Wires and RCA'S

  A company called Monster Cable made a huge, disgustingly absurd amount of money in the late 80's thru the early 2000's.  They did a great job of marketing and set up hundreds of thousands of dealers with spiff programs.  For you that do not know what a spiff is, a spiff is a bonus paid to a salesmen when they sold a particular item.  I have a huge disdain for this kind of sales tactic (in fact i hate this worse then the idea of commission).
    Monster Cable at one point had 6 or seven different types of RCA cables that they would sell to a retailer. ranging from around $20 a pair to about $200 a pair. The mark up by the store owner was about 70% which is high, but what makes it worse is that all though they looked impressive, I can honestly say i did not hear a difference in the last 30 years.  In fact, i have never worked with anyone what has heard a difference between a decent (and undamaged) set of RCA's and a 200 set of balanced line directional triple shielded blah blah blah. buy good racs, not GREAT RCA's just a tip form your friend Patrick. At Electronics Depot we do not push hi-end cables, they don't help do anything but separate a customer from his money with little to no return.
   This is not true for other wires, you should use a 75 ohm RCA if you are running video, in a car you may get interference from a regular RCA, you probably wont, but for a few bucks difference it would suck to have to re-run a new video RCA in a car. Also spring for Oxygen free copper power and ground wire rather then Copper Clad aluminium (CCA).
    I have seen way to many demonstrations where the CCA wire raised inductance and got warm.  If you are running a 4 guage wire when you only need a 8 guage CCA is fine, or a 0 guage when you only need a 4 guage then maybe that is ok too but why not use the right sized wire in OFC. Ok, I am sure i am going to get hate mail for all this but like I said, not everyone is going to like this blog, I hope you do.

Next up, what manufacturers do to us retailers once a year for a "buy-in"