Cable talk with Monster Cable's "Little Monster"
Dolby Podcast Episode 13, April 26, 2007
Expert advice on HDMI cables, cable length, optical versus coaxial connections for your digital audio, power conditioners and surround sound music recordings from Kevin Lee, the Little Monster of Monster Cable company. Plus Listener, Joey, gets an HD DVD player recommendation for his Sony STRDG800 AV receiver, which can't take audio through the HDMI.
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Mentioned in this Episode
Jack Buser: Hello, and welcome to Dolbycast —the insider's guide to entertainment technology from the experts at Dolby Laboratories. I'm Jack Buser.
Craig Eggers: And I'm Craig Eggers.
Jack: And we're here to give you the straight talk on everything you need to please your ears.
Craig: Hey Jack.
Jack: Hey Craig.
Craig: Do you realize this is our 13th podcast?
Jack: Uh oh.
Craig: I don't know if that's good or bad.
Jack: Is that good or bad?
Craig: My father was born on the 13th and he always claimed to be lucky.
Jack: Is that right?
Craig: Yeah, so maybe we can borrow some of his karma or something.
Jack: Well, maybe this is our lucky episode. [laughs]
Craig: So, before we introduce our guest, and he's a very special guest, we want to get to our listener mail.
Jack: That is true. We've got a great question today. And actually we've been getting lots of mail lately. The mailbox is about to explode. As always, we try to answer everybody's question. We can't physically do that, but we're going to try. This is a good question. Craig, why don't you hit it?
Craig: Well, special shout out to... "Hey, Jack and Craig heard your podcast from the Home Theater Guys, the HT Guys. "
Jack: Very cool. And we were on the H... That was very cool.
Craig: We were on HT Guys. We're going to have them on our show very shortly too. [The HT Guys were in two episodes of Dolbycast: “ HD Shoptalk with the HT Guys, Part One ” and “ HD Shoptalk with the HT Guys, Part Two ” in June 2007. –Ed.]
Jack: Any of our listeners that have not heard that podcast, the HDTV Podcast, please check it out. It's very, very cool.
Craig: Definitely. So, this is from Joey, we're not going to say his last name, but Joey says, "Heard your podcast from the Home Theater Guys and really started enjoying yours too." So, we got a new fan.
Jack: Alright.
Craig: That's cool.
Jack: Well, welcome to the family.
Craig: Keep it up. "Here's my question, I'm going to be purchasing a next generation DVD player one of these days, and I'm thinking about the Toshiba HDA2. "
Jack: Good choice.
Craig: "One of the reasons I'm excited about next generation players is the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD." There's a fan.
Jack: There you go. Alright.
Craig: "But in reading a description of the Toshiba player it said, 'The optical digital output will transfer the Dolby Digital, DTS, and down converted version of the Dolby Digital Plus, and TrueHD signals.' The receiver in my home is a Sony STRDG800 and can't take audio through the HDMI. "
So basically he's asking, how can I get the true impact of TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus on these next generation formats with his Sony AV receiver?
Jack: Well, your problem there is that you're looking at the wrong player. Now, I'm not saying that that's not a great player. That's a great player for somebody who has an HDMI-capable receiver.
What you're going to want to do, we actually looked up your receiver there on the internet, and we found that not only does it have TOSLINK optical S/PDIF input, but it does also have multi-channel analog input. So, that means if you want to get the full impact of the next generation audio formats, you're going to want to make sure you find a next generation player with multi-channel analog output.
Craig: And decoding inside the player.
Jack: Exactly right. And of course, you're going to want to make sure you get a player with Dolby TrueHD, multi-channel decoding inside the player.
Craig: Precisely.
Jack: And it won't hurt to have Dolby Digital Plus multi-channel decoding either.
Craig: Oh, yeah.
Jack: Right? So, since you won't be able to pass those signals decoded, or even pass the signals undecided over your S/PDIF output, you want to make sure you decode in the player, then pass the decoded audio through the multi-channel analog out to your receiver.
Craig: OK.
Jack: And this is a great idea, and we've talked about this before on the podcast. This is a great idea for anybody who has an older receiver, maybe a receiver that's not HDMI capable. This is a great way, if not the best way, to connect these next generation players if you don't have HDMI.
Craig: So Jack, he's talking about the HDA2. That doesn't have the multi-channel analog audio outputs.
Jack: That's right. So, we recommend actually the HDXA2, which is the step-up player from the HDA2. And it does have multi-channel analog outputs on the player. It'll decode Dolby Digital Plus as well as Dolby TrueHD. You should be good to go.
