It appals me beyond any limit every time I see a commodity turned into a product. Like with Mach-150 razors with 1200 blades in it, or printer ink cartridge costing more than a printer, it is a clear-cut scam every single time. Case in point: "high-end" digital A/V cables. One of my colleagues has recently bought 9ft HDMI cable for $100. It was all fancy, gold-plated, silver wrapped cable in a very pretty package. However, although HDMI is a cable used for Audio/Video purposes, it still does exactly the same stuff as your regular 1GB Cat 5 Ethernet cable or USB cable: it moves ones and zeros. Now, even in retail CAT 5 cable costs about $0.40 per foot. Look at all the USB cables around you connecting all sorts of equipment, from digital cameras and external hard drives to keyboards and printers - can you find any of them being gold-plated and costing upward of $40? All those cables are digital yet very inexpensive while moving your files and other data without any distortions.
So if one pays more than $0.40 per foot of ANY digital cable: Ethernet, DVI, HDMI - the person is a certifiable sucker and people who sold it to him/her are shameless snake oil peddlers. Go to eBay or www.AllElectronics.com and buy the cheapest cable you can find and you will be just fine.
You can bring up as many anecdotal evidence as you want about how generic cable sucked, and then monster cable made your TV picture crystal clear, but the fact remains: bits either go through or not regardless where they travel: on commodity Ethernet cable, or on the most exclusive and expensive HDMI cable. If you don't get TV picture all distorted like satellite TV signal during heavy rain, your cheap HDMI cable works perfectly fine and your TV picture CANNOT possibly be made any better by expensive "monster" cables.
I can't wait to see what will happen when all consumer electronic components will start receiving digital A/V feeds over the air using wireless connections. I think all the high-end cable manufacturers need to start diversifying now and get busy with creating gold-plated wireless antennas costing $200 and up.