TECHNOLOGY- Is There a Monster (cable) Behind Your Stereo?

Merry Christmas!

I started selling electronics not long after graduating high school. Back then things were a lot different. Vinyl records were still the audiophile media of choice (and they were still called stereophiles* because the multichannel audio formats that had been tried were found wanting), the VCR was just becoming a mass market item, and the really adventurous early adopters were spending their money on a new gadget called a home computer (a good one had 64K of RAM). CD players were just on the horizon and the digital entertainment age was still gestating.

Now music and video are portable and ubiquitous. Even the most modest home audio setups have subwoofers and multichannel sound. Most people don’t even buy their music in a store anymore, preferring to have it sent directly to their audio devices, and high resolution video downloads are fast going the same route. Television displays are bigger, brighter, and sharper than those first VCR buyers could have imagined. Movies, television, and music are available when and where you want them, with almost nothing excluded.

But consumers haven’t changed much. Most of those downloaded videos have lower visual quality than those early VCR tapes. And the music that comes out of the earbuds of an iPod is more reminiscent of what we listened to on 8 Track tapes than it is the CDs that spawned it. High-end audio has always been like the high end of anything: rapidly diminishing returns for investment and rapidly increasing smoke and mirrors. So even today the audiophile combination of scientific jargon and mumbo-jumbo is as all pervasive as it was when Steve Martin mocked it in a routine he called Googlephonics.

Sure, when analogue sound was a crapshoot and there were so many inaccuracies in the chain of electronics that it was easy to let mysticism slip into your tech. There were a dozen Audio and Video magazines on the stands 30 years ago. Some were rigorous and technical (a magazine titled simply AUDIO was among the best) and some embraced subjectivity (The Perfect Sound comes to mind). I remember that Stereo Review magazine did testing of some common audio myths in the mid 1980s. My favorite was double blind testing of amplifiers to see if a panel of “golden eared” ‘philes could tell the difference between a group of amps which ranged from a $300 Pioneer receiver to a pair of Krell tube monoblocs that cost more than most cars at the time. The results- no, not really. At least, not statistically.

You would have thought that the digital era would have put an end to a lot of this silliness. But it didn’t. Not by a long shot. In the early days of CD there was the idea that using a magic marker to darken the outer edge of a CD would improve sound quality. (I remember one debate as to which color of magic marker was best for this!) Digital was new and “tweaking” was such a time honored tradition that a lot of people just couldn’t give it up.

One of today’s audio (and video) fetishes that has been around for a long time is the idea that the cabling you use (those wires that hook components together) has a demonstrable affect on the sound you hear. I’ve been fighting off the advances of salesmen on this one for decades. I used to just point out that having an RCA cable the size of my wrist didn’t make sense when the components themselves didn’t use such wiring internally. Or I’d mention that professional audio and video equipment didn’t use such expensive patchcords. This was often met with a combination of a puzzled stare and the kind of impassioned personal testimony that you rarely hear from anyone except TV evangelists. Don’t get me wrong. Decent cables are worth what you pay for them (which really isn’t much) and over long runs (>15 feet or so) good shielding is a good idea. Also what kind of connection you use can make a big difference. To change a video connection from RF to composite, to s-video, to component, and then to digital shows obvious improvement with each step. But to pay $150 for a set of Monster Cable RCA patchcords or northward of $250 for a Monster Cable HDMI cord is nothing short of madness. I especially like the idea that Monster Cable (not the only offender but surely the most widely recognized) thinks I should pay more that half the cost of my Blu-Ray player for a cable to hook it up. It’s a digital cable, for Pete’s sake! Either the bandwidth is adequate and the interference is low enough or it isn’t. Exotic compounds and special manufacturing processes don’t make those 1’s and straighter or those 0’s any rounder. They are either there or they ain’t.

The analogy that comes to me is putting a $2000 set of wheels and tires on your $3500 Toyota Corolla but with the added absurdity that you’re convinced they make the car go faster.

The Consumerist website has weighed into this faux debate with a couple of articles. The one where high quality patch cords and speaker wires are swapped with coat hanger wire is especially funny (although by no means scientific). But I do have problems with the one on how Monster Cable is ripping off consumers. They are right that the products are a rip-off but they miss the point of why they are a rip-off , sighting high profit margins to retailers as the problem. In fact, the margin on Monster Cable connectors is not at all out of line with other products in the same category- 35-45% (they also calculate margin incorrectly). Electronics retailers often work on moderate margins for bigger ticket items and depend on accessories and service contracts to keep their business profitable. When I was managing an electronics store our rule of thumb was that 70% of gross sales were generated by bigger, lower margin items but 70% of net profit was generated by accessories (wires, connectors, batteries- the stuff that hangs on pegs on the back wall). We aimed for a 40% net profit, which in electronics was excellent. To compare, grocery stores usually have a margin of 1-3% while clothing stores might have as much as several hundred percent margin. While this may seem like a large disparity, it’s more a result their retail constraints. Grocery stores rely on massive volume compared to most retailers, while clothing stores have to stock every style in dozens of sizes. It isn’t the profit margin that the retailer makes that’s the problem. It’s that you’re paying way too much for the cable in the first place.

And don’t even get me started on why a $1500 power strip that “filters and cleans” the electicity isn’t as good as a $150 Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). And those service contracts? Margins on them are typically upwards of 90% for the retailer. You could say they are almost pure profit.

So if you want to use that Best Buy gift card you got this morning wisely, buy a better component or some extra media. Don’t let the salesman convince you that a hundred dollar patchcord is anything but a pig in a poke.


* Stereophile is a word my spell checker has never even heard of!

TECHNOLOGY- The War is Over

HD-DVD is dead. Now maybe we will get the Matrix and Star Trek movies on Blu-Ray.

Format wars have been around for a long time. There’s the old story of Edison electrocuting a mouse during a government hearing on the merits of AC vs. DC power for electrical transmission in the US. (In spite of his dramatic demonstration of the dangers of AC current, it was chosen anyway.) The one that the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray has been compared to most is, of course, VHS/Betamax. The videotape format war is somewhat of a cautionary tale. Sony’s Betamax format was technically superior in almost every way and continued to lead in innovation for years. It preceded VHS by almost a year, had superior video quality and better special effects, was the first format to incorporate high fidelity audio (at the time it was the best consumer audio recording quality available), and introduced the first camcorder. Sony won the format in almost every way except one- market penetration. JVC was a virtually unknown company in the US at the time, compared to Sony. They knew that it would be difficult to advance their format in the States unless they were able to license the technology to better known companies. So they did just that, most notably with RCA. RCA was one of the largest television manufacturers in America and had dealers in virtually every small town in the nation. Soon people who had never seen a Sony Betamax machine were able to select from several models of RCA branded VCRs in their home town and often could rent movies from those same stores. (The cost of a pre-recorded videocassette was often close to $100 dollars in the early 1980s!) While this worked for JVC in the long run (the formats competed for years), RCA had less luck with their CED videodisc format in it’s competition with Phillips’ Laservision format. Though neither fomat was ever widely accepted, in this case the higher quality format did eventually win. In large part this was due to Pioneer’s unflagging support of laserdisc for years after Phillips abandoned the format to team with Sony for the development of the Compact Disk.

For those of you who are still debating the merits of high-definition television, here is a quick primer on the different extant formats (reposted and expanded from my posts on FARK re: this subject in response to a poster that continually asked for “numbers, give me the numbers”).

(Numbers approx for analog formats)

Standard TV broadcast (best case) 330 line resolution, interlaced. Approx 160-170K pixels

This is color TV which added approx 25% increase in information to BW but due to the way it was added to the signal also caused interference between color and BW info. This characteristic was referred to as Y-C interference and was reduced by comb filters and almost vanquished by the S-VHS connector. It was best noticed as a row of crawling dots at the border of a horizontal line of color. Commonly referred to as “dot crawl”. (Duh.) Comb filters get their name from the manner in which the color signal was retrofitted to the existing Black and White television transmission standard. The bandwidth used for a BW signal had unused spaces in the waveforms. The color information was broken up and placed in the low signal areas. Color televisions not only required different tuners to decode the extra information, but three electron guns (rather than one in a BW set) to display it. (A major breakthrough was made by Sony when they invented a way to have one electron gun display all three colors (the Trinitron set). This coupled with Sony’s ability to improve linearity by using cylindrical rather than spherical tubes made them the manufacturer of choice in professional equipment for a long time.) This Y-C interference was a contributing factor to the American analog TV standard, NTSC for National Television Standards Committee, being called Never Twice the Same Color.

VHS (best case) 200 lines, interlaced. Approx 60K pixels.

VHS was also burdened with being an analog format that copied an analog format, so each generation had significant degradation. This was even evident on Pre-recorded VHS tapes. Mass production of VHS tapes was accomplished by having hundreds of VHS recorders hooked up to a single Master deck and then each was turned on and copies were made in real time.

Super-VHS (S-VHS) was about 400 lines with no increase in color information which made for a sharper, noisy picture with the same characteristic color bleed that VHS was famous for.

DVD 480 lines interlaced, max resolution 480x720, approx 345K pixels (which can’t be delivered by a standard analog TV)

720P HD 921K pixels delivered at twice the rate of interlaced signals

1080I HD 2073K pixels delivered at the same rate as analog

1080P HD 2073K pixels delivered at twice that rate

So arguably 1080P as it appears on Blu-Ray has about 12 times the number of pixels, not to mention a greatly expanded color palette and uncompressed 8 channel sound compared to DVD. Also, HD in general has spurred the greatest advances in display technology since the start of television broadcasting. Many people were so shocked by how much better their DVDs looked on their new HD televisions that they thought it was the TV itself and not the source that made a program hi-def .

So the format war is over and the better format won. A victory for consumers who now will be able to start replacing their existing DVD libraries. But they had better do it quick, downloads are just around the corner. To get an idea how those formats stack up, quality wise, have a look here.

TECHNOLOGY- Wireless HD Specification

The WirelessHD consortium has agreed on a standard! Now you are going to be able to hang your flat screen television wherever you want and not have to worry about hiding the wires (except for the power cord, of course). And when you want to rearrange the room you just spackle in the holes from the old mount and off you go. It also spells the end of the egregious TV and equipment cabinet/stand that is sitting in virtually every living room in the country. Stereo equipment, videogames, DVD players can sit anywhere in the room that they are more convenient. I expect my equipment will now find a spot in a custom coffee table, out of sight but right at hand. Projection aficionados should also rejoice. As projectors get brighter, smaller and now are wireless the number of places they can be comfortably installed increases greatly.

It’s not impossible to envision camcorders using the tech to synchronize video to computers, though I haven’t seen any plans for such applications. The world will be a better place when, after being out shooting video and still pictures all day I can just tell my cameras to sync with the computer and all the data would be transferred wirelessly. It’s easy to see other applications.

In addition to carrying 2 1080P streams the standard can also carry audio and includes universal remote control specs. It should have a range of about 10 meters and not pass through walls.