Here is my humble opinion.... Unless one has a visual characteristic you prefer, I would buy the one that costs less....They are both made by a reputable company....The differences in them sonically is not gonna be audible and probably not even measurable.. I think the real "high end" cables are a waste of money for the most part... Now with that being said, I will say this...In car audio it matters about build quality and materials used....RCA cables usually run under carpet and can be exposed to being stepped on or things layed on the carpet on top of them (I said possibly, although in a good install it is not likely) Once the cables are ran, secured and connected, typically it is pretty permanent....Unless you have them in a set-up where you plug and unplug them regularly, the strain relief should play a minimal part .....A very cheap RCA could possibly have fewer strands for conductors or use a cheap outer insulation, but I bet you cannot hear a difference in a cheapy and an expensive one...brand new, out of the box, freshly connected.... Now the outer contact fins can be a factor....More surface area = less signal loss possibilitiy....Some of the cheapies are harder to connect and disconnect, the expensive ones have a smoother feel.... Monster cable is hype....over-priced....My opinion of this comes from experience in home audio, pro audio (live and recording) and car audio...I have read many many different articles on this very subject....Tests and experiments done by people in the industry.... I have swapped out the cheapest rca I could find with one that costs $200.00 for a 3' cable....Neither me or anyone I could find to listen could hear ANY sonic difference..... Willy
That pretty much sums it up Willy!!!!!!! THe ONLY thing that i would look out for is the extremely cheap cables......lack of sheilding can ' sometimes", allow EMF and RFI feilds to induce noise IF the cables are run in a poor manner.....
Exactly....Especially in car audio....It is nearly impossible to keep the RCA away from power or ground (since the whole freakin body and chassis is a big ground wire) and cheap ones with cheap insulation can be a source of noise. My experiment was done with home audio with interconnects between CD player and preamp.... The packaging and advertisement for monster says stuff like.... When only the best will do.....or....a difference you can hear.....You ask the salesman "is there really a sonic difference?" he says "definitely....My buddy replaced his cable with monster and now he has tighter bass" B.S.......but what happens is people believe it, buy it, and swear they hear a difference.....What person is gonna say "yeah I upgraded, what a mistake, I was a fool" A few years ago in a high end home audio magazine, they did a test..... They took two systems....High end pre amp, high end amp, high end CD player and high end speakers..... System "A"...they connected everything with high dollar RCA cables....Used special devices to isolate the cables if they had to cross over the top of a power cable....crossed them at 90 degree angles, etc.... System "B".....everything was identical with the exception of the RCA's...They went into a junk drawer and pulled out the cheapies...They layed them any way they just happened to lay and wired everything up... Then they took a meter and volume adjusted both systems to be EXACTLY the same volume...... Then they brought in like 6 people...A musician, a studio pro, a high end audio salesman, a soccer mom, a lawyer, etc..... They played some movie soundtrack stuff and some straight audio stuff... They said nothing about the differences in the systems...The only thing visible was the speakers....They asked each person to evaluate each segment on each system..There was absolutely no evidence to show that people could hear or preferred the sound on the expensive cable system..as a matter of fact, a couple of the people commented on deeper, tighter bass or more detailed upper mids and highs on the cheapy cable system.... Then you have people who will spend hundreds of dollars on special isolation devices to sit their power amps on, claiming it will give the system more detail or sonic improvement.....They buy them and claim there IS a difference. Willy
Maybe i need to come up with an idea, something along the lines of a stiffening cap, for RCA cables!!!!!!! YA!!!!!!!! LOL!
hey thanks willy that was some good advice yea i think monster cable is over priced so i think i would stick to the cheapest. thanks for the info.
