Extremely Lame

Yesterday I went to Circuit City to pick up a couple of DVDs I’d misplaced and hopefully an HDMI cable to connect my laptop to my EXTRA BIG ASS TV. The DVDs were no trouble. The cable, on the other hand? What a ripoff. The cheapest cables they had were over fifty bucks, and those were only a meter long. Anything longer than that would have run me anywhere from sixty to $130. One hundred thirty bucks for six feet and change of cable?

If it wasn’t bad enough, I was mocked by some mouth breather employee on my way out when I told him that it was complete nonsense to have this huge range of prices for the exact same thing. Keep trying to convince other idiots that you won’t be able to transfer a 1080p signal over anything but $90 and up cables, you aren’t going to convince me.

It’s a digital signal. It’s nothing but ones and zeroes going over the cable. Interference and signal degradation isn’t going to effect the end result in any way. You are either going to get the signal or you aren’t. Nothing is going to be fuzzy if you buy cheap cables. Hell, even with analog cables, Monster cables are overpriced pieces of crap. Unless you have a sound system that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars or your speakers are a half mile from your receiver, an average set of cables will be pretty indistinguishable to everyone but the most discerning of audiophiles.

But even the most anal retentive of people will not be able to tell a difference between a signal on the same television with an expensive HDMI cable and a cheap HDMI cable. You know why? Because they’ll be identical.

If you’re in the market for HDMI cables, don’t go to any big box store. Go to Newegg.com and get some for less than twenty bucks. And don’t bother with that gold-plated nonsense for digital cables. It doesn’t matter. It is true that gold conducts electricity better than copper, but unless the entire cable is gold, you’re still going to be limited by the copper wiring.