I saw this yesterday. At first glance i thought it was some kind of late april’s fools joke, because of the name, then i realized pioneer really did this.
Basically it’s a glorified goddamn split usb cable.
Ok, there is a reason behind this, and it’s that the ipad itself cannot power the ergo or the wego, but charging (pun not intended) 35$ for a cable that is worth no more than 2 cents? At least color it, put some premium interconnects on, two ferrites, and you at least have a cosmetic reason to sell a cable for that price. But like this?
Any opinions?
(no i don’t hate pioneer, i just dislike this uninformed customer ripoff thing that’s going on lately with some brands)
Uninformed is the fact that on their website they kind of say it’s their “special cable” that makes playing tracks from the device’s library, hot cues, sampler, effects, scratching and all this stuff possible. I know it’s marketing speech, but i still hate it nonetheless.
At least this is how i see it
Well Apple does the same shit. $30 for a $1 fucking converter (the old iPhone charger to the new 5-pin bullshit), or $40 for 2cent plastic cases for your phone.
It’s business. It’s unreasonably priced compared to what you can get at the market, but I am pretty sure they did market research and did their homework and will sell these.
In the case of the Lightning to HDMI adapter, there is an entire ARM SoC running inside along with 256MB RAM. There might be something similar in the converter you mentioned.
I used to have my entire audio setup wired up with Monitor Audio Pureflow stuff; it’s normally £400 a metre, but my supplier had a few 100m reels in his garage. When I asked him how much the wholesale value was… £2.50 a metre. Yep, that’s a 16,000% markup.
~$100 cabling has absolutely nothing to do with signal quality to any real meaningful degree. Yeah, sure, there might be some marginal aliasing that might get smoothed out a bit, but not anything really meaningful. The real reason you spend ~$300 on cabling is the actual quality of the cable, wrap, and terminals. Cheap cables work fine, but investing a relatively tiny amount in making sure your connections are always solid isn’t actually a half bad idea.
People are just so desensitized to disposable, static, consumer lines that they look at anything made to last and think it’s ridiculous. The Monoprice lines I’ve had for a month are currently shot, and could very well go out on me. In a bedroom, nobody cares, but in a modular professional/touring setup, people really underestimate how obliterated cheap cabling gets really quickly, especially in hostile environments (90% of professional setups). Investing what I spent in cases protecting my gear in solid, borderline immortal lines isn’t actually ridiculous.
Yeah, sure, you can get a disposable Chinese plastic mould for a few dollars, but those terminals and shielding have maybe a month in them on the road before they fry on you in the middle of a rig. Getting boggled by mid-priced cabling is like getting stunned by the fact that people spend ~$500 on cases.
