Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

Back before monoprice was bought by a Chinese company, I had one of their HDMI cables, and yeah - the connector just slipped right off. Buncha thin gold wires sticking out.

I contacted them. They asked for a photo, which I was able to text them directly from my phone (very advanced for 2009). He looked at it, said it was their fault, and to toss it. Another was shipped to me.

I have a Logitech mouse that’s double clicking. One of the 10 (!!!) steps I was supposed to do before they’d accept that it’s broken was to go to a website and click 100 (!!!!!) times.

I sincerely miss the companies that were totally dedicated to customer service.

Switchcraft + Belden or Canare and you’ll have cables to pass to your grandchildren.

My bass cable is a Monster Cable and is ~45 years old. Bought it when I was 15.

Guitar cable?, ya...noooo cordless my droogys prolly cheaper too did a custom stealth mod to one guitar where the transmitter, plugs into 1/4 jack,under the back cover nice thing is that its possible to turn an amp up to face peeling loudness, and step back, and not get hurt, got to watch for things vibrating off of shelves though and are you kidding me?, I know that as a guitarer there are cumulative cognitive effects, but when a fucking speaker cable outfit starts suing people, something has definitly gone off the rails but oh ya, there are people in jail for "cheating" on video games, but somehow there are government weed stores tone is in the hands

It’s why Snap-On sells so many tools. They will send someone to you with the new tool if one breaks.

If you travel back im time you’ll find audio connectors corroded. It was standard practice to use an eraser to polish the jacks. Monster offered gold plated connectors. It really made difference. Any benefits beyond non corrosive is questionable.

The sad part is that, once upon a time, those crazy claims mattered. There were once good and bad cables. But over the last centry all the best practices were universally adopted (twisted pairs, shielding, consistent conductors made of soft copper). Monster now sounds like a car company shouting about seatbelts and crumple zones, things we now just expect but were once important to look for when selecting cable.

Given Monster some credit for at least being a brand. Have fun trying to reclaim a warranty from the discount chinese numbered company that tops your amazon search. It will be out of business before your delivery arrives.

Yeah, 1979 was totally the biggest year in meme history.

What if we bring the idea into 2025 and sell subscription-based cables?

[dead]

> Monster's counsel had made a horrible mistake, and probably caused lasting harm to the company, by sending me that ridiculous letter

This sort of thing always reminds of the Jack Daniels cease and desist letter[0], which, at least for me, had the exact opposite effect.

0. https://brokenpianoforpresident.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/jac...

This reminds me of the spat between Tekton Design speakers and a Youtube reviewer.

Tekton received such massive and negative feedback, he tried to backpedal the initial threat. But still, the gall. They suffered reputationally not from the [mildly] negative review, but from the fallout from the ill-advised threat of lawsuit.

https://www.audioresurgence.com/2024/04/tekton-speakers-revi...

[more neutral] https://musictech.com/news/gear/tekton-audio-allegedly-threa...

Maybe writing that letter was a bad idea in the first place?

It was good for Blue Jeans and for Monster, as they both avoided expensive litigation, but from a more general perspective, it would have been better if Monster thought Blue Jeans was an easy victim, sued and got its comeuppance.

Is there any way to file a (real) countersuit against someone, just to punish them for having wasted your time and energy with a threat of legal action that never materialized?

This is wonderful. It’s also true! Even when I was running a very small business and not particularly bothered by what people were doing that could be argued as resembling trademark infringement, I was urged to be vigilant about it because if you don’t defend your trademark, you risk losing it. That’s how the law works!

If that really is the reason you’re threatening action against someone, they may just understand if you’re nice about it!

That said, while it may foster more goodwill towards your company, it probably isn’t as surefire a way to generate the swift response you want as being a dick and making the threats

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...

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.

That's not really what digital implies, but you figured out the important part: When digital signals fail, they do so in a very obvious fashion. A worse cable won’t give you “less saturated blacks” or something else that's subtle, it will give you random bit errors that manifest as snow. If the picture isn't obviously bad, then it is as good as any cable will give you.

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.

Calculations change at 10+ meters. Most cables are not rated past 15.

> So yea, “digital” cables are not immune to signal integrity issues, and better cables do perform better.

Better cables perform better, but not at all in the way that Monster suggests.

Gold plating and oxygen-free copper doesn't matter.

Any certified HDMI cable will operate at least to its certification, whether or not it is gold plated with triple shielded conductors.

