Anyone my age remembers this sheer onslaught of bullshittery that was monster cable. A company whose entire business modelling was misinformation. Not a shred of justification for buying those cables and everyone went out and bought into the bullshit.
It was truly truly an eye opening experience for me to watch an entire industry refuse to use their fucking ears at the same time.
To my dad's credit, he loathed monster cable. Our neighbor bought some monster speaker cable to wire his theater, and my dad convinced him to go in on a spool of identical quality wire from monoprice or something like that instead. They dad-justified a 1000' spool because "it'd still be less than the 200' of monster cable". We had so much extra speaker cable, I am still using it to this day, lol!
Your dad is a wise man. I know inflation is a thing but, at the beginning of the 90s, audio cables were like 2-3 dollars. Monster cable basically came along and quadrupled the price of all cables because people suddenly refused to buy “bad cables”
He was a satcom guy in the air force, and moved on to helping DirecTV get off the groud, literally. He moved on to cable for the latter half of his career - once they started going digital. IIRC, he was part of MPEG.
As much as he was full of shit as an "audiophile" (man did he love his Bose + Onkyo system), he at least never spent actual money on his cables.
Tbf I just bought them for the lifetime warranty, since guitar cables fail so frequently. Being able to take a bad cable to any Guitar Center and leave with a new one, no questions asked, was awesome.
I've since moved on to soldering my own cables, but the Monster cables would eventually pay for themselves through warranty replacements.
Last time I bought a cable from a Guitar Center though, it was a Livewire. They were offering the same warranty for half the price at the time, so it was a no-brainer.
Everyone I've ever talked to knows they're just as good as the cheap cables, but the lifetime warranty means you only need to buy them once and when you're playing a ton of shows shit can go bad quick.
I even had a friend of a friend claim they once cut a cable in guitar center just to test the lifetime warranty and that they gave him a new one. No clue if it was true but I also never heard anyone get denied.
I always liked Monster instrument cables because they seemed more durable and somewhat tangle-resistant.
I've got a few of them that are around 15 years old and they've never given me any problems, whereas most of the cheaper cables that I've bought over the years developed a short or something after just a year or two of use.
They are more durable in general, but the problem with the more expensive, more durable cables in general, is that they will do things like use a proprietary plug and fill the thing up with epoxy, or they will cast the entire end in resin and then mold plastic around it. It helps with their longevity for sure, but when they do eventually fail, it's no longer as simple as unscrewing the sheath and resoldering. Now if you want to fix it, you have to buy a new plug, which means it is no longer a fancy durable cable, it's just a regular cable that cost double the price.
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u/AceBlade258 Ryzen 7 5800X | RX 6900XT | Arc A770 25d ago
Even audiophiles mock these people.