Craig: Bass management is also built into the player. And that's really essential if you're using the external audio inputs on the back of the AV receiver.
Jack: That is very true.
Craig: Make sure, especially if you have a satellite surround system, make sure that your player offers bass management.
Jack: That's true. And I will add one other thing. If you are doing a multi-channel analog connection, since we have a special guest here in house, it behooves me to say that you should probably make sure you have some pretty nice cables connecting the two.
Craig: You might want to use some nice cables for that.
Jack: You might want to use some nice cables.
Craig: And just for a point of reference, you used the phrase S/PDIF, which is kind of an industry phrase.
Jack: That's true. I have to clarify that.
Craig: So, let's clarify that for our listeners.
Jack: S/PDIF, Sony Philips Digital Interface. And essentially it looks like that little optical wire, most of the time. It's the one that shines the little red light out of it. It can also be coaxial cable. It looks just like half of a little stereo RCA cable, if you will. So, S/PDIF can either be optical or coaxial.
And it was really the standard for standard, I guess, for standard DVD video digital audio. So, Dolby Digital on standard definition DVD would be carried over these S/PDIF optical or coaxial wires.
For next generation there's just not enough bandwidth on that wire to carry Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby TrueHD. So that's why we've stepped it up to either multi-channel analog or, especially if you can do it, HDMI.
Craig: And I should also say if you have a legacy AV receiver and you don't have the multi-channel inputs, the cool thing about the XA2 that you mentioned, is that it does have a Dolby Digital compatible output. So you can send a 640 kilobit per second high resolution Dolby Digital signal from that player to your connected AVR and still get a great audio experience.
Jack: That's right. It's down converted, but it's down converted to 640 kilobits a second Dolby Digital, which is actually better than the Dolby Digital you found on DVD, so it should still sound better.
Craig: Exactly.
Jack: It's just not going to give you the full impact as if you could do the HDMI or multi-channel analog connection.
Craig: So, we're getting pinged already by Scott the engineer. Move on, move on, and move on. You're talking too much. Get to the guest. Get to the guest.
Jack: Now you know everything. Craig, why don't you have the honors... Actually, you know what we should do? Go to a little break.
Craig: Let's do that.
Jack: And when we come why don't you do the introduction.
Craig: Excellent.
Jack: Sounds good.
[music]
Announcer: Jack and Craig would love to answer your questions. Email them at dolbycast@dolby.com.
Craig: And we are back at Dolbycast. It gives me great pleasure to introduce our next guest, a friend of mine for many, many years, Mr. Kevin Lee—the Little Monster from Monster Cable, Incorporated. Welcome to Dolbycast, Kevin.
Kevin Lee: Hey Craig, how are you? And Jack, pleasure to see you again.
Jack: Good to see you again. It's great having you here at Dolby. Both of us are a part of a Bay Area company, so it's always good to work with you guys.
Kevin: Bay Area born companies, got to love that.
Jack: That's right.
Craig: So, when I'm driving down 280 and by the 280/101 split, I see this sign that says " Monster Park ". You guys have anything to do with that?
Kevin: Yeah, yeah, that's us. That's us, Monster Cable are the ones who named Monster Park. And Craig, you got to come and watch a football game with us this season.
Craig: Well, are you going to have a contender this year? I mean, is Monster Park going to become a national thing on television because maybe...
Kevin: Craig, stop that. We're going for the playoffs this year.
[laughing]
Craig: OK.
Jack: That's right.
Kevin: We're Monster Park, and our players have got monster attitudes, so we're there.
Jack: That's right. Well listen, it's so good to have you in. So many of our listener questions, including today's questions, are about cabling and about connections. So Craig had the great idea a few weeks ago, "Hey, why don't we get the experts on cables in here to really clarify all the different wiring and cabling issues that people might have out there." So, thanks so much for coming in.
Craig: Truly.
Kevin: It's a pleasure to be here.
Jack: Absolutely. So Craig, why don't you kick it off with a little bit of HDMI?
Craig: Well Kevin, I know one of the issues in front of the industry is HDMI - there are so many different versions, there's HDMI 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, we talk about it often. The fact is that when you go into retail, you're not even hearing about those versions, you're probably hearing about feature sets and performance capability. Why don't you give us a little bit of an overview of what an HDMI cable does, the benefits it brings, the types of performance it can offer?
Kevin: Well at the top level, HDMI is a fantastic connection because it does offer high-definition picture qualities amongst different scales, high-definition audio that you guys are providing, and that is identifiable as a single cable connection, because we provide a lot of different wires, and it's really nice that a customer can hook up one cable, and get audio, digital, and all that...
