Monster Cable lowers prices during recession
— -- For years, electronics shops loved Monster Cable's high-priced, premium cables. Consumers snapped them up for $100 and more when purchasing expensive new flat-panel TV sets and home audio equipment.
Then the recession hit. TV sales stalled. Monster lost one of its top retailers — Circuit City, which closed 567 stores.
Now, founder and "Head Monster" Noel Lee is cutting prices on top-of-the-line cables for high-definition TVs, effective in June. An 8-foot HDMI cable that currently sells for $129.95 at Best Buy will be priced at $99.
"We're lowering prices, due to the recession, but we're also increasing performance," says Lee.
On Monday, the company also lopped $10 off the price of its most basic — but rarely stocked — HDMI TV cable, to $29 for a 1-meter length. And it introduced two new lower-cost HDMI cables in 2-meter and 4-meter lengths for $39.95 and $59.95. Competitors' cables of similar length can be found online for as low as $5.
Privately held Monster does not release sales figures, but tech analysts believe it's hugely profitable — even though some argue that pricey cables don't make most home entertainment centers sound or look better in the digital era.
"If you're a broadcast TV station, and need four times the bandwidth of most people, then yes, you need a higher-performance cable," says Wilson Rothman, an editor with gadget blog Gizmodo. "But to get the signal from your Blu-ray player to a TV 2 feet away — that's not a challenge. The cheaper cables do the job just fine."
Lee's main selling point is that a high-performance cable will prepare you for new technologies, while a $5 to $10 cable from the company's Asian competitors will not.
"Do you need the higher-performance cable today? Probably not. But with bigger displays and 3-D TVs coming down the pike, you will, eventually," Lee says.
Such talk riles bloggers like Joshua Topolsky, editor-in-chief of tech blog Engadget. "You buy a new cable with the new TV — not three years ahead of time," he says.
