DLP or LCD, plasma screens aren’t a very long-lasting technology. Unless you plan to ebay it in 2 years…
DLP or LCD, plasma screens aren’t a very long-lasting technology. Unless you plan to ebay it in 2 years…
Thats just bad information and good luck hanging a DLP over the fireplace.
ot
try this site www.plasmatvbuyingguide.com - it reviews both and has some recommendations etc . I ended up with a 42" Plasma and am happy
“The monster cables are really pretty remarkable. I still can’t believe it makes that big of a difference.”
That’s because it doesn’t. Monster cable is the biggest rip-off in consumer electronics. If you don’t believe me, google monster cable along with rip-off or scam or something and you should find plenty.
I’m an electrical engineer designing computers. The signals I deal with have amplitudes from 3.3 volts down to a few millivolts, and switch at frequencies of ten’s of megahertz up to a few gigahertz. Your stereo sends signals that carry audible content around 40 kilohertz - in other words, trivial frequency issues. The difference between cheap and expensive cable in most cases will be cheap cable has higher resistive losses, higher dielectric losses, and less immunity to radiated emmissions (noise). Resistive losses are basically a “don’t care” because this will only degrade the amplitude of the signal and will be more or less constant for all frequencies up to 40KHz, so you can compensate for not having monster cable by turning your volume dial a billionth of an inch clockwise. Dielectric losses will be virtually nothing at 40Khz, these effects are only significant in the MHz and GHz ranges. Noise immunity can be different assuming the cables are constructed differently (coax vs a parallel pair for example). However, the noise picked up by your wires will mostly be higher frequency (filtered out by the speaker or input) or very low amplitude compared to the signal level of your stereo equipment. The best equipment in my lab might be able to measure a difference, but your ear never will. That’s why “stereo review” and the likes always describe the differences in imprecise terms, ie the music sounded “sweeter” or “smooth”, fact is there is no difference except in your imagination. There is so much bullsh*t out there from cable vendors…cables that supposedly need a “break in period”, lower skin effect losses, cables that have eliminated dielectric losses (which were insigificant in the first place), etc. Anyone that buys $500 cables has simply been scammed. I’ve never seen a single double blind study where anyone was able to actually detect the expensive cable from the free-be’s that come with the unit.
Although one time a guy at a store “demo’d” the difference to me on an HDTV. I was amazed that I could actually tell a bit of difference. Then I looked at how he had the test wired…the “cheap” cable was wired to the composite input of the TV, while the “expensive” cable was wired to the componet video inputs (3 video inputs vs 1). What a scam. Monster cable is probably their biggest profit item, that’s why it is always pushed at you.
The only benefit is usually the connectors have better plating on them and may be more durable, but this isn’t usually much of an issue and certainly not worth the price difference. Buy cheap cables and put the money towards something with tangible benefits like carbon aerobars (joke).
Are you sure we are not long lost brothers? I ditched the tv a few years back. Now I get disgusted every time I happen to see a sitcom on at a neighbours house - in particular, the required laugh tracks in attempt to make something funny just shows how shitty the show is otherwise. It is also hysterical getting glimpses of the news and watching the anchor people influence the audience reaction by making facial expressions or changing the tone of their voice. Pure crap! I only began to notice these things about tv after I had removed myself from it for a few years.
Sorry for going on a tangent. I read that you should stay away from plasma tv’s because eventually the quality diminishes and it is neccessary to refurbish it which apparently costs alot of money. LCD’s are the way to go and will last many many years. (All this information coming from a non-tv watcher 
)
And that is why I am so going to mis Arrested Developement. Best show on TV.
I wonder who is actually watching TV these days? They say, that many still are in record numbers. That kids are watching TV in record numbers. And clearly advertisers are still parting with millions and millions of dollars to keep the whole thing running. However, an anectdotal and casual poll of family and friends finds that people have just about no time at all for TV. Indeed, many in my circle of friends have done what I have done - got rid of the cable TV and pretty much forgotton about it.
