Slashdot Mirror
Denon's $499 Ethernet Cable
Guysmiley777 writes with what looks like a very late (or very, very early) April Fool's joke: "Denon's $499 Ethernet cable 'brings out all the nuances in digital audio reproduction.' Sure, that seems plausible. After all, nuances in digital signals are so subtle. Oh, and 'signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer.'" Considering that $499 will get you a competent laptop these days, I wonder how big the market is for such a thing — then I look at Stereophile magazine's annual list of recommended components. The "view more images" link shows that they take cable porn seriously at Denon.
Even Amazon.com sells them - that means it can only be good, right?
Right?
*nudge nudge wink wink*
np: Anthony Rother - Liquid System (My Name Is Beuys Von Telekraft)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
i agree to a certain extent, but there's a point at which it stops being a con and starts being just a bad joke
i'm sorry, but anyone who thinks this cable is worth five hundred bux doesn't deserve to keep their money
Not trying to justify this, but this not for ethernet, but a proprietary digital audio transmission from Denon sources to Denon receviers.
http://www.audioholics.com/news/press-releases/denon-digital-link-receives-approval-for-sacd-transmission/
Well here's your answer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/14/humanbehaviour
"How being swindled can make you feel better" by the Guardian's "Bad Science" columnist, Ben Goldacre.
While we're on the subject of their "attention to detail" like "empoying" that others have pointed out, I also see that if you click their "View new product warranty" link, you'll find that... it's not even listed in the products that have any warranty whatsoever! I had been thinking, "damn, if that's a $500 cable, it better either be a couple of football fields long, or have a several century warranty," but no, a crappy 1.5m and no warranty.
ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
Google: Shielded Twisted Pair (STP). Quite common. Probably can get a 1.5m STP cable for about $3.
This was done with wine, often with humbling results.
Check out the Amazon reviews!
The cable insulation and the rest looks mostly standard - I mean, it's cloth and heatshrink (probably PVC) instead of vinyl, but I can't imagine that the change would make such a huge difference, even in terms of so-called 'vibration protection'. Are electrical signals really that sensitive to normal sounds?
So a huge markup for a very small piece of tin foil and some cloth. Whee! I use shielded connectors at work every day. I work in the industrial sector so we must use shielded to keep external noise from interfering with the network. I wish I could charge my customers that much for shielded cables...
the copper wire lamp cord that you can split with your hands once you get it started, is as capable a cable as any high cost audio speaker cable.
Personally, I like good audio equipment, but hate spending much money on stuff that won't make any difference in my cluttered space, or any difference at all. I found the bang for your buck solution was mid-late 70's solid states, either just the amp units that have no preamp, or receivers with jumpers between the main in and preamp outputs, the receivers being my favorite because the lower quality of their preamp/tuner sections keeps their cost low. You combine these with any decent sound card with a good signal to noise ratio. I just pop out the preamp unit/main in jumpers, run the preamp input into the aux input on my sound card(just in case I want to tune in some AM or FM radio, I keep both it and all the other inputs on the card muted 99% of the time, so, you know, it actually HAS the low noise it's supposed to) and run the main output of my sound card to the main in on the receiver. You can generally turn the volume on the computer to 100% without ANY audible noise in the speakers, even with your ears up to the cones. I've found this type of setup gets louder with less distortion than most modern setups costing over 10 times as much.
No, no, no. It goes to 11.
This type of test has been conducted a great many times over the years. Notable is the work of Dr. Floyd Toole when he was head of the acoustics lab at the Department Of Physics at Canada's National Research Council in Ottawa. He was able to demonstrate that people of all sorts would recognize and prefer the sound reproduction that was most accurate in terms of having the lowest distortion, flattest frequency response and best loudspeaker dispersion as long as they did not know what equipment they were listening to. When they did know, their beliefs and preconceptions essentially determined their perceptions.
I thought so at first, too, but in depressing fact, that's the real price from Denon.
:)
And it looks like you save 100 pennies if you order from Denon rather than Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM
The reviews are hilarious
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm an audiophile. I love high-end stuff and I've messed with all kinds of audio equipment looking for the best bang-for-the-buck. Believe me, some of this top-dollar stuff is nearly holographic to listen to.
That said- There's a big divide in the audio community over double-blind testing. There's a vocal group who says that a blind A/B test is completely invalid. Then, these idiots turn around and make claims like, "When I stuck a piece of the magical masking tape to the speaker cabinet, the sound just opened up and gave me an instant orgasm that made me convulse on the floor for ten minutes." Okay, it's not quite that bad but if the difference is huge, why won't a double-blind test work? Hell, I can tell the difference between a cat turd and French silk pie, even blindfolded!
