I'm tagging this funny, but it might also be tagged serious. Not sure which.
It's fun to pick on audiophiles. They stand in the Venn sweet spot of "assholes with too much money" and "gullible twits that believe in the power of positive thinking." We went down to THEshow one year. My buddy's girlfriend was one of three women we saw the entire time. Never in my life have I seen so many speakers that look like daleks. Never in my life have I seen so many men that aren't used to seeing women. Never in my life have I seen power cords sold for $300 a foot. They had this thing there before Hammacher Schlemmer decided to sell it. Here it is, at THEShow. Know what it sounds like? a record player.
I love gag reviews, and I have no idea why they're so hilarious to me. That said, I can't remember the exact details, but I seem to remember an experiment where people used coat hangers soldered together in lieu of an HDMI cable and found that it was practically the same quality. It's always funny to hear people brag about how much money they spent, though!
RCA cable. Been there, done that. Works for audio because it's just impedance and if you aren't running it very far, coat hanger is the shit. near zero impedance, big phat fuckin' conductors. HDMI, on the other hand, is a 20-conductor protocol: - 4 pins for USB (data hot, data cold, data power, data shield) - 9 pins for digital RGB and audio (hot, cold, ground x 3, all digital) - a couple pins for maintenance (hot plug detect etc) and copy protection (metadata, HDCP, etc) ...all of which sling data around at up to 18Gb/s. I make cable all day long. It ain't no thing. But HDMI is a not-fucking-around protocol. You gotta get everything to work right or it won't work at all. Flip side, of course, is that if it works at all, it works perfectly which means that if your $4 monoprice cable is getting the job done, a $1600 Audioquest cable will also get the job done. And nothing more.