Craig: And we should say that that's a digital connection.
Kevin: And a digital connection, in extreme hi-def in resolution, whatever you want to call it. But it also comes with the copy protection that allows us to marry with the entertainment studio so that you get all of the content that everybody wants...
Jack: That's a good point - now we haven't talked about that before, which is that it is a copy-protected connection, so that's actually very good, because really for the first time in the living room, we're able to get both digital audio and digital video over a single cable, in the living room.
Kevin: And it's easy to do technically - it's not easy to do industrially with getting all the parties on the same page, so that's a big achievement by a lot of the folks that have founded the HDMI connection, but a lot of the - kind of what you referred to - the confusion that's happening amongst all of the consumers that are trying to attach this up is that there's been a progression of video quality over a long period of time, and a progression of audio quality over a long period of time, but never ever before have we seen that progression escalate in the last year or two years as we have with digital audio-video connections and HDMI. There have been 5 different specifications HDMI since HDMI 1.0 which was probably about 18 months ago...
Jack: Hasn't been that long!
Kevin: Hasn't been that long at all, and a lot of it is with real performance issues, so with the 1.0, really supported what the primary - I'd say the beginning of high-definition TV that reaches consumers, so you have a satellite box or a digital cable box, and out is an HD signal that's in 720p, 1080i and I'm sure it supports Dolby Digital as well.
But now fast forward to today with all of the high-definition formats out there like Blu-ray, HD DVD and Dolby TrueHD, and you need a bandwidth that's 4 or 5 - 10 times the size of that, and there's new specification because of that, like HDMI 1.2 - and it's not just 1.2, it's also 1.2a and 1.2 category b, and 1.3 and there's a whole bunch of things out there.
So the good thing is that the technology is there for the consumer - the downside is a little bit of confusion over what's going out there.
The message, though, I'd say is that what you want to do is make sure - whether it's (and I know Craig said no plugs, and I'm not here to plug Monster), whether it's Monster or some other high-quality cable manufacturer, make sure you're going to get the best performing cable out there that has - and the key here is 2 things: one is extreme bandwidth, so right now, to get geeky a little bit, 2.2-3 gigabits is what 1080i and 720p is and that's what HDMI 1.0 spec was about.
Now with 1.3, you're talking about 4.46 gigabits and beyond. When that progresses with the new displays that are coming out at the end of this year, that are not 60 hertz, but 120 hertz, that are having the ability to do 10-bit color, like the PS3 today can be 12 bit color. That's going to go to bandwidth requirements beyond 10.2 gigabits, beyond even the current specifications.
Craig: So that was actually the question that I was going to give you a hard time with, which is HDMI - right - we're talking about all digital. Does the quality of the cable really matter when it comes to HDMI because we're dealing with digital?
Kevin: So I would say the knee-jerk reaction is "well it's digital, it doesn't really matter, " but if you ask the audiophiles, we knew a long time ago - from the transition from albums to CDs, between fiber-optic audio and digital coaxial, there are differences in digital. It's not 1's and 0's - yes, if 1's and 0's got across from point A to point B perfectly, then we wouldn't have a problem.
But the problem is that you've got to go from point A to point B. Now digital is great if the bandwidth requirement is not high - it's pretty simple to deliver that information. But you take what we want to get today - which is a 1080p signal at 60 Hz, 8 bit color, feature 10/12 bit color and 120 Hz, you're talking a bandwidth that really stretches the limits of what a cable can do.
Jack: Huh, that's very interesting.
Kevin: So super-high frequency, super bandwidth means for instance - to get geeky on cable construction for a little bit - to make sure that that signal gets properly across point A to point B, all of the conductors have to be evenly linked. All of the spacing between the conductors as they're terminated has to be even.
Jack: Could you get errors otherwise?
Kevin: Errors - there's things like, and you could go on the forums and check out what words like " jitter " mean, and things like that.
Jack: We haven't talked about jitter before - what is jitter? Can you explain that?
Kevin: That's why I said you should go onto the forums, and find out what jitter means.
[laughter]
Jack: We actually - the guys back here in the studio - we've got a guy back here in the studio that knows jitter backwards and forwards, and I'm sure he could school us on it, and that sounds like a topic we should cover in one of our upcoming podcasts.
Kevin: Yeah, but it is one of the core things...
Jack: Something like the clock signal, the timing, something like that - we should definitely cover that...
