Monster Cable is fighting back against critics of its overpriced cables, responding to a Consumerist expose of profit margins. Monster issued a long, rambling denunciation of the criticisms therein.

Here's a Valleywag-esque 100-word version:

• Making a fuss over the high markups on our cables is misleading, because all brick-and-mortar stores aim for similar margins on every type of product. It's much worse on clothing, jewelry and furniture.

• So what if the retailers are ripping you off? That's the retailers' fault, not Monster Cable's.

• Monster makes the world's highest quality cables. "Our customers know what they're paying for."

• The idea that digital transmissions suffer no signal loss is nonsense.

• Different HDMI cables are rated to different bandwidth capabilities. This means that you'll have "the best possible digital picture" with a higher-rated cable.

A few reflections:

• The claim that "digital cables, by definition, have no signal loss" is indeed false. It's only true if the transmission is error-corrected, for example by using a protocol like IP. Without error correction, the stream of ones and zeroes can lose integrity en-route just like an analog wave. DVI and HDMI are not error corrected.

• Monster doesn't address the well-understood fact that at normal cable lengths, there'll be no perceptible difference, even without error correction, between their cables and cheap alternatives.

• Monster's discussion of bandwidth increases between successive

HDMI specs obfuscates the fact that you only need as much bandwidth as the data you're transmitting requires. Other companies also sell the higher-rated cables cheaply.