|   Everyone says Monster Cable is worth the Money! | jefflam79
Apr 22, 2001 2:44 PM | | I have been in the market for cable and speaker wire. Everywhere I go they tell me that Monster Cable is well worth the extra $$$. I am on a budget but I also have some good gear and I want the best performance from my gear that I spent money on. If I get cheap cables that is a waste of performance from my gear. Anyway, I think I will just go with Monster and be assured that my cables are not restricting my A/V gear's performance. Anyone know of a online store that sells Monster for less than MSRP? I can't find any. I searched and they are all full price just like my local stores.
Thanks! |
| No they don't | Eyespy
Apr 22, 2001 3:43 PM | | From Forbes Magazine, December 28th, 1998:
"A $100 stereo cable is something like undercoating on a car. To move the product, you have to motivate the salesman. Watch how Noel Lee does that.
Selling sizzle with sizzle
By Robert La Franco
TO ENCOURAGE audio salesmen to push its costly stereo cables, 12 times a year Monster Cable flies a dozen or so top producers from stores around the country to all-expenses-paid weekends at places like the Napa Valley, Hawaii and Germany.
Founder, chairman and sole owner Noel Lee even lets the star salespeople zoom around in his 13 sports cars, including a $200,000 Ferrari.
Lee needs good salespeople because his product requires lots and lots of selling. Buy a $400 stereo from the Good Guys in California and chances are you'll also walk out with $50 worth of Monster cables. Buy a $1,000 Marantz amplifier from Ken Crane's Home Entertainment in California and you'll get sold on a $100 connecting cable.
Do you really need that fancy wiring? That depends on how well you hear. Some say heavy-gauge, rubber-coated lamp wire at 25 cents per foot affords nearly as much fidelity for audio signals as the gold-tipped, electromagnetically shielded cable Lee sells for between $3 and $125 per foot. Chances are most will never tell the difference. In short, it is a product where most of the value is in the mind of the buyer. Thus, Lee lavishes attention on the people who move his goods.
Unlike Kimber Kable and Straight Wire, which do minimal sales staff training and rely almost exclusively on print advertising, Monster Cable puts $13 million a year, 15% of sales, into training and incentive programs. These are aimed at convincing store owners and appliance salesmen that it pays them to push Lee's products.
Salespeople get fancy trips. Store owners get fancy markups. Most of the customers, after all, come to the store armed with competing price quotes on the CD changers and the amplifiers. The wires, in contrast, are an afterthought and don't have to be competitively priced. Monster's cables typically yield a 45% gross margin, while the more visible audio and video components hover around 30%.
Cables are to a stereo store what undercoating is to a car dealer. At Ken Crane's, a chain of eight stores based in Hawthorne, Calif., Monster accounts for 2% of retail sales volume but 30% of gross profit.
Lee, a short, crisp 50-year-old with a mechanical engineering degree from California Polytechnic State University, started this firm in 1977. He's since built it to expected sales of $90 million for 1998, more volume than almost all of Monster's competitors combined. Lee probably nets 10% pretax.
The huge sales and training budget covers more than junkets for the retailers. Sales personnel are taught things like this: Cheap cables pick up electronic noise from telephones, televisions, hair dryers or the audio equipment itself. Premium cables deliver more signal. What they don't say is that you can solve some of the interference problem by draping your wires away from sources of interference.
After Lee gets through training a store's staff, no customer can leave the store without becoming cable-conscious. In a Good Guys shop near San Francisco, Monster cables visibly hook up every active product display. The Monster name is printed on canopies above the sales racks, and its packages are lined up like invading army troops on the shelves. Every month Lee sends out the numbers to each store that agrees to his aggressive sales strategy, tracking the performance of each salesman and a store's overall performance rank among competing retailers. The rankings are based not on dollar volume but on the percentage of customers who go out of the store with a Monster product. It's from this list Lee selects the winners of his all-expenses-paid weekends.
Early in the program, one Midwest salesman almost totaled |
| No they don't | John T
Apr 22, 2001 7:27 PM | | eyespy, I liked your very informative take on "MONSTER" cables. I'M glad i did not purchase same, but opted for the "MIT" cables, don't know one from the other, being half deaf these sound fine to me. maybe it's the "RAY ANTHONY" cd's that make the system sound so good.
take care. John T. |
| Who is everybody? | Robh3606
Apr 22, 2001 5:13 PM | | Well I have used the Recoton 12Ga. for $2.99 for 30 ft. If there is a difference I can't hear it! |
| re: Everyone says Monster Cable is worth the Money! | ChrisR
Apr 22, 2001 5:33 PM | | Based on my 4-year experience, yes they are. M1.2, Z1 and Z2 are the best entry-level Monsters.... Anything else about that can be justified if you have expensive powerful amps with large speakers and you listen loud. Other brands like Kimber, Audioquest also have good wires but you have to spend a lot more to match the Monster quality.
Monster Cables (M and Z series only) have no substitute at their price points. This is just my opinion. |
| re: Everyone says Monster Cable is worth the Money! | mtrycrafts
Apr 22, 2001 8:12 PM | | Oh, you have 4 years? All learned on the net? |
| re: Everyone says Monster Cable is worth the Money! | ChrisR
Apr 23, 2001 5:41 PM | | no |
| re: Everyone says Monster Cable is worth the Money! | jefflam79
Apr 23, 2001 11:53 AM | | What about s-video? Is RS gold or AR good enough for video as well? |
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