The problem is that some audiophiles need to spend money to feel like they're not being complacent about their baby... er.. system. They want that little extra push over the edge (to 11) so bad that they will themselves into hearing it. Some tweaks really are useful. If you optimize everything then the net improvement may be noticeable even if the individual tweaks aren't, but knowing what the weak links are is key. Six feet of gold power cord isn't going to do anything about the hundreds of feet of ordinary house wiring your power travels through. In fact, it is the job of your component's power supply to shield you from hearing what's going on in the AC world anyway. Even if the cable makes a slight difference, its effect should be attenuated into nothingness.
Oh well, we aren't all morons, and Denon probably figured they needed to get a $500 network cable to market before everyone else did.
Judging from the drawing in the "manual":
http://www.usa.denon.com/AK-DL1Lit.pdf
there are at least three major shortcomings with this cable:
1) there is no strain relief that will prevent the force from pulling on the cable from stressing individual wires. These days, even the cheapest patch cables are injection molded, which virtually insures that none of wires are torn out of the crimp connection.
2) The wire mesh shielding of the cable is not connected to the metal shield surrounding the plug. This will increase the bit-error rate in noisy environments.
3) the little plastic lever that needs to be pressed to release the plug from the socket is not prevented from tearing off when the cable is disentagled by a little hood that covers its tip.
5 foot cables of decent quality that do not have the three flaws described above are less than $1 wholesale.
If Denon "engineers" (or more probably their guy that sources stuff on the cheap from chinese manufacturers promising to deliver overnight in quantities of 50) deliver such a shoddy quality on the cable, what kind of corners did they cut in the electronic design of their products?
These pictures are the closest I could think of off the top of my head and it comes in your choice of black or white. Enjoy... <_<;
I work with coax all day, and I know that problems in the cable can cause micro-reflections and other such things, where the signal actually bounces back towards the source and causes interference. So you could technically create a cable that blocks any signal sent back along the same wire. I don't think it's currently possible, though, because that usually involves filters that are a lot bigger than the cable itself. I don't even know how you'd do that on ethernet, since you have bi-directional communication.
You pay a gazillion dollars for high-end HDMI cables because of the flaws of HDMI itself: unshielded twisted-pair over possibly long distances with no error control. Maybe in the audio world, cat-5 doesn't use error correction. Regardless, i thought optical connections were the standard for high-end audio connections.
You don't need a blind test. Ethernet is digital. You cannot get better than "0 dropped packets" no matter how good the cable is, and given modern error correction techniques, even with some dropped packets, the actual bits that get delivered and turned into sound will be identical.
The cake is a pie
Silver is better than gold all the way around with only one exception: it oxidizes.
If you want the *best* signal quality possible, it's silver plated copper stranded wire (or Coax if that's the app) with silver connectors both on the cable and console. The connectors need to mate very tightly and ideally have a small gasket to seal them.
That's what I use on my GHz frequency equipment. I'd use it on my video editing gear as well, but some conspiracy has landed me with only gold plate beryllium copper contacts as the best I can find...
for average joe consumer though, they buy overpriced cables with high-end looking terminations badly assembled ending up with this as the result.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Ironicaly, for actual ductwork, what you really want is "high-temp" tape, which is pretty much aluminum foil with an adhesive backing.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The truth is: very few people have the time, money and know-how to objectively compare products and sniff out the best ones. Adoration within the industry is mostly focused on money spent, i.e. the dude with a 25'000$ amp stack will get more oohs and aahs than the other guy with only a 9'000$ amp stack.
That's how you wind up with mixing engineers chopping up their perfectly fine $500 Sennheiser cans, to solder a $1500 headphone cable right onto the speaker leads. They should be shot.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/11/25/ Goddamn Martians!
OMG! Wau!
This cable is not intended to carry Ethernet. It's made for Denon's proprietary low-voltage differential LPCM interconnect. More like S/PDIF than Ethernet. Not everything with an RJ-45 is Ethernet.
Having said that, I can't imagine this is any better than any other cable that meets their spec for this interconnect.
-Peter
As an electrical engineer - these monster speaker cables get my dander up. Seriously - Who believes that the way you weave your copper strands makes an audible difference?!?!?!
Now - consider this..... How in the hell does a UTP cable (apparently now with additional ungrounded shielding!) can make ANY difference to a digital signal? IT'S FREAKING DIGITAL you COCK!
The error correction systems would weed out any badness - that is what you paid for!
Seriously - This would be the con of the century...
Use a (good quality) CAT-6 cable...
i think you mean monoprice.com . I've also had good luck with cablesforless.com
AgO2 is much worse a conductor than Ag resistivities: Silver: 1.6 X 10^-8 ohms-m Silver Oxide: 1 x 10^+9 ohms-m
Audiophiles are amazing. They're the only group I can think of that make Scientology, ID true believers AND flat earthers look like rationalists.
Check out the the ultimate in audioweenie gear. Magic rocks you tape to your cables, magic clocks, and "audio tuneups" transmitted through your phone!
I'll bet if I tape those magic rocks to the super ethernet cable and put that clock on top of my server, I can probably get a 20 jillion teraquad internet connection over the POTS line.
Somebody actually did a double blind study of Monster Cable versus coat hanger wire.