I made a joke on my most recent episode of Handy Tech Under 100, where I said,
all the items will be priced at over $100, and none of them are going to be useful.
So we're going to kick things off then with the Apple Watch, which, I'm just kidding.
It's the usual thing.
And then literally hundreds of you were clearly full of disappoint.
I mean, I can't think of another reason to dislike that video.
So I decided to follow up with a new segment devoted to legitimately crappy stuff that costs more than $100.
Welcome to Useless Tech Over 100, Episode 1, featuring the Wireworld Starlight Platinum 7, a $1,000 HDMI cable.
Cooler Master's new Master Keys Pro-L and Pro-S keyboards provide 16.7 million color RGB backlighting,
genuine Cherry MX switches.
And an industry-leading ARM Cortex processor.
Learn more at the link in the video description.
So why did I spend this kind of money on a cable?
Because while it's all fine and good to know that premium cables are pure nonsense for digital connections,
because the internet said so,
I felt like before taking shots at Wireworld specifically, or the premium cable industry in general,
I owed it to my viewers and to myself, given that I'm the proud owner of this cable,
to at least try it.
With an open mind, and give them a chance to wow me.
Let's start then with Wireworld's side of the story.
At the entry level, you're already getting double the number of signal conductors.
They call this their Symmetricon design, versus a round HDMI cable that has a mere 12 signal conductors.
You're getting their HD grip plug, including silver with gold-plated contacts,
which is very nice feeling, by the way, and the conductor used is 28 gauge OFC, or oxygen-free copper.
It's of debatable importance for audio-visual applications, given its identical conductivity to regular copper,
but hey, it costs more, so at least they're taking your money and spending it on more expensive materials to build the cable you're buying,
rather than just lighting their cigars with it.
That's somewhat noble.
As you step up to the Chroma series, you get thicker gauge wires and...
What?
Amazing visual clarity?
Is this of the cable?
I mean, does it come with a pair of reading glasses, so I can see it better?
Maybe this one's not.
This one is just about the colors, because it does say, right on the Island 7 cable description,
that you can enjoy all, their words, not mine, of the performance benefits with the entry-level one.
But that doesn't prevent the higher-end ones from existing, so moving on, the Ultraviolet series,
now you're getting silver-plated OFC conductors,
which will provide you with an immediate improvement to your listening and viewing experience, apparently.
But probably not as much as the Starlight 7, which increases wire gauge to
23 AWG, and adds another eight silver-plated OFC conductors,
in Wireworld's patented DNA helix design that twists the conductors around each other.
I mean, hey, if it's good enough for DNA, it's good enough to forex the number of efficient paths for electromagnetic energy, right?
The Silver Starlight 7 adds a thicker layer of silver over the copper cables, and promises vibrant color and exquisite sound quality,
but I mean, come on.
If you're gonna get the Silver Starlight 7,
you might as well spring for the big kahuna.
The Platinum Starlight 7 includes all the benefits of the previously mentioned designs,
but opts to use carbon fiber plug-ins and
solid silver conductors in place of copper, which sounds like you're getting a killer value.
I mean, effectively,
24 meters of silver wire in this one.
That is until you actually look up the cost of 23 gauge silver wire, and realize that the bomb cost of this entire package that
you receive,
including the admittedly attractive carrying case and printed signed certificate of authenticity,
is around a hundred US dollars and change.
But, if everything in life was as simple as covering the bill of materials cost,
then we'd all be paying four to six bucks for dinner at a fancy restaurant.
So labor and patented technologies, assuming they deliver a tangible value, do justify spending more sometimes.
Which leads me, finally, to my test.
I sat down,
in front of my curved 4k OLED TV from LG, tried first the random cable that I stole from the office,
then a wire world one, and it did not observe any difference in image or sound quality.
But then it hit me. I only have one wire world cable.
That means that between my computer and the receiver, I'm still using a standard quality cable,
effectively bottlenecking the data flow. So I needed a new test.
There are a couple of situations where high
quality cables have made a difference for me in the past.
Long runs, where red mirror HDMI cables have saved my buns, and
high refresh rate DisplayPort monitors, where flaky cables have caused intermittent display blanking issues.
Since I wasn't about to spend another
$9,000 to test long-distance, I settled on the latter. For my first test,
I used the cheapest, you know, bundled in the monitor box, one meter cable I could find. Truly horrendous.
And I managed to successfully overclock the 50 Hertz 3440 by 1440 ultra-wide display to 61 Hertz.
A fair result, but nothing amazing.
So I followed that up then with a $10 or so retail cable that I purchased a while back.
And no improvement. 61 Hertz. Looks like if it works, it works. At least for basic cables.
So finally then, and with a lot more anticipation than I actually expected,
I plugged in,
the Platinum Starlight 7 silver cable, and
was disappointed.
61 Hertz. I was actually rooting for it after reading so much about how their design and materials improve signal integrity.
Which I guess leads us to the conclusion.
While I'm sure that someone will be happy to point out some kind of a flaw in my testing methodology,
like that the HDMI ports on my video card or the processor in my monitor might be bottlenecking this magnificent cable,
but here's a newsflash for you.
HDMI ports are not like cars, where everyone has to have a steering wheel and an engine,
but can pretty much find their own way to roll it down the road.
They are built according to a rigid standard to ensure interoperability and support for all the cool features like stereo 3D, deep color,
multi-channel audio, Ethernet, 4k, etc, etc, etc. And if the processor in a 1440p
100 Hertz monitor and an NVIDIA video card,
in this case a GTX Titan X, remember, NVIDIA is one of the only devices that I'm aware of that offers
manufacturer-supported display link overclocking.
Can't take advantage of this cable. The only conclusion that I can draw is that nothing can.
I didn't break out an oscilloscope or anything like that.
That would have been super cool and may have actually revealed the 6% conductivity improvement between solid copper and solid silver.
But what I wanted to know was whether it makes a
real difference, even a small one, 62 Hertz would have been good enough, to a person rather than a machine, and the answer is
no.
Speaking of whatever I was talking about on that day,
I recorded this video when I was supposed to be in the office,
Massdrop.com. If you're not familiar with Massdrop, guys,
it's the site that takes the deals that their community requests and goes to the manufacturers or the authorized distributors and
sources them, not just sources them, but at a better price. And the more people buy,
the better it gets. But Massdrop does more than just that these days. In fact, they've started doing some exclusive deals,
including the Fostex TH-X00 headphones that I reviewed a little while ago back there.
But this is different this time. This is the TH-X00 with a different type of wood.
Gone is the mahogany and in is the Purple Heart or
Peltagene wood, which basically gives it a darker aesthetic, and
also slightly changes the sound signature, giving it a little bit less kick in the lows,
but a little bit more clarity in the highs, according to Massdrop. I haven't actually listened to these personally.
They are available for $4.49 on Massdrop. They have already reached the lowest drop, and they've sold over
1,100 pairs so far, but that doesn't mean that you can just wait around, because there's only
2,000 available and just a couple of days left in the drop. So check out the deal over at DrawedUps.com
slash Linus. We've got that linked in the
video description.
Thanks for watching. Guys, if you hated this video, hit the dislike button.
But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at
Amazon. Don't buy these cables, by the way, please.
Buy a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum, which is linked in the video description.
Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering, hmm, what should I watch next?
Well, maybe check out Channel Super Fun, where we've got this video over there that I guarantee you is worth watching.
That's assuming that you haven't already.