> Once I patiently explained that a cable shouldn't matter for digital as long as the bits got there.
Emphasis mine.
As someone that sold AV equipment, including cables, in the late ‘00s / early ‘10s, nerds that misunderstood the nuances of this were the single worst group of customers to work with.
You could see them coming a mile away. By the time “gold-plated HDMI cables are a scam” gets down to their level of pseudo-intellect, it becomes “all cables with the same physical connectors are the same”. Patently untrue, and 99.9% of the time they won’t have any of it. Some of the most snide, belittling, insulting shit ever sneered at me in a professional context has been from some socks-and-sandals nerd practically accusing me of genocide because I dare suggested that the cheapest HDMI cable on the shelf explicitly doesn’t support whatever insanely expensive TV, blu-ray player, or whatever else, that they’ve purchased.
15+ years later, purchasing the ‘right’ HDMI cable is if anything a more Byzantine process. Made worse by the fact that any conversation on the topic inevitably has at last one person butting in to say “they’re all just cables bro aha”.
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.
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.
Emphasis mine.
As someone that sold AV equipment, including cables, in the late ‘00s / early ‘10s, nerds that misunderstood the nuances of this were the single worst group of customers to work with.
You could see them coming a mile away. By the time “gold-plated HDMI cables are a scam” gets down to their level of pseudo-intellect, it becomes “all cables with the same physical connectors are the same”. Patently untrue, and 99.9% of the time they won’t have any of it. Some of the most snide, belittling, insulting shit ever sneered at me in a professional context has been from some socks-and-sandals nerd practically accusing me of genocide because I dare suggested that the cheapest HDMI cable on the shelf explicitly doesn’t support whatever insanely expensive TV, blu-ray player, or whatever else, that they’ve purchased.
15+ years later, purchasing the ‘right’ HDMI cable is if anything a more Byzantine process. Made worse by the fact that any conversation on the topic inevitably has at last one person butting in to say “they’re all just cables bro aha”.