Monster "Clean Power" Worth It?

No.

No.

Typical Monster marketing hype and bullsh*t.

As soon as you mentioned "Monster" I knew the answer was no. Monster is overpriced garbage.

As Jackie Gleason used to say, "... and away we go!"

Lots of people here have tried Monster Cable products. Very few think they are worth the money.

Monster products typically perform as well as any other product, but are way, way overpriced.

As for HDMI cables, no legitimate source I've ever come across believes a Monster Cable can make an HD image look better.

It's digital; either the ones and zeroes get there or they don't. (At the very margins of receiving going to hell in a handcart, there might be a small difference) I just don't believe in brighter ones and darker zeroes.

Surge protectors kill the spike before it kills your gear. The Monster is probably a perfectly capable, but certainly overpriced surge protector.

The main Monster feature is a Monster grab for your wallet.

Strictly speaking, that's true only if you're using coaxial cable:

- the 1's can travel lengthwise down the center conductor,

- the 0's can travel broadside down the shield, and

- none of the other numbers can get through.


...have you hugged an engineer, today?

LK

Monster products are hyped and pushed by electronics retailers because of their obscene profit margins. The same is true of some TERK products.

I guess what you are trying to say is "digital" signals are still analog voltages and can be degraded by cables just the same.

Quite true!

However here is the rub: The HDMI signal is scrambled on two levels. First there is the DC free scrambling that makes data recovery more fool proof. Then there's HDCP which scrambles the data yet further to circumvent p;iracy and illegal digital copies from being made. So if so much as one bit is wrong, you lose the entire pixel. And furthermore if enough bits are corrupted you will lose HDCP handshaking and the screen will go blue.

So yes, there are bad HDMI cables. But they don't make colors look washed out and raise black levels. Bad cables cause droputs either on a pixel basis or the whole screen if bad enough. If your image is stable and free of white zits, then you cable is performing to spec. A "better" (read more expensive) cable will make absolutly no difference in the image quality.

I don't know about current products but a few years ago Monster power products were not UL listed. You know, that little sticker every 99 cent extension cord has that certifies the product has been tested and safe by an authorized lab.

Well Monster doesn't seem to carry that certificate on it's power products. Why not? Surely cost isn't an issue, we all know Monster is a billion dollar company.

Yet the $12 Home Depot surge protector power strip has a UL sticker.

So do you really want to put an untested, uncertified, electrical product in your house?

You're assuming that the Chinese manufacturer of that cheap strip actually submitted to the UL underwriting process and didn't just print up counterfeit labels and slap them on the power strips.

I remember when I bought my first big screen - a 52" RCA RP for $999 at Best Buy for the 2003 after Thanksgiving door buster. After standing in the cold parking lot for an hour and a half, then finally getting inside and waiting in line to get to the electronics department, I ended up getting one of the last sets available. I remember the salesclerk putting a $200 power strip on my order without even asking if I wanted it. I made him take it off despite his protests that it was needed to provide "clean power" for the HDTV display. I'm guessing it was a Monster (or similar) and he would have gotten a better commission on it than on the TV!

Still have that TV although the tubes are going bad due to burn-in from CNBC's ticker and the side bars from several years of SD displays... need to replace it before too long.

That would make Home Depot legally liable and I don't think their purchasing department is quite so cavalier.

That's entirely possible and I did read on an electrical forum that such a practice does occur.

However, if there is no UL label you can be sure it was not tested. And at least the early Monster power products I saw were not. I guess I need to look at the current products although I generally don't waste my time at BB looking at Monster products!

You're assuming that their purchasing agents are able to catch manufacturers cheating.

Monster HDMI cables made my wallet much lighter and more svelte than those cheap Monoprice HDMI cables can.

That's what their job is ...

Usage and location determine if safety certification is needed for a product. Residential building codes require certification from a National Recognized Testing Lab (NRTL) for certain electrical appliances and equipment.

UL is a NRTL and UL Listing will satisfy the building inspector when he makes his inspection. Electrical equipment that is brought in later that is not part of the building does not need certification, but a retailer may insist on it to satisfy his concerns, or as is likely in the case with Monster, competitors will cast doubt on a product without it.

i agree monster is overpriced, but leaving monster's reputation out of the argument- is there any technological update/benefit to using these new giant surge protectors? there has to at least be something going on there, they are about 10 times bigger than your average cheapo surge protector. to be fair it has been decades before weve seen any update in the technology. I'm not advocating the picture quality will be geting any better, but what about the protection it provides?

More protection = More dollars, even if you don't need it. Do you want protection for a once-a-day event or for a once-a-century event? AV manufacturers build in protection for surges likely to be encountered by their products to protect against warranty returns. You can pay for protection for unlikely events, but it will cost more and will probably (almost certainly) go unused.

I have a large surge protector located where the utility power enters my house distribution equipment. It protects the whole house and I don't have to worry about every outlet. It won't protect against a direct lightning strike on my house, but there is no practical defense for this.

At many stores, Monster has display units which have a clear plexiglass cover to let you see what's inside. At a cursory inspection, they do a very nice job inside. Lots of inductors to reduce spikes, etc. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's much higher quality than the average Wally World power strip.

Of course, inductors are made of iron and wire, which are dirt cheap. So the boxes are very overpriced.

But that's the problem with everybody shopping based on nothing but price, combined with the world's manufacturing base completely outsourced to China. There isn't much of a market niche above the absolute cheapest crap that's manufactured and sold for peanuts.

Instead we can only buy a somewhat nicer product at an obscenely higher price. Because there's only a 1% market share available for anything that isn't absolute crap.

Surges are shunted to ground by MOV's and TVS's. The inductors are elements of the noise filter circuits.

thank god I work at Future Shop and get anything Monster for an absurd discounted price....picked up all 1000HD HDMI cables + Monster Power Center for dirt cheap....I would never consider it if I had to pay retail tho thats for sure

I found a couple new in the box on flea bay for very low prices and grabbed them. I needed two that were rack mountable and at the time and for the money, Monster fit the bill. They are the 5100 models and I paid around $150-$170 ea. What do they go for in the store, $500+?

I also picked up a one of their smaller units that would fit in one of my audio racks. I found it for $60 or so on Amazon w/free shipping. It was the only one I could find that was under two inches thick and it did not break the bank. I think BB sold it for near $200. It works for plugging in a TT, Preamp and the Oppo BD player and something else. And no feedback on the TT.

Hey, they work and allow me to plug all of my gear in and I can see what kind of voltage all of my gear is using.

I say, if you can get a deal, why not, I have never had any problems with their gear, just shop around and never pay full retail.

There are different ways of reducing surges. For example, here is a commercial product that eschews MOVs and uses inductors.

Without a schematic or a teardown, it's not easy to know what Monster does. My bigger point was that the Monster boxes did more than the average surge protector power strip, but at a very high price.