It's called SCIENCE sweaty

Yes.

It's also for digital signals, so interference doesn't matter (up to the point it stops everything).

But hey, it also has a silver ABS grip.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I would think it’s to resist corrosion, but there are plenty of cheaper metals to plate with that don’t corrode, so even that’s a stretch.

Or, you know, plastic.

But how many people do you think he used that line on and it sealed the deal?

It's for those occasions when there's a black hole passing through your house. Gotta be prepared.

I used to sell TVs for Best Buy back in the day. The Video Department manager, my boss, set up a display side by side to show the difference between $40 Monster cables and the normal cables that came with a DVD player.

When there was no noticable difference, he went into the TV settings and adjusted the settings for the normal cables to make the picture look like shit. Not all customers are that gullible though, so usually one of the more savvy ones would fix the settings. So my boss would have to go in and fuck the settings up again once or twice a shift.

To be fair, it was 4 coat hangers. The Monster cable was therefore outnumbered.

That's a classic and I am glad it see it passed around again. The best part is the people that start delving into the snake oil absurdity that is "audiophile cables" before, you know, getting better actual speakers/headphones. Like for fucks sake, your $200 fancy cable isn't going to make your bullshit bargain bookshelf speaker into the voice of god. Just get some half way decent equipment and listen to your actual music.

This is a classic.

A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore "prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal".

So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.

Installing cable TV at a man's house, ripped his Monster coax connector off. He was appalled! (I was appalled!) Showed him what I was replacing it with. Parts guide.

"The shield is quad-woven steel. Yours was 1x of angel hair copper. The dielectric is solid, not a noodle. See? (bendy, bendy) Foil shield? Uh, did yours have one? Oh, I see the shredded bit right there!"

Bent the center conductor on his Monster cable with my pinky. "Try that with mine." Stopped him before he hypodermic-needled himself.

tl;dr: Whatever the cable guy cuts for you is miles above Monster grade.

It's like Yeti gear. "So you paid $35 for a cup that's simply a vacuum sealed canister? I got a 6-pack off Amazon for $25. Cute colors too!"

FWIW toslink supports up to 125mbps theoretically

Much lower in practice of course, but it's a bit better than 128k

It's actually anti-lock breaking system, super high end; not many cables have it

https://xkcd.com/641/

You are correct; the point of gold plated contacts is anti-corrosion and long service life not for absolute highest conductivity.

I'm a ham radio operator; I have some silver-plated antenna connectors, because antenna feedlines are dealing with extremely weak signals on receive, so any loss you can eliminate in the connector the better. Problem is they corrode to hell everywhere they aren't tightly screwed together. For consumer AV equipment the signals are basically never weak enough to bother with that.

I would think most audiophiles know this?

They're not marketing to audiophiles. They're marketing to dudes and dads. They aren't trying to get the guy hooking a manual turntable up to a tube amplifier, they're trying to get the guy attaching a PS5 to an LG TV to a Sonos soundbar. They're going for the guy who is spending middle class money on AV equipment without bothering to understand it.

Wish I'd thought of it.

Septendecupleprice