Cables: Moster Cable vs. Mogami

A

Andrew McCarrick

Carbonite Member
Which of these would you suggest? Moster Cable or Mogami. I've never use Mogami myself, so just looking for a comparison between the too. And which series?
 
Monster is overpriced and overrated. Mogami, Canare, just don't waste your money on Monster.
 
Ive heard the Monster cable with the arrows on the cable showing the user which
direction the audio should travel are AMAZING sounding.
 
Canare Star Quad: about $1.30 a foot in bulk.

Mogami quad: roughly $1 a foot in bulk.

Belden quad: also roughly $1.00 a foot in bulk.

Monster: $6.00 a foot in bulk.

Coat hanger: free with dry cleaning.

Look at it this way: a lot of studios use both Canare, Bleden, and Mogami, or a few other brands that average $1.25 a foot. Self-proclaimed "audiophiles" shell out $5.00 and more per foot for that Monster crap to listen to material produced on cable costing much less. Why? It doesn't make sense.

And when the big-name studios aren't shovelling out $6.00/foot for overpriced, underperforming crap like Monster, why should you?

@Gohanto, thanks for that link. It proves my theory that uptight, self-proclaimed "audiophiles" believe strongly that Monster sounds better... it's psychosematic, really. You spend $6/foot on cable and you'll convince yourself that it sounds $5/foot better than the rest.
 
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well in all fairness to the monster cable
it really shines when the room temp is 74 to 76 degrees.
It will truly blow your mind.
 
Rippie said:
Ive heard the Monster cable with the arrows on the cable showing the user which
direction the audio should travel are AMAZING sounding.
Click to expand...
Actually the arrows can be of some benefit though I'm sure Monster's aren't done with this in mind. One way of wiring unbalanced interconnects to prevent ground loops with some equipment where signal ground is not at chassis ground is to use cable with 2 conductors for the audio plus shield like a conventional balanced cable, grounding the shield to chassis at the signal source end of the cable and letting it float unconnected at the destination end. Where there are polarized connectors such as XLR there's no ambiguity but you can also use such a scheme with unbalanced wiring using connectors such as RCA plugs where there would be ambiguity as to which end was which. Using a 2 conductor plus shield cable, the connections would be: source signal hot to pin, signal ground to shell, shield to shell; load signal hot to pin, signal ground to shell, shield unconnected. In that case, having arrows on the cable legitimately indicates the direction of signal flow from source to destination. See Rane's Notes for info on this scheme.
 
and I can say monster cables are great for tying the dog up in the backyard
which wasnt a designed implementation either.
 
Rippie said:
Ive heard the Monster cable with the arrows on the cable showing the user which
direction the audio should travel are AMAZING sounding.
Click to expand...

I had to label Firewire cables for The Wife and her camera setup for her seminars. The camera had the 4-pin FW connector, the computer had the 6 wire... completely different connectors, and obvious which end went where... but alas... to eliminate any hesitation in the panic of setup, when I wasn't there... I just labeled each, "Camera", and "Computer" as required... (Did the same for the projector-computer cable as well...).
 
Andrew McCarrick said:
If in the end there's not much of a quality difference between the two?
Click to expand...
I daresay there's plenty of quality difference between Monster and Mogami cabling. For my money, Mogami and Canare are the superior microphone cables.

Monster makes solid, reliable, high-quality cables for the consumer market. The problem is that their pricing structure is way out of whack, and their marketing material is full of baffling hyperbole. Part of the blame should be placed at the feet of Hi-Fi and home theater salespeople who've gone to great lengths to condition their market to accept the notion of a $250 HDMI cable.

If you want to see how utterly ridiculous the audiophile market has become, consider the Anjou Pear speaker cables, which will run you $302 per foot!

Famed psychic debunker The Amazing Randi has had it in for Anjou and their magic wires for some time: http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/90-swift-september-28-2007.html#i4
 
Andrew McCarrick said:
I've posted a similar thread on Pearl Drummer's Forum and according to engineers there, there is absoutely no different between the audio quality of those two cables or almost any cable.

http://www.pearldrummersforum.com/showthread.php?t=233336
Click to expand...

While I don't know much about audio cables, where most RF cables differ in quality is the concern... or lack thereof... in the connectors, how well the shielding is connected, and the quality of the connector themselves. Again from the RF world, tightening down the connector on cheap connectors often results in the shielding pulling away from the connector body... or the connector pins not mating well... or heck breaking just after the connector... so that from the outside all looks well...
 
Mogami Here. I love the fact that when I accidentally split one, I walked into the local audio shop here, handed over the old cable, they gave me a new one and I walked right out of the door. Took 3 minutes. They really stand behind their cables. They are kind of expensive but I only have to buy them once. ever.
 
Andrew McCarrick said:
I've posted a similar thread on Pearl Drummer's Forum and according to engineers there, there is absoutely no different between the audio quality of those two cables or almost any cable.

http://www.pearldrummersforum.com/showthread.php?t=233336
Click to expand...

Audio quality, I agree, almost all cables are identical. You'd have to really screw up the design to get worse audio signal from one XLR cable to another (it's a noise canceling design to begin with).

The difference mostly lies in durability. Plus some companies just use connectors that are a pain (granted it's not the end of the world to just replace them yourself)
 
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