Fleck
People seem to find the time for tv no matter how busy life gets.
In all honesty I feel the opposite to you in that everyone I hear is talking about being a regular watcher of reality tv shows.
Fleck and Adrian,
Out of curiosity, why did you give up TV? And by giving up TV, do you mean that you no longer watch broadcast TV, or that you no longer even own a TV for the purposes of watching DVDs, etc.? Also, what other published media have you given up? For instance, the Internet apparently made the cut. I am always interested in why people make absolute choices.
By the way, I have given up TV, too…for Tivo (and Netflix). I only watch “realtime” TV for sporting events.
Garth
Oh boy, don’t get me started on the virtues of a good two-channel stereo. I too gave up cable TV a while ago, and instead upgraded my stereo. The only thing I will add in this thread is that if you like Monster cable, you have got to try Nordost. Best audio cable out there. The high-end cable products are ridiculous, but certain brands at the entry level make a worthy upgrade. I won’t address Dapper Dan except to say that you neglected to mention impedance and the audible spectrum runs from 20-20 khz.
well, yeah, you can’t hang a DLP over the fireplace, but unless you spend significant $$$ a plasma screen won’t be lasting that long (a year or two) before you start noticing that colors are becoming washed out and/or the brightness is lower etc. etc.
Have a look at a plasma screen set up in shops that have been there a while, a store in my town has had the same two plasmas up for about a year and a half and they are looking like crap now, washed out like there’s no tomorrow.
Plasmas are nice, but when I buy a TV I want to be able to enjoy it for 5-10 years, that’s why I personally would go CRT first by far (despite the huge weight/size), then DLP, then LCD.
amen!
I can’t believe the crap the supposed ‘audiophiles’ talk when coming about cables and interconnects, things that have absolutely 0 grounding in science but are pure marketspeak. I am an electronic engineer and I really can’t stand the snake oil they are peddling…
NOBODY has ever proved with any sort of reliability in a double-blind A-B test that ‘monster’ or ‘premium’ cables sound any better than home depot 10-12 gauge wire (assuming it’s been soldered properly).
Heck, some people are saying they hear a difference when using expensive interconnects for DIGITAL connections, come on!
You are probably talking about some crappy brand older plasmas that have never been calibrated, left in torch mode and run for 24hrs/day. Frankly, your anecdotal evidence is pretty meaningless and I hope isn’t the basis for your claims that “plasma colors fade”.
Do some research before posting things that are not true (avsforum.com is a great place to get real information). New, quality plasmas are 60,000hrs to half brightness! That is CRT level…and they will look great far beyond how long it’ll be before they get replaced by some newer technology.
ot
Yeah, 20-20K has been used for a long time as audible spectrum, but with some of the newer equipment (DVD-AUDIO, SACD) they run higher sampling rates (96K I think it is), so you could argue there is higher frequency content information at the component level. The 40K has no logic behind it really, 44K sample rate in CD’s is all. I personally don’t think I can hear a difference above 17K or so. In any case, it is all low frequency.
Well, despite all the techno-speak, I just popped in a DVD and switched cables back and forth between my HDMI cable and the set that came with my upconverting DVD, asked both my daughter and wife to pick out if one sounded different, and if so which one, and they both said it was very noticable and easy to tell. I agree. Sure it’s anecdotal, but the anecdotal evidence in my living room is worth a 1000 ST posts about what works and what doesn’t.
As for plasmas burning out, most have a shelf life well over 15000 hours. If you are watching more than 15000 hours of TV in 5 years, you have serious issues…
I’ve had my setup a year, and love it. Watching a special on Yellowstone right now (commercial break actually) with my daughter, in high-def. Outstanding shoe, outstanding picture and sound. Dis if you want to, but I’m heading back to enjoy the hell out of it.
A little bit of a hijack…
Monster guitar cables are pretty widely regarded to be high-priced rip-offs, yet not surprisingly the are heavily pushed at your local Guitar Center.
