Monster Cable gets a ***** slap

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I will never ever buy those overpriced POS cables ever. That company sues every single corporation that may have even a passing similarity to their company. They even sued Monster.com for ****'s sake! Just because it had Monster in the name! For awhile Monster.com put a link at the bottom of their website that said "if you were looking for monster cables click here" but last time I looked it just redirected back to their own site.

I hope they get sued into the ground.
 
Careful there guys, you are about to get a massive smack down for suggesting the it's not Monster Cable's god given right to DESTROY their competition by whatever means possible. This is capitalism at it's finest, and if the little guys can't handle the legal battle, they deserve to be crushed!
 
Paging Evan! paging Evan!

lol

oh yeah, you're right, I defend crushing the little guys "by whatever means possible". :rolleyes: It's comforting to know that you haven't actually read a word I've typed. This is clearly an issue of tort and not one of the shortcomings of capitalism. But hey, it's much easier to just rail on your favorite whipping boy every time something happens that you don't like, right?

Here's a clue for you and your silly strawmen: blaming bad, unethical stuff that goes on in a free market environment (like absurd lawsuits) on the principles of capitalism is disingenuous---just as disingenuous as it is to blame the steroid problem on the game of baseball. Good things happen and bad things happen in a free market. I don't defend the bad stuff, but do you realize how effing LAZY it is to say "here's capitalism at its finest" every time something bad happens? Not everything, good or bad, that happens in a free market environment is a result of Capitalism; all I've been saying is that, among the schools of thought that we see today, Austrian economics respects individual rights the most and is most conducive to liberty...and thus most conducive to justice. But every little complaint about ethical lapses in the market results in these snide, lazy comments about "capitalism at its finest". Problems with tort law? Capitalism's fault. Mom and Pop shops closing? Capitalism's fault. My balls itch? Capitalism's fault.

I'm not going over the same issues again and again, because it's way too early, so I'll just say this: it's never smart to let the better be the enemy of the perfect. Free market Austrian economics is not perfect, but unless you have a better economic school of thought to put forth in its place, I suggest you give up the tired "everything bad that happens in a free market is because capitalism sucks" mantra.

Back to the topic at hand: Monster teh suxxorz. They suck just like Suzuki sucks. Tort reform, anyone?
 
MikeFlynn74 said:
Whoa whoa whoa! I was merely kidding- jeeze

Werd. It's too early, I didn't get enough sleep, I need more coffee, and 'kidding' is rarely communicated well over the internerd without the ol' ";)". I was more responding to Pete's snide little "capitalism at its finest" comment anyway. :cross: *goes to chug coffee*
 
Monster cable is a ripoff. You just need a large enough gauge for your distance so that it doesn't attenuate your signal. Stranded copper is your friend.
 
MikeFlynn74 said:
Capitalism and being an greedy unethical ****** is 2 different things that often look the same.

Hmmm...I guess they'd look the same if you didn't really value personal property rights...IOW, making lots of money looks unethical if you believe in the redistribution of wealth.
 
Audio cable hype is almost as rampant and lucrative as is automobile sales.

I have seen stranded cable speaker wires sale for a $1000.00 a meter because the manufacturer had excellent marketing. There is a LOT of "Snake Oil" marketing that takes place in cable manufacturing and sales and most all of it is targeted to the educated audiophile thta has the money but not the time to give a ****.

The reality is, a basic lamp coord is as good if not better than most of the cables out there. And beware the brands that have the devices attached. Claims of "re-aligning the magnetic fields around the cable thus aligning electrons in the flow direction to clarify sound" HOGWASH! Most of them dont even have a complete circuit and all that have been tested have been shown to have no measurable, scientific improvement on signal quality.

In the end, it's not so much that the wire itself is better but in a few respectible cases the connector itself is better than the average.

The only other products more gimmicky than speaker wires are "vibration isolation blocks for CD players" that are supposed to clear up the sound by eliminating vibrations that could reach the component. Rediculous.
 
