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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.
...until your cat chews through it.
Ah well, there is a mug born every minute. I start selling $500 USB cables, anyone want one?
My little Linux and tech blog
Cable porn. Is that a sub category of tentacle porn? A giant Cthulhu-like monster made of Cat-5?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Will they try selling us higher quality air to shoot the EM signals through?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
What's the point of using an $800 HDMI cable to connect my media center PC to my HDTV if the content I'm streaming over my network isn't in the high fidelity I can only get with this $499 Ethernet cable?
Looking at the datasheet for that cable on their website, it seems like the only possibly unique thing they've done is to add a thin metal shield around the cable near the tip - from where it stops being UTP (with all the noise-protection that UTP tends to have) to where the plastic connector-to-NIC starts.
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!
A fool and his money are soon parted
These cable will be a great leap forward for Digital Audio.
The arrows to indicate direction will mean that the Electrons wont have to look around before knowing which way they are supposed to be moving. This will allow them to get to their destination quicker and even take a moment to go back and get any stragglers who can't keep up. The end result being that all of the electrons will arrive at the intended destination and as you can imagine this will mean a much better signal.
The next generation of these will probably contain filters to stop those pesky noise electrons making their way down the cable. This will really help the signal to noise ratio, although the commercial development of this is still a little way off yet.
I was thinking of buying a Denon AV receiver for my home theater upgrade.
Then I see this. Are all their claims just sheer puffery? How can I take their brand seriously?
If this Ethernet garbage is just an aberration, don't they know that doing it will have the reverse effect on consumers with clue?
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.
Man, maybe I'm a terrible person, but I absolutely love these kinda scams.
Every time I see something like this, I really wish I'd thought of it.
There are two types of Audiophiles:
(1) Non-technical people who like knowing they have thousands of dollars in equipment, blissfully ignorant of the technical details, but trusting in the outlandish claims of the various companies.
(2) Technical people who know about skin depth, SNR, etc. and make informed purchases and more often than not (as in my case) build their own high end audio equipment.
I actually own one of these. Unfortunately it got bent and now some of the 1s get stuck because they don't slide through the bent area as easily as the 0s :(
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
You could always start selling cables that cost $599.
How could they *not* be better?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
This is an RJ45 cable. Actually, to be precise it's an RJ45 connector with an 8-wire cable (unknown if it's even a twisted pair cable, though I'd imagine so). Actually, to be really precise it's not even officially RJ45 but why go into that...
/. editors and readers on these types of stories!?
RJ45 cables are used for the ubiquitous 100BASE-TX Ethernet, of course, but also for plenty of other applications, some of them not even digital (for example, long distance transmission of component video signals).
I'm not saying that a $500 RJ45 twisted pair cable is not absurd, just that there ARE applications where a higher quality cable would make a difference; try running a 100m 1080i (analog) component video connection over $1/ft RJ45 and see how it looks compared to something better built for the job.
That said, looking at the intended use ("Denon-Link") it seems to be multichannel 192kbps PCM audio, hence $500 for 1.5m is obviously a total waste of money.
Ok, end rant. Point is, nothing about this cable or any of its uses has the SLIGHTEST thing to do with Ethernet, but now everyone seems to think Denon is selling a cable to stream MP3s over your home LAN (yeah, a 1.5m cable would be really useful for that...) Sigh, why is it that I expect more from
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, and I have to tell you, these cables are AMAZING. They bring out nuances in the sound that you never knew were there. Listen to a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos in the classic 1972 vinyl recording with the Berlin Philharmonica, and you'll swear you're sitting there with Christian Ludwig right in the room, hearing his every borborygmus and flatus. These cables are so subtle that they even allow you to separate the overtones from the bass notes of his snart! And the Goldberg Variations with Glenn Gould... just breathtaking. You hear every note he sings (and the piano is pretty good, too).
Usability is great, too: you'll never spend half an hour wondering which way to plug these things in, since the marking on them finally make it clear that it doesn't matter; now, why didn't anybody think of that before?
If you're an audio professional, these cables will pay for themselves in a week. And if you're a serious amateur, they'll give you an audio experience you won't soon forget.
(-; for the humor impaired)
I store them in gold lined boxes to prevent space radiation from degrading them.
Also, they are manufactured in harmony with the orbit of the moon, so the lunar cycle does not impact the quality of audio fed over them.
Finally, the meteoric metal mixed into the alloy used for the cables gives them the power of the universe, preventing them from aging.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So I took a wander over to the site you linked and discovered the following item description for one of their most expensive cables, (and this isn't even for signal balanced cable pairs, which actually do prevent the causing of inductance-based interference in surrounding cables. What's being sold here are just garden variety audio wires. Made of gold.)
Wow! I got scared just reading that. They sure know how to make you feel insecure about your audio signal! --The price for security in plugs and wires? $4358 for twenty feet of cable! I bet you could sell some of these around the White House. (Just had to get a political dig in.)
I am stunned. I am clearly in the wrong business. I should be selling wires to rubes. Of course, I can't imagine that would do much for one's self esteem. George Cardas either doesn't sleep well at night, or he can talk up a real shit-storm when you challenge him on his ridiculous product line. . !
-FL
Harsh sound ? See now that's the one thing I never understood... how can a cable make the sound "harsher" ? I could see a poor (wrong gauge) cable affecting low frequencies, but what I call "harshness" is usually caused by hard-surfaced tweeters (as opposed to silk or paper cones).
The thing one must understand regarding "high end" stereo equipment, is the marketing aspect of it all. Once you pass a certain threshold, say $600 per component (or $3000 for a 5.1 system with receiver/amp), you step into the audiophile reality distortion field. Crossing that line means you've got money to burn, which is why audiophile gear starts out cheap and stretches to infinity dollars.
The reason your buddy's $11k stereo sounded like ass, is because it puts him in the "rich sucker" bracket. The components may have been selected by the sales person or manufacturer to sound a little off, solely to create demand for their $15k system. The term "upgrade" is heard every day in audio shops around the globe, and such upgrades tend to happen in small, granular steps. That's why speaker vendors don't have just one "perfect" set, they have a long list of products carefully plotted from cheap to obscene, and many shops will offer a trade-in program to help you climb that money ladder. It's all designed to part fools with their money while convincing them otherwise.
Anecdote: a while back I had a stereophile chum, but unfortunately he was dumber than dirt so our convos were rather bland, but he spent every last penny of his on stereo equipment, which fascinated me from a psychological perspective. I never actually liked his system, partly because his "listening room" was a small apartment living room...
Anyway, he started out small, spending about $300 on each speaker and $800 on the receiver. A few months later he had replaced his fronts with a more exotic pair, and continued over the following weeks to replace his other speakers until he had a full matching set. A year later, he had replaced his entire kit twice more, having sold his car to afford a $12000 system, always the same brand as his first cheap kit. Well it should come as no surprise that it sounded like ass to me. He still had sharp highs and horrible staging. Even he conceded there were improvements to be made, to come when his finances allowed it.
Over the course of three years, he probably spent close to $25k on audio gear, since he was selling the used gear at half-price or less. I then used my powers of geekiness to convince him to sell his last heap of junk to some naive schmuck, and took him shopping - online, that is. Shipping was a bitch, but all-told I had him spend about $7k on an assortment of drivers, enclosures, crossover components, soundproofing and related materials, and of course a fierce amp and receiver. I brought over my measuring equipment and taught him how to build speakers (to the best of his limited IQ). He was now free to tