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Something about fool and his money

Sun, 06/15/2008 - 10:41am — Nick

When I saw the writeup on Slashdot, I had thought this $500 1.5 meter long network cable from Denon was some kind of April fools day joke. Apparently, I (and quite a few other people) are wrong in that, yes, this cable is actually for sale on Amazon, and it actually is $500.

But the real story are the reviews on Amazon. They are comedy gold, like this one:

A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the "directional markings" on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.

I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile - I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.

Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.

Awesome. Too awesome.

UPDATE: On second glance, this isn't a network cable, but a "Dedicated DENON LINK cable". What the hell? It looks like it's just a digital interconnect between a DVD/CD player and a receiver, something already handled by S/PDIF, with cables that cost less than 1% of this one.

Besides, this is not the most ridiculous price I've seen for a cable. $6,708.00 for a five foot power cable tops that. Then again, that power cable might actually serve a useful purpose for that price.

UPDATE 2: Also, reading the comments on that Slashdot article pointed me to a couple of places to get cables and other accessories for cheap: Monoprice.com and CablesforLess.