Gila, it's the same scam that Bose has been running for years. $500 for a clock radio that doesn't even have a CD player? Hey, just make consumers THINK that they're buying the best of the best via excellent marketing and exorbitant pricing. It's such a scam. Not that Bose products don't sound good, just that for what they are, they're vastly overpriced.
 
EdWort said:
It's not the size of your cable that matters, it's how little it attenuates. :D

Ha! Not true. If your "cable" is too small, you'll find you get a lot of resistance when you want to use it. The bigger it is, the less resistance you'll get that is untill it's too big to fit.:p
 
Evan! said:
Gila, it's the same scam that Bose has been running for years. $500 for a clock radio that doesn't even have a CD player? Hey, just make consumers THINK that they're buying the best of the best via excellent marketing and exorbitant pricing. It's such a scam. Not that Bose products don't sound good, just that for what they are, they're vastly overpriced.

Ayup. Lot's of creative marketing dollars spent on inferior branding. Speaker cable is just the worst of the worst. And in the consumer markets there is very little, if any, test data to support claims. Speakers to an extent are similar. All brands tend to claim the best fidelity but few are willing to provide the performance curve reports to support their claims.

Step out on the consumer market and into live sound and all of a sudden your flooded with test reports and solid, verifiable claims.
 
GilaMinumBeer said:
Ha! Not true. If your "cable" is too small, you'll find you get a lot of resistance when you want to use it.

True, but if you have a Super Conductor cable......
 
EdWort said:
True, but if you have a Super Conductor cable......

He He. Yes, if you have a Super Conductor cable then that would see the least resistance but, keep in mind that you'd have to dip it into Liquid Nitrogen to get it to work right. Ouch!
 
I used to use Monster cables, then I found these guys. The difference between these cables is like the difference between drinking a Bud Light and a Westy.
 
Evan! said:
Gila, it's the same scam that Bose has been running for years. $500 for a clock radio that doesn't even have a CD player? Hey, just make consumers THINK that they're buying the best of the best via excellent marketing and exorbitant pricing. It's such a scam. Not that Bose products don't sound good, just that for what they are, they're vastly overpriced.

:off:

You know what's weird, though?

I have a pair of Bose speakers; just little ones, bookshelf speakers. They sound phenomenal. They're designed in such a way that they send the sound throughout the room. I mean, I'm no audiophile, but I've listened to music in a dark room with these and with other speakers, and there's ansolutely no comparison. Very clear sound, decent base, I guess I would describe them as "vibrant"; they really feel live, they're no muddled notes or anything. I've had them for for probably more than fifteen years, probably going on twenty.

I distinctly remember them being less than $200 (they were a Christman present I got to pick out, so I basically had a budget), which I remember even at the time was pretty reasonable. Completely worth every penny.
 
the_bird said:
:off:

You know what's weird, though?

I have a pair of Bose speakers; just little ones, bookshelf speakers. They sound phenomenal. They're designed in such a way that they send the sound throughout the room. I mean, I'm no audiophile, but I've listened to music in a dark room with these and with other speakers, and there's ansolutely no comparison. Very clear sound, decent base, I guess I would describe them as "vibrant"; they really feel live, they're no muddled notes or anything. I've had them for for probably more than fifteen years, probably going on twenty.

I distinctly remember them being less than $200 (they were a Christman present I got to pick out, so I basically had a budget), which I remember even at the time was pretty reasonable. Completely worth every penny.

Like I said, Bose isn't a bad product, but you're paying a lot for the ad campaign. If you do a little searching on teh interwebs, you'll find that pretty anyone that's even an amateur audiophile can show you products that are either comparable in quality to Bose but cost much less, or comparable in price to Bose and are much better. Again, it's not a bad product, but there are other products out there that don't have a sophisticated ad campaign that have better Quality:price ratios.
 
the_bird said:
:off:

You know what's weird, though?

