vocals that his doesn’t, but I could be wrong.
Is that worth the $7000 difference? I don’t know. He hears, or thinks he hears, something that I don’t.
A great deal of it comes from a certain type of authority belief in marketing. Consider speaker cables. How much should you really spend? About $6 a yard. Don’t listen to the salesman. They’re all pretty much the same. In fact, I’ve known people to use 16-gauge lamp cords, and even CAT-5 cables, for speaker wire.
In one set of blind tests, braided coat hangers were used, and none of the listeners noticed a difference.
In my experience, the only difference comes in terms of external quality. If you scrounge somebody’s old workshop, you might find some ratty cables with bad shielding of poorly soldered plugs, but almost anything you find at retail will do just fine. Spend the money instead on better speakers and components.
(If you really want an exhaustive test, check out Nick Charles’ work on Head-Fi.)
2 thoughts on “You Pay Your Money…”
Heh!
I’ve used old 300-ohm TV antenna ribbon wire as speaker wire. Works just fine with my father’s 50-year old home-built vacuum-tube pre-amp and reciever. A very little tweaking allowed us to connect to a nice-low-range Sony CD player (from Tiger), and it produces perfectly fine sound (unless you’ve got the hearing of a dog).
Of course, both of us suffer from some hearing loss after long lives of firearms and industrial environments, so maybe we’re just audio philistines.
One of the strangest thing, wich the so called “expert” forget anytime is that the internal circuitry still run on copper and silicon, and soldering is done with TIN!