Monster vs Ultralink cables

[Audiman]

Guys,

I need your advice...I need to buy the following cables and I'd like an independant opinion so I can compare against what the sales persons are telling me:

HDMI - Monster 400 vs Ultralink Platinum Pro

Component Video - Monster Video 2 vs Ultralink Platinum

S-video - Monster Video 2 vs Ultralink Platinum

RCA (stereo) - Monster Interlink 250 vs Ultralink Advance Performance

Thanks,
John

[Chris D]

Hey, Audiman! First, welcome to the Guide! :banana: Of course, you picked one of the hottest topics of this forum, cables, since this forum is largely funded by a custom cable company, Cat Cables. What I will pass on, though, is that you may want to give Cat Cables a look at any cables you need before looking at mass-produced stuff. More than likely, my guess is that you'll find CAT's owner, Doug, will be able to make you cables customized to your exact system, with a better performance, for a lower price. Now Cat doesn't make DVI/HDMI yet, so no luck there, but definitely the other types you mentioned. For DVI/HDMI, both products you mentioned are going to be some serious $$$. For the same performance, you can spend a lot less money. There's a company that specializes in just DVI/HDMI cables on the web, which is where I bought mine, but I can't remember the name right now. Let me do some searching.

Good luck!

[Audiman]

Re: cables

Thanks for the insight Chris. I'll keep an eye out for your update on the HDMI URL.

Cheers,
John

[Cowanrg]

i would strongly advise against getting monster, or specifically monster hdmi. i have had many experiences where my customer's have bought them to save a buck over higher priced cables, and they just dont work well. they are dark, soft colors, loss of detail, etc...

for HDMI, get an audioquest. its what i use, and what ive sold to many people, and it seems to work the best that ive seen.

[Shane Martin]

Well I won't touch the other cables but I hope I can touch on the HDMI cable suggestion w/o breaking much of any rules.

William Phelps who is a fairly well known engineer dude and a calibrater for DILA's posted on [forum name deleted] about signal loss on HDMI cables and found that there were some issues. I'll post the link here and if we need to remove it, go ahead mods.

<Post link removed by Management as it serves no really good purpose at this forum. >

Basically the Ultralink was one only 2 cables that passed the tests he posted about.

[Lex]

Direct links to other forums for information content is not really desirable on HTGuide. If a poster over at those competing forums deems his information relevent to one of our topics, that person is welcome to post here within our guidelines. But we won't become a clearinghouse for information links to other forums.

Additionally, as Chris said, we are a cable sponsored forum, in fact, without CAT at this point the forum could cease to exist. We've not really allowed competing cable discussions in the past. I'm not going to delete this thread, but I am going to ask you to be sensitive to this forums' sponsor.

You might even see what fellow Australians have had to say about CAT Cables, Component Video, S-video, RCA cables, speaker cables, etc in the CAT forum here. We are not currently selling HDMI, but may in the future.

Lex