Kevin: But the short of it is that an HDMI, high-performance HDMI signal requires a higher-quality construction cable, with very little tolerances to outside interference and things like that, and that's where folks like Monster come in.
Jack: So Kevin you guys are doing all kinds of cable. You're doing component video cable, you're doing S-Video cable, you've got iPod connectors, and you're doing HDMI. But you're also in another area of business, and that's power conditioners.
Kevin: That's right.
Craig: And the question that I have for you is: does electricity really get dirty that it needs to be cleaned up and conditioned? Tell me about power conditioners. Why is it important - if I've got a Class A home theatre system, why is it important for me to go out and buy a Monster power conditioner - or any power conditioner for that matter, to plug all my components into?
Kevin: Well because - you in fact do have dirty power, and if anyone wants to hear what dirty power sounds like, if you go to most of the national electronic retailers, they'll have a demonstration where you can actually hear the power in the wall, and where does the power noise come from?
Well it comes from your power company, it comes from your neighbor's house and what he's got, it comes from your own home - your air conditioners and refrigerating - and it even comes from your equipment rack. So noise from your TV goes into the noise of your DVD player. That's why good power conditioners actually have separation isolation banks inside a single power conditioner.
Jack: Every time we go to a trade show - I can tell you we have to wrestle our audio gear to the ground, because the power at a trade show is so noisy so messy, that we condition the heck out of the power - because you hear it, you see it! It's funny, I've got a little anecdote. A good friend of ours who works in the Japan office is very into high-end audio and power conditioning is like a passion of his. To the point where—you know your little wall jacks?
Craig: The wall plate?
Jack: The wall jack, yeah, but you know how there's the plate around it, the wall plate.
Craig: Yeah.
Jack: In Japan they actually sell premium wall plates. Not the actual jack that you plug things into in your wall, but the ceramic plate around there, for the ultimate audiophile. They'll sell you another plate for a couple hundred bucks.
Craig: Sounds like another opportunity for Kevin!
[laughter]
Jack: There you go, man! There you go!
Kevin: I'll be sure to put it on the product process.
Jack: Well, it's huge in Japan. They have huge display cases filled with wall plates. It's the strangest thing.
Craig: Jack, I was thinking, let's take a quick break here.
Jack: We should. And when we come back, we've got to ask the question we've been asking episode after episode. Which is: For the old TOSLINK output—optical or coaxial? We'll be right back.
[identification break]
Jack: And welcome back to Dolbycast Episode 13. We're here with the Little Monster talking about all things cable and we are going to settle, once and for all, the time-old dispute—is that even a phrase? Time-oldie?
Craig: Ages.
Jack: Ages-old dispute between optical and coaxial connections for your digital audio.
Craig: And we should remember that both of us stand on different sides of this issue, don't we, Jack?
Jack: We do. Kevin, settle it once and for all. If I'm connecting digital audio via S/PDIF—speed-if—do I use optical or coaxial for the best-sounding audio?
Craig: Kevin
Kevin: Well, I know both of you guys, I'm sure, have your long list of technical reasons why it's one or the other, but I am personally going with coax.
Jack and Craig: [laughing]
Craig: Kevin remembers his friends!
Kevin: Oh, is that you, Craig? Are you a coax kind of guy?
Craig: Yes, I am a coax kind of guy.
Kevin: Well, I don't know why you like coax, but here are my reasons. First of all, in the wire there are pros and cons; I'm not going to get into that. But I'm talking about the termination of that final connection, which is highly critical. And on a fiber-optic cable, the truth is you've got to cut a piece of plastic, then you've got to polish it off perfectly. And to the extent that you do that or don't do that, that affects the signal. Then you've got to get a connector, and you've got to put that connector inside the component. And as you guys have all experienced, sometimes that feels like a good connection and sometimes it doesn't.
Craig: Sometimes it falls out.
[laughter]
Kevin: Yeah, sometimes it falls out.
Jack: But does coaxial have that cool red laser? I don't think so.
Kevin: It doesn't have a cool red laser, but it's got a very good RCA connection on it and that works for me.
Jack: That is true.
Craig: Thank you, Kevin! Jack, I think that settles our little dispute, don't you?
Jack: Alright, I suppose it does.
Craig: Kevin one of the very cool things that Monster Cable's involved with, is teaching retailers and training retailers on the importance of music—surround music—in the home theater environment. I know that you've got a whole program where you go out and do a lot of training about surround music. And you have another program called "Monster Music."
Kevin: That's right. It comes back from our roots. My father and I have always been audiophile fans, music fans. We're also musicians. So we've been in a lot of live performances, as I'm sure you guys have.