I wish the HDMI forum would officially deprecate all older HDMI standards, so that companies like Monster couldn't advertise that their cables provide "better color, higher resolution, better sound", etc. All the cables in the store would be 8k HDMI 2.2 cables, or they wouldn't be allowed to use the HDMI trademark.

Speaking of high quality "Monstrous Cables" and draconian legal remedies: there's K. W. Jeter's Noir (1998), a Cyberpunk novel whose detective protagonist's main job is killing copyright violators so that their still-living spinal cords may be incorporated into hi-fi system cables:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668069

DonHopkins on Nov 10, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Electric Sheep on Ubuntu Linux 17.10

I deserve to be downvoted by the literature snobs, but if you liked Blade Runner the movie (and who in their right mind doesn't?), then you may very well enjoy K. W. Jeter's three written sequels to the MOVIE Blade Runner (not the BOOK DADOES), "Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human", "Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night", and "Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon". There is no book "Blade Runner 1" -- that's the movie.

The irony is that Philip K Dick was offered a whole lot of money to write another book entitled "Blade Runner" based on the screenplay of the movie, but he insisted on maintaining the integrity and title of his original book DADOES by re-issuing it with a reference to the (quite different) movie on the cover, instead of rewriting another book called "Blade Runner" based on the movie based on his own book. (Harrumph!) He would have made a lot more money by selling out that way, but he steadfastly refused to do it.

However, fortunately for us, after his death, his friend and fellow SF writer K. W. Jeter (who also wrote an excellent cyberpunk novel Dr. Adder which Dick loved) sold out on his behalf and wrote those three books based on the movie (which referenced famous lines like "Wake up. Time to die!").

They explore the question of what the fuck happened after they went flying off into the wilderness (that unused footage from The Shining), and whether Decker was a replicant. (Who would have guessed??!)

So even though they're not written by PKD, or directly based on his original all time great book, and not as authentic and mentally twisted as a real PKD book, they are still pretty excellent and twisted in their own right, and well worth reading. They're based on an excellent movie based on an epic book, and written by a friend and author PKD respected, who's written some other excellent books.

And while you're at it, check out Dr. Adder and K. W. Jeter's other books too! Especially Noire, for its hi-fi cables made out of the still-living spinal columns of copyright violators. (I suggest you buy a copy and don't pirate it!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2:_The_Edge_of_Hu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_3:_Replicant_Nigh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_4:_Eye_and_Talon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Adder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_(novel)

http://www.indiewire.com/2015/12/watch-u-s-theatrical-ending...

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jeter_k_w

Jeter's most significant sf may lie in the thematic trilogy comprising Dr Adder (1984) – his first novel (written 1972), long left unpublished because of its sometimes turgid violence – The Glass Hammer (1985) and Death Arms (1987); Alligator Alley (1989) as by Dr Adder with Mink Mole (see Ferret) is a distant outrider to the sequence. Philip K Dick had read Dr Adder in manuscript and for years advocated it; and it is clear why. Though the novel clearly prefigures the under-soil airlessness of the best urban Cyberpunk, it even more clearly serves as a bridge between the defiant reality-testing Paranoia of Dick's characters and the doomed realpolitiking of the surrendered souls who dwell in post-1984 urban sprawls (see Cities). In each of these convoluted tales, set in a devastated Somme-like Near-Future America, Jeter's characters seem to vacillate between the sf traditions of resistance and cyberpunk quietism. In worlds like these, the intermittent flashes of sf imagery or content are unlasting consolations.

[...]

Much of his later work has consisted of Sharecrop contributions to various proprietorial worlds, including Alien Nation, Star Trek, Star Wars [for titles see Checklist]; of some interest in this output are his Ties – they are also in a sense Sequels by Another Hand – to the film Blade Runner (1982), comprising Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995), Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996) and Blade Runner 4: Eye & Talon (2000), and making use of some original Philip K Dick material. The sense of ebbing enthusiasm generated by these various Ties is not markedly altered by Jeter's most recent singleton, Noir (1998), a Cyberpunk novel whose detective protagonist's main job is killing copyright violators so that their still-living spinal cords may be incorporated into hi-fi system cables; the irreality of this concept, and the bad-joke names that proliferate throughout, are somewhat stiffened up by the constant interactive presence of the already dead, a Philip K Dick effect, as filtered through Jeter's own intensely florid sensibility. [JC]

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 standard was first created. It was not until DisplayPort 1.4 that they added optional FEC. This is required because a bit error in a compressed stream would manifest as an entire macroblock busting, which affects potentially a large pixel area and multiple frames.