Still, serious player swear that high quality cables are a must for retaining their tone, esp. when using 3-10 effects pedals in between thw guitar and aplifier - do think from your experience those claims have some merit?
If you’re an electrical engineer, then I surely hope you wrote that note with your tongue firmly planted on your cheek.
Have you ever used a time-domain reflectometer? Have you ever measured cables? The wire material makes a difference, the inner jacket, the dielectric, the outer jacket, the insulation, the shielding, the grounding, the termination, the solder, the soldering technique… they all make a huge difference, one we can easily measure every day in our lab.
By the way, I hope you’re aware of a big difference between computer wires and the ones used in hi-fi systems: the ones in computers deal with milli-amp currents, some audio power amplifiers can swing 100 amps.
Yes, cables make a quantitative difference; whether you can hear these differences or not is another issue (but you would be surprised to learn how sensitive the ear is in picking extremely subtle differences that we can barely quantify).
John
P.S. Plasma or LCD? Have no idea – don’t have a TV set myself.
Absolutely not tongue in cheek. I use TDR’s and VNA’s all the time. I’ve spec’ed cables and designed cables for sending small signals at 100’s of MHZ and GHz frequencies, I do it every day.
Sounds to me like you are in the audio equipment business. No doubt your opinions are heavily influenced by the marketing (with it’s pseudo techno babble) that drowds the industry in misinformation.
A TDR uses a rise time of about 50ps to measure the impedance profile of a transmission line, audio waves have a rise time of about 50 microseconds. The reflections and losses visible under a TDR have little relevence to such slow signals. If I did my math right, at 20KHz the wavefront is going to be 3750 meters long (ie, it would take 15000 meters of cable to fit a complete wave in). This means that it takes about 1/6th or 625 meters of cable before the cable begins to look like a transmission line and have reflections, etc. Until then, terminations, impedence mismatches, etc are irrelivent. By the way, some cables claim to eliminate standing waves! Yeah, if the cable is 7500 meters long that might be important!
The amount of current being used only makes my point stronger! If you were dealing with very small signals, then noise immunity, dielectirc losses (the type of insulation), etc become more important. As you have larger voltages and currents, the signal to noise ratio makes these irrelivent.
A-B comparisons are very hard to perform for such a small difference.
This I am an expert at, neither. Look at projectors for less money. I have about $80K into home theater, room not included - look at Runco projectors.
Sorry I couldn’t read all the other responses, but as someone who used to work for a LCD manufacturer, I can say that right now, it’s pretty much like buying a bike. There are older more “established” lines (plasma), but new technology (LCD) is catching up VERY fast (I would consider most in production now to be VERY comparable to plasmas). By Christmas, because Hitachi has built a new plant in Asia that can cut glass on sheets that are MUCH larger than the old ones, prices on LCD’s will drop quite a bit. I wouldn’t be surprised to see VERY high end LCD TV’s below the price of plasmas by the end of the year.
With that said, depending on how much you watch TV (this is where the burn in issue can become involved), you can get good deals on plasmas right now, and they definitely aren’t any WORSE than LCD’s.
Of course, unless you watch ALOT of movies, or plan on getting high def cable (which rocks…now if only OLN would broadcast in high def this July ;-), you may actually be disappointed in the picture quality compared to your regular tube TV. Out in So.Cal, the major networks are now broadcasting in High Def during prime time, but outside of the that, you get HBO, Showtime, ESPN, Discovery Channel, and a couple of freebies. Of course, they jack the rates to get ESPN and Discovery (Discovery Channel I believe has more high def footage than anyone else in the world) - although I wouldn’t pay for it. I bought the regular high def package, and because of the stronger signal, my regular ESPN looks fantastic as well.
So, go look at them, see which ones have the whiter whites (this is about the simplest way without going nuts trying to disseminate all the technical jargon - which is not consistent between companies anyway), which ones appear to have the best picture, style, and price.
Then enjoy…