Jack: What do you play?
Kevin: Drums. I'm a drummer.
Jack: Oh, that's right. Very cool.
Kevin: I've been in the middle of a band playing drums, so I know what it's like to be there and our passion brings us back to trying to promote the benefits of great sounding audio, as you guys have.
But here's what we've noticed: with all the attention around flat-screen and HDTV, that people have listened to their audio through little speakers built into their flat-screens now. And that means their audio for video and movies, as well as their audio for music. We've been on a huge mission to promote better audio as part of your video experience and part of your music experience.
Jack: Alright.
Kevin: And we think that it doesn't have to be about stereo. It could also be about surround sound, because that an awesome—as you guys know—way to listen to music.
Craig: So tell us about Monster Music, Kevin.
Kevin: So Monster Music is some of the major releases from major artists, like the Ray Charles' Genius Loves Company , and other things like that.
Craig: I love that disc.
Kevin: I love that, too. And rock bands like 3 Doors Down, so not just jazz. And we actually have our new George Benson/Al Jarreau release, Givin' It Up , which won 2 Grammy's—thank you very much—for those guys, congratulations to them. We are releasing those major releases in Monster Music surround sound using, of course, Dolby Digital technologies and it sounds fantastic.
Jack: I heard a rumor that you were actually using Dolby Digital at the highest possible data rate: 640. Is that true?
Kevin: Highest possible you can code on a DVD is exactly what we're using.
Jack: Wow.
Kevin: We did that because we wanted to get surround sound out to the masses. That means it couldn't be on DVD-Audio or SACD, because there's not enough players out there. So I called my good friend here, Craig, and said, "Craig, what's the best possible signal you can put on there? " and he gave me all the specs and that's exactly what we did. My father does the surround sound mixes. We call it Monster High Definition Surround Sound—HDS. Because it's a special surround sound mix, it's very engaging. For instance, you can have two very different surround experiences: one, being in the audience, or two, as drummers, we wanted to be in the middle of the band.
Jack: Very cool.
Craig: They get all the attention. Drummers get all the attention, you know?
[laughter]
Kevin: Drummers get the chicks? No. Not that I remember.
Craig: Nah. One of the very cool things that we talked about earlier is that fact that your father's generation is used to listening to their music through big speakers and speaker systems. And yet today, music on the move, portable music, is a big, big way to experience people's favorite tunes.
Kevin: Yeah, and that was important to us when we came up with Monster Music. So we wanted to introduce surround sound not just to people that own stereos and home theater systems because, sadly, there's less and less people out there doing that versus people owning portable players, like iPod.
So that's when I called you, Craig, and said, "You know, you guys have this great technology called " Dolby Headphone Surround " and could we possibly, to expose more people to music, take that technology and put it on the digital music files themselves?"
So we came out with hi-definition digital music files that are 1) encoded directly from our master files at the recording studio. So better than ripping the CD yourself or, of course, downloads. And with your help, it's encoded in Dolby Headphone surround sound. So that means, fans listening to this podcast, you can get surround sound experience from any MP3 player, including iPod, from any pair of headphones. That's ANY MP3 player and ANY pair of headphones.
Jack: Very, very cool.
Kevin: And with the help of the folks at Universal and such, they gave us no DRM rights on that, so it can go on an iPod.
Jack: Wow, Very cool. That is incredible.
Craig: We're really pleased with the response that you guys have gotten.
Jack: Absolutely! Well, listen, we're running out of time. Before we lose you, I've just got to ask you one last quick little question. It's about a burning, burning desire that I have to have all of my speaker cable be the same length. Is it true that you absolutely have to wire up all your speakers with the same length of speaker wire?
Kevin: It depends how " audiophile " you want to get!
[laughter]
Kevin: If you want to be perfect, yes. Same speaker cable, same size speakers, properly calibrated, etc., etc., etc. However, my home theater system—that I think sounds great—my speaker cables are not the same lengths and I think that is OK for practical purposes, Jack.
Jack: OK. That's good to know.
Craig: That's a good response.
Jack: I can sleep easier at night. Listen, thank you so much for coming in on this podcast. It's been so educational, I know for Craig and I, and hopefully for all of our listeners out there. If you have any questions for us or the Little Monster, please email us at dolbycast@dolby.com, and we'll make sure those questions get to all the right people. Again, thank you so much for coming in.
Craig: Thanks, Kevin.
Kevin: You got it. Thanks, Jack. Take care, Craig. See you around!
Jack: Later.
[music]
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