All that being said it’s unusual to find a cable that is both clean enough to do the handshake and keep sync but noisy enough to give you visible snow. So it’s still quite true that practically speaking, yes, it’s usually an all or nothing deal. Cable quality can and does matter though. I was a BlueJeans customer for a long time before the brief Monster spat, but it endeared them to me, and I still try to buy from them when I need to buy a cable I need to be absolutely sure of.

> it’s an all or nothing deal with digital.

That's not been my experience with hdmi or dvi. Bad cables or bad connections can result in artifacts in the display. Sometimes bad cables can result in difficulty negotiating but a good result if negotiate succeeds. Bad cables can result in frequent dropouts as the signal quality varies around the threshold.

Differences in cable construction may lead to more or less longevity in difficult environments: frequent connection cycles, movement in the cable, heat/humidity/other environmental stuff, tight bends, etc.

Certainly, once you reliably meet the threshold SNR for accurate reception, a better cable doesn't help much.

Does that need oxygen free, cold extruded in zero-g cables? No. But a well made cable is likely to last longer in challenging environments.

It's really hard to tell without more detail! I tried doing a bit of digging, but he was a really early staffer to join Audioholics, and was editor-in-chief when he was fired. He's editor-in-chief of another site now, which it looks like he founded. You probably have to do something pretty bad to get publicly fired for cause when you were the editor-in-chief, and him having a new site he made himself isn't exactly an assurance of innocence either. Just... kinda a wild random footnote on a link on an article from over a decade ago.

That’s my take as well. They used high quality cables from Belden when I bought mine, not some cheap Chinese knockoff. They’re also not focused on nonsense like “ethernet regenerators” for audio signals or “HDMI cleaners” for video.

They’re just good, simple, solidly built cables that fulfill their intended functions. No snake oil, no BS. 10/10 will buy again when I’ve got a home and a rack for a bunch of fixed-length custom cabling.

I discovered exactly this the hard way when I got my Blu-ray UltraHD setup.

The included cable wasn't long enough so I bought a new one that I thought looked good, came home and didn't work right.

That's when I discovered not all HDMI cables are the same, and I had to check supported bandwidth.

Sadly the cheapest cable I could find in town that supported my needs were... Monster Cable.

Except 99 times out of 100 it was an attempt at an unnecessary, scammy upsell to a high margin cable, when the cheap one would and did do just as well.

People frequently did try to claim you would get deeper reds and better blacks and all sorts of audiophile-grade bullshit by spending that extra hundred dollars on magic cables.

While you feel you might have been knowledgeable and honest in intent, the retail electronics industry as a whole is filled with a heady mix of ignorance and profiteering, to the detriment of customers. They’re almost always better served by grabbing cables from an online vendor after leaving the store.

And that’s if the devices they buy don’t already come with a perfectly good HDMI cable, which most do now.

My side-by-side, A/B comparison of monoprice RCA/coaxial cables and higher-end RCA cables revealed a clearly audible difference. Blew me away. I realize HDMI works differently, though, and there is some preposterous snake oil in the world of cables, which BJC admirably fights, partly through their superb articles.

I wish HDMI would die as a standard. The TV folk won't that happen though, controlling HDMI allows them to control the ecosystem by extension.

Would be nice if the EU could step in an make DisplayPort the required connection and protocol like they did for the USB-C port for charging.

I just fo to monoprice and buy whatever clear bag they sell. Network, usb, dp, HDMI, whatever. It works. Every time.

I even had their HDMI to 2xCat6 cable bridge, that worked fine with, you guessed it, monoprice cat6. Dozens of yards.

Maybe I've just gotten lucky buying cheap commodity cables.

> as long as the bits got there.

Let me just clarify that this was really not something outside the range of common sense.

I recall it was merely overpriced but decent $29 cables vs $129 monster cables. This was pre-hdmi probably 2000 or earlier and it was at the Good Guys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Guys_(American_company)

That said, yeah hdmi and say 4k is confusing. Thank goodness for unconfusing standards like USB-C. (kidding!)

a source here would be amazing

A quick google seems to indicate that they are still doing business under that same name.

https://catandcloud.com/

Seems to have just faded away. Their name is the same.

I just shared this story with friends, and one of them, a musician, says he will now never again buy monster cables even though they are thought of the best quality. So there is a negative outcome of this to the company.