By Evan Ackerman
This isn’t the first time people have put Monster Cables to the test, but some guys over at the Audioholics Home Theater Forum thought it would be fun to perform a single blind listen-off between a 2 meter Monster Ultra Series THX 1000 Audio Interconnect (that’s an expensive word for “cable,” I assume) and a bunch of wire coat hangers soldered together. Needless to say, nobody in a group of 12 self-described “audiophiles” could tell when the Monster Cable was in use versus when the coat hangers were in use while listening to a high quality jazz CD. And in case you’re worried that coat hangers have some sort of previously unknown and fantastic audio properties, the same test was conducted with standard copper wiring, with the same results.
It’s sort of like the difference in image quality between Fine and Normal JPEG images, or even between JPEG images and RAW images: yes, there are differences if you blow up an image like 200% and look for them, but in the real world, pretty much nobody can tell. When it comes to wiring, the exception would be if you’ve got high bandwidth signals around a lot of interference, or if you’re running cables long distances, since that stuff can cause noticeable signal degradation. ‘Course, you’re going to pay out the ass for long Monster Cables, so why not just move all your components closer together and save yourself a couple hundred bucks out of that 80% markup, hm?
[ Monster Cable ] VIA [ The Consumerist ]
Listening to CDs cannot show the difference, but listening to real vinyl will.