I have a pair of Bose speakers; just little ones, bookshelf speakers. They sound phenomenal. They're designed in such a way that they send the sound throughout the room. I mean, I'm no audiophile, but I've listened to music in a dark room with these and with other speakers, and there's ansolutely no comparison. Very clear sound, decent base, I guess I would describe them as "vibrant"; they really feel live, they're no muddled notes or anything. I've had them for for probably more than fifteen years, probably going on twenty.

I distinctly remember them being less than $200 (they were a Christman present I got to pick out, so I basically had a budget), which I remember even at the time was pretty reasonable. Completely worth every penny.

Acoustics are very dear to me. I am currently a Physics study with an Acoustics Discipline. In my possession is a Sencore Real Time Analyzer and Tone Generator.

This thing goes leaps and bounds betond your typical Radio Shack Sound Pressure Level Meter. It will actually show you the response in user selectable Octaves or ranges. So, what does this mean?

For giggles one day I compared and older set of B&W DM604 Series 3 Tower Loudspeakers, (New, these were retailed for $4000.00 a pair.) with a $15 dollar a peice Radio Shack RCA Bookshelf speaker.

Of course there were differences inherent to each speaker type, the towers had more range in the bass octaves, but each speaker was set at precisely the same location, height, and distance from the sampling microphone using the center of the tweeter as the measuring point. The microphone was set 1 meter away in both instances.

The result was taht the smaller, much cheaper bookshelf speacker produced a flatter (more precise) response than the higher priced Tower speaker and could still perform through 80% of the bigger speakers range.

Locate the sweet spot in the room for a decent subwoofer and you'd never know the difference.

I was able to install 13 of these bookshelf speakers, mounts, wiring, and calibration of system for less than the retail price of 1 of the "better" speakers and at the end of the day they perform MEASURABLY better than the others.
 
These are the ones that I have, FWIW.

Bose1.JPG


Bose's marketing has surprised me as well - because these really WEREN'T that expensive when I got them. Not sure if that's a corporate change that has occured over the past fifteen years, or if they still sell some good stuff in the entry-level market.
 
This goes back a few years, and is part of the reason why I really don't care for Sony Products (besides the fact that everything Sony I've ever owned was junk).

Once it's been defined as property, our national inclination is to respect its boundaries. The respect you get, though, depends on how much financial clout you can back your claim with. Famously, in 1987, a Maryland restaurant owner named Resurreccion "Sony" Florendo agreed, under threat of a $2 million lawsuit from the Sony Corporation, to stop using her lifelong nickname as the name of her small chain of Filipino eateries. "Sony is my name. It is my personal identity," she told the Washington Post at the time. "I am intimidated by a giant corporation with resources that I can't even think of."

If the situation were to arise today, that corporation would have even more resources. Had Sony Florendo dug in and fought for the right to use her own name in 1987, she might have won in the end. Under federal law at the time, the Sony Corporation would have been required to prove there was a likely chance that customers would actually have believed that Florendo's food was being sold by the electronics giant. But in 1996, President Clinton signed the Federal Trademark Dilution Act, changing the standard and putting another weapon in the hands of whoever plants their flag first. Now, if a trademark is "famous," the holder can sue even if nobody would be confused. Plaintiffs can simply argue that the other use "tarnishes," or even "blurs," the existing mark.
 
Evan! said:
Like I said, Bose isn't a bad product, but you're paying a lot for the ad campaign. If you do a little searching on teh interwebs, you'll find that pretty anyone that's even an amateur audiophile can show you products that are either comparable in quality to Bose but cost much less, or comparable in price to Bose and are much better. Again, it's not a bad product, but there are other products out there that don't have a sophisticated ad campaign that have better Quality:price ratios.

Bose is actually in the business of doing other things with sound, and just happens to use what they learn doing those other things to make speakers. I must say though, since they closed the speaker plant here in MA and started making the things overseas in china, the prices have dropped considerably, some people argue the quality as well, but I for one don't notice.
 
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