Home > Consumer Reviews > Monster XPHPCIBIG100 100 Feet Speaker Cable

If you check out many of the audio/video website forums, and home theater forums, you find that members rail against Monster products for being overpriced. That may be, because to deliver audio to your speakers, there really is no difference, electrically, between $1/ft Monster cables and $0.20/ft generic speaker wire of similar gauge (or lamp chord for that matter). However, there are definite benefits to this product that justifies the price to me.

The beauty of this XPHP-CI cable is that is has a high strand count, which means it is very flexible. Fishing it around walls is easier than if the cable was stiff, as you would get with thicker but less strands of other cables. This is also useful for in-room speaker connection cable - say from your amp to the wall plate or the wall plate to your speaker, as the flexible cable will lay where you put it and you are not fighting it or bending it or worried the working you are doing will weaken the joint at the banana plugs you've put on the ends.

The other benefits, well, the clear covers means its attractive and blends better than brown, white, black, grey, you name it. The CL3 rated jacket means its firecode compliant to run inside of walls. And the beefy nature of the cable means you have some meat to attach those banana plugs to.

Sure, a 16ga spool of any wire will do electrically, even for high power setups so long as you don't run 200feet, but it wont look and feel the same and not inspire the same confidence that the connectors you put on it will stay put for the long haul. But you do pay for Monster products.

I don't buy all of the marketing about it making your music sound better. Its an electrical conductor made of copper like every other cable. I do know that the look and feel and workability are worth the premium price to me.

Nice beefy stuff. It has a thread inside the CL jacket so it is easy to strip back...you just pull on it to cut the jacket. The speaker wire inside is well insulated and the conducter is high quality.

This is an excellent price for this wire. Sure many people are happy using hardware store wire, but if you like the extra quality this wire has it. Works and looks great.

Yeah everyon and thier mom says speaker wire iis speaker wire, I would normaly never buy monster cable anything. But for $66.94 compared to $149 at best buy this is a pretty good deal. Beautiful cable very sturdy color coded unlike half the other wires out there. It blends in with my carpet you almost forget it is even there. Yeah I could have gone to monoprice.com and got speaker cable for $25 but it was my first high end build and wanted top of the line everything, and am very satisfied.

This cable works very well. It's casing is a little bulky (might not work well under carpet), but the built in casing splitting is a nice touch.