Don’t Buy Cables at Best Buy!

In the same vein as my post about haggling your way to a good cell phone deal, I want to make sure everyone within the sound of my voice knows that there’s a better way to buy cables than at your local Big Box electronics retailer.

I’m talking about all kinds of cables: From USB to Cat5, from RCA to DVI to HDMI to VGA, there’s really no reason you should pay what the big retail stores want for these cables.

Example A: HDMI Cables

HDMI is all the rage. You can connect your high-definition components to your HDTV with a small, single cable, covering video and audio, rather than the 3-5 bulky cables previously used for the same process. It’s a miracle! Except that when the man in a polo shirt who just sold you a TV, in his most helpful voice, intones “And you’ll need an HDMI cable to connect that to your components”, he’s not actually trying to help you. He’s trying to send you home with, at a bare minimum, a $64 length of rubber-coated wires. Which somehow seems reasonable to people who don’t know you can get that cable for $6 on the web.

Example B: USB Cables

The (admittedly apocryphal) word on USB cables is that Best Buy et al have a tendency to mark down their printers to near-cost, and just lean heavily on their salespeople to make sure everyone walks out with a $30 USB cable to push the margins back up. The “standard” USB cable Best Buy sells will set you back $28.99.
Granted, part of that ridiculous amount gets you hilariously witty Geek Squad marketing banalities like “Agent 642 does not personally recommend using this cable as a fish stringer.” Ha ha ha!

While you’re laughing your way to the big yellow and blue cash register, you’re supposed to forget that you can get a cable that is equal in length and function for seventy-two cents if you know where to look. I’ve used similar dirt-cheap cables (hint: they come bundled with a lot of USB devices), and I’ve never had a problem with one.

Example C: Ethernet Cables

I’m of the school of thought that ethernet cables are easy enough to make yourself that you should never even have to resort to buying them “prefab”. However, I realize that operating an archaic BDSM-esque crimper is outside the scope of many people’s Sunday afternoon hobby proficiency. Still, that’s no reason to pay $20 for a pathetic, 6ft length of ethernet cable. If you don’t have the skills to DIY, there’s still a veritable rainbow of cables in all sizes, starting at $1.70 for a 7ft cable that will be just as good as any $20 Geek Squad Cable.

Sources

It would be painfully negligent if I were to publish such a diatribe on what I would label as a paradigmatic pricing scheme, only to pepper my examples with evidentiary links that all point to the same site. That would prove nothing, except that one retailer happens to have great prices on cables. But there are tons of them out there.

A quick Google Search for “cheap cables” brings back plenty of results, but here are some I rely on (or have heard good things from trusted sources):

• MonoPrice
• Cable Wholesale - I got some really long VGA cables from these guys at an amazing price.
• Computer Geeks - They sell a kit for $28 that you could use to make fifteen 20-foot cables, at only a little more than Best Buy wants for one six-foot cable.
• Deep Surplus - Haven’t ordered from here, but the prices look very good. I’ve read good things about them.
• A tangentially related post from Make Magazine

But Don’t Take My Word For It

Whether you hook up your TV via digital connections, analog connections, or both, you are unlikely to detect any difference in picture quality between a cable with a moderate price and a luxury brand. The only difference you’re likely to notice is how the cable looks behind your TV.
-PCWorld.com: The Cable Game

There are some great insights, not just in the body of this blog post, but in the comments:

Not only isn’t there $143.62 worth of quality difference, there isn’t $.01 worth of quality difference.
-mattyice11 on Gizmodo: HDMI Cable: Price Gouging?

And if you’ve made it all the way down here and you still care, even just a little bit, about the quality and price of the cables you buy, check out this grandaddy of expensive cable debunkers, Roger Russell. This has long been my favorite exposé on “audiophile” cables:

So what do our fifty hours of testing, scoring and listening to speaker cables amount to? Only that 16-gauge lamp cord and Monster cable are indistinguishable from each other with music and seem to be superior to the 24 gauge wire commonly sold or given away as ’speaker cable.’
-Speaker Wire: A History

So there ya have it… Lamp cable sold at 30 cents a foot outperforms so-called “Speaker Cable”, and is indistinguishable from the cable sold for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

Tip: Prevent Missing Attachment Syndrome

From purely anecdotal evidence, I feel comfortable saying that a fairly large fraction of the total base of email-using professionals shares one of my (numerous) deficiencies. That is, I often send emails to clients or colleagues that say “Please review the attached file”, or “I’ve attached my XYZ Form”, or some other allusion to the fact that there is an attachment. And, of course, much of the time, I completely forget to actually attach the file in question.

Last week, after another particularly embarrassing occurrence, with its concomitant followup (”Sorry, here’s the attachment…”), I resolved to build some sort of barrier between my payload-free messages and their confused recipients-to-be. Or more accurately, some kind of airlock.

Here’s what I did: I created an Outlook rule that applies after I click “Send” in a message. If the message contains the words “attach”, “attached”, or “attachment”, but doesn’t actually have an attachment, Outlook holds the message for 5 minutes before sending. This way, I’ll see the message sitting there and think to myself “why isn’t this message sending?” If it just happened to have the word “attach” in it, even though no attachment was required, it’ll be on its merry way in 5 minutes anyway. If it needed an attachment but lacked one, I have ample time to notice and attach the file.

I’ve had this rule in place for a few days now, and it’s already saved me from such (admittedly minor) embarrassment once.