Originally posted by: zion
Anyway, I have to justify spending $40 on a couple of THX certified Monster composite cables somehow, right?

Heh, heh! Yeah, I'll allow you that. There's no doubt MC makes a nice product, and I wouldn't cripple my otherwise-awesome home theatre with junky $2 cables, either.

For LD capping, though, the way I think about it is, How much better do you think the picture could be because of good cables? One percent? Let's assume you could see that difference with a nice, sharp DVD source. I'd say 1% is actually generous; I think that amount of difference would be pretty apparent, yet a lot of people bicker back and forth about whether cables really make a visible difference. So it could be less than that. But let's say it's 1%, and just visible with a good DVD source.

Now, how much worse than a DVD source is LD? I'd say at least 10%; probably more. You've got luma and chroma stored together (i.e. composite), you've got no anamorphism, you've got picture noise inherent in the format, you've got dot crawl and comb filter issues. Even making an LD, you'd be working from an analog tape (albeit a high-quality one), so you're going to have generational losses just to get the thing onto LD. So maybe that 10% is underestimating things somewhat.

Compare the probably-less-than-1% improvement with the probably-more-than-10% degradation in "reference" signal you're comparing, and you're looking at the cable maybe contributing up to 1/11th of the general crappiness of the picture. I think that puts the cable's importance way down there someplace. Its positive effect probably falls below the measurement (in this case, capping) error of the measuring device (in this case, the cap card).

I could be wrong in some of my estimates, but that's about how I see it.

Now, all bets are off if there is significant noise coming from outside sources! There I'd imagine the MC cable's improved shielding, etc., would eliminate a large quantity of outside noise, which itself could conceivably add substantially to the picture quality degradation. So there you could be looking at the cable eliminating 75% of the source of, say, 10% of the noise, for an overall improvement of about 8%.

Which I have to say, I would pursue.