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Bloggit's Journal - Chain Stores and Noose Pricing

About Chain Stores and Noose Pricing

Previous Entry Chain Stores and Noose Pricing Nov. 20th, 2007 @ 07:18 am Next Entry
I hadn't been in a Circuit City in years. Hadn't been to Best Buy except to buy printer ink in several years also. My last experience involved a salesman being rude to me when I didn't buy his spiel on cellphones... a topic regular readers will realize I'm pretty much an uber-expert on.

So anyhow, I bought a new receiver this weekend. A Denon AVR 3808ci to replace my seven-year-old Denon AVR 3300. This provides much newer technology, 7.1 rather than 5.1, video switching, and most importantly, should eliminate a low-frequency throbbing on some soundtracks - not sure if my AVR3300 developed a problem or simply isn't properly recognizing some modern signals, but hopefully the new receiver won't have it.

Attached to this is my Denon DVD-2910 DVD player. Plus some new Definitive Technology bipolar surrounds to mate to my other DefTech bipolar surrounds, DefTech BP7004 mains and DefTech CLR2300 center. If a game plan is working, stick with it.

The AVR 3808ci can up-vert component video to HDMI, simplifying the switching of sources. Prior to the new acquisition, changing from watching the Dish to watching DVD required changing sources on both the TV, for video, and the AVR3300, for audio. Now all of the switching is on the AVR3808ci, which passes any appropriate video to the TV over HDMI. This is great.

Unfortunately, the Component conversion loses a bit, relative to going to the Panasonic plasma, on SD (low resolution) TV. It just doesn't convert it quite the same. HD seems pretty close even with the conversion, perhaps with a bit of motion pixellation, but the Panasonic did great up-sampling for SD. The only reason I was using Component for the Dish anyhow was that Component and HDMI are essentially equal in quality, though different in approach, and the Panny plasma only had a single HDMI input... which now is enough.

So off to buy a two-metre HDMI cable.

Most of my really long cables came from MonoPrice.com. Excellent quality cables, aggressive prices for everything including for both HDMI 1.3 and basic HDMI starting under $5 for six feet. But add shipping and you've added $6 to the part and three days minimum waiting. Blue Jeans Cable is also excellent, but they have the same flaws plus they accept PayPal (or you can send a fax!) However, 2-metre CL2-grade HDMI cables run $9-12 at both places, and a two-metre HDMI 1.3 CL2 is only $15 at MonoPrice. (HDMI 1.3 requires far higher bandwidth test passing than HDMI 1.2.)

Okay, off to the local stores to see how much extra I have to pay. I figured I'd pay $30 - in other words, about double the cost-plus-shipping for a basic cable - just to get it quickly. But that wasn't to be.

Best Buy only carries their own captive brand of cable, called something like Dynex. (Rocketfish is another Best Buy captive brand; Best Buy apparently doesn't allow profit-margin competition in their stores!) Dynex HDMI cables are $60 for 2 metres! (the web-site discount price isn't offered in the store.) And it's not HDMI 1.3 even at that price.

Circuit City has a variety of cables, but again starting at $69 for 8 feet, and again, NexxTech is a Circuit City brand. (No cheap six-footers and no price-competition from real brands.) Up to $139 for a "five-times-shielded" MonsterCable. Wow!

Clearly these chains make a lot of money off of cables. And even worse, people are buying something they don't need. HDMI is digital and electric. Five-times-shielding isn't going to help you. One faraday cage is sufficient, and "success" is boolean (either you have it or not), so after getting to a good signal point, additional shielding... or gold or green felt-tip pen or Tweak connection enhancer - can't make any difference.

Uggah. No wonder the chain stores are losing money and going down.
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