Monster Scart

scottyf

a few points here as i think a few of you are getting a bit confused
a scart lead carry analogue signals and hdmi lead carry digital.a digital lead will either work or or not you can not suffer from loss of quality as to the way the digital signal is passed.a scart lead passes analogue signals so with poor quality cables you can reduce signal quality this is a scart lead on offer here.

a few reasons why a quality scart lead is worth the bit extra(and i mean a bit up to say £15)
gold plated contacts (gold is a better conductor)
fully wired (lots of cheap scart leads have only the composite wires connected,composite being lower quality to RGB)
high quality low loss cable (cheap standard cable in a cheap scart)
shielded (all the cables are shielded to stop interference from any other equipment nearby.

why spend £1000+ on a tv and then hook up your sky+ with a £1 cheap scart instead of trying to get the best quality signal you can to your tv

and i'm only talking about scart hear not hdmi/usb ect which is a different story alltogether

Halloway

The problem is that there appears to be absolutely no independent objective research on whether or not good cables make a scrap of difference. There are some audiophiles who use bell wire to connect speakers because they cannot tell the difference between that and stuff costing tens or hundreds of pounds per metre.

I confess that I really don't know if good cables make any difference or not. I tend to buy medium quality (£30 for a pair of phono interconnects) but that's simply because I want them to last, not for any intrinsic improvement to sound quality.

When you start to think about how interconnects might affect a signal then it all gets very complex very quickly. If you also think about the other factors in signal and sound propagation then it becomes more complex still. When I see statements like "gold is a better conductor" I think "better than what"? What does it mean to be a good conductor? Is the conductance of a cable of any relevance to how well it carries a signal? Bear in mind that electricity travels at 70-80% of the speed of light in a vacuum (~3x10^8 metres per second) and that the average interconnect will be around a couple of metres long, the timescales are so vanishingly small that any variances in the signal propagation are going to be dwarfed by external factors such as room acoustics, sitting position of the listener etc etc etc.

Anyway, as mentioned earlier, don't buy Monster cables. Monster have a policy of bullying companies in the US who have the word "monster" in their name. They are a nasty company indeed.

And. for no other reason than I am feeling mischievous this evening, here's a link some of you might find interesting:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2972748

*edit* and why not Google for 'monster cables rip off'?