Monster Cable
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Monster Cable headquarters in Brisbane
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| Private | |
| Industry | Consumer electronics |
| Founded | 1978 |
| Headquarters | Brisbane, California, U.S. |
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Key people
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Noel Lee (Founder & CEO) |
| Products | Cables, HDMI cable, headphones, audio equipment |
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Number of employees
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600+ |
| Website | www |
Monster Inc. is an American company that manufactures and markets 6,000 different products, but is best known for audio and video cables. It also produces speakers, headphones, power strips, mobile accessories and audio devices for automobiles. The company was founded by an audiophile and engineer, Noel Lee, in 1979 by experimenting with different ways to build audio cables. It grew by doing demonstrations to convince the industry that audio cables made a difference in audio quality and by establishing relationships with retailers that were attracted to the cable's profit margins.
Over the years it created new divisions like Monster Music, Monster Game, Monster Mobile, Monster Photo and Monster Power. In the 2000s, Monster had legal trademark disputes regarding other companies or products that have "Monster" in their name, such as Monster.com and the film Monsters, Inc. Monster said it needed to defend its premium brand, while critics said it was pursuing litigation against companies that do not have confusingly similar products. It began manufacturing headphones in a partnership with Dr. Dre in 2008, which ended in 2012, and it created other celebrity branded or Monster-branded headphone products.
Several tests done by audiophile publications, news reporters and academics have conflicting viewpoints on whether more expensive audio or video cables like those from Monster make a difference in audio or video quality when compared to generic cables. Instead of advertising, Monster offers incentives to retailers and their salespeople to sell the cables. Retailers bundle high profit-margin cables with larger purchases that have smaller margins in order to improve profitability.
Monster was founded in 1979 by Noel Lee as Monster Cable Products. Lee, an audiophile and engineer, was experimenting with different copper qualities, wire constructs and winding methods of audio cables in his family's garage and comparing them while listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. He became convinced that audio cables could be engineered to improve audio quality by conducting electricity more efficiently. Using a borrowed portion of somebody's booth at the 1978 Consumer Electronics Show, he did demonstrations of his cables in comparison to standard wires. After a positive reception at CES, he quit his job at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and started Monster Cable Products with $250,000 in bank financing. Monster's first cables were manufactured by Lee by hand and sold door-to-door.
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Wikipedia