[Hi Ho]

Originally Posted by LesPaul Generally speaking, the pricier it is the better quality. You may not notice any difference though.

The cable industry is full of more snake oil than all other industries combined. Companies like MonsterCable and AudioQuest have consumers believing that "if it's expensive it must be better".

That couldn't be further from the truth. I second mojo's suggestion of Monoprice. BlueJeans is another good source. When working with HDMI cables up to 6ft in length just about any decently made cable will work perfectly. When you get into longer lengths the deficiencies in lesser quality cables become apparent. You still don't have to pay an arm and a leg to get a good one though. My 35 foot 24 AWG $60 HDMI cable from Monoprice works great, just as good as the $725 AudioQuest cable I had borrowed from work (no, that's not a typo). AudioQuest's 12 meter HDMI-3 costs $1,375.

Originally Posted by hitchface That isn't just cables though. Good surge protector, UPC, and cables all combine to make a nice, clean power delivery. That basically means less background noise and fewer visual artifacts, a far as what you can see. It is also healthier for your components to be shielded from 'dirty' power.

Unless one has very dirty and unstable power coming into his home or the power supplies in the components are so poorly designed that they cannot reject normal levels of noise the chances that a power conditioner will make any appreciable difference in audio or video quality are next to nil. I'm not saying that having a power conditioner or better yet a UPS is a bad thing, it just won't improve the audio or visual aspects of a system in any detectable way unless there is something wrong in the first place. It can help prolong the life of components and protect them from surges.

Originally Posted by mojo With digital cables, such as HDMI and DVI, cable quality doesn't matter a whit. You either get no picture, or a perfect picture.

That's not completely true. There is an in between when it comes to video cables like DVI and HDMI. You can get sparkles. When you have them it is very obvious though.

Originally Posted by Force Flow There are gold-plated connectors available, but I haven't seen much difference between those and the standard steel/nickel/whatever connectors other than price. Shielding is probably a bit more more important than the type of metal on the connectors

Gold plating does nothing to improve the quality of the signal. In fact, gold is a worse conductor than copper. Still, it really makes no difference. I have used cables with all sorts of metals plating the conductors and have yet to see or hear any differences. The main advantage of gold is that it does not tarnish.

I don't know of any properly conducted double blind tests that have proven that any "high end" cables provide any audible or visible improvement when compared to a properly made "cheap" cable. They do a very good job of cleaning out wallets though.

Originally Posted by mainiac 3. Do you still get HDTV quality video if you use a vga cable, but you use adapters to get it to fit dvi or hdmi slots?

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. You can't simply use an adapter to make a VGA output work with an HDMI input. VGA is analog. HDMI is digital. You would need an analog to digital converter. DVI is a different story. Not all of the pins on a DVI jack are actually used for the digital video signal, provided it's a certain type of DVI jack. The rest, depending on the component, are used for analog VGA signals and it may be possible to use an adapter if the connector on the display is DVI-I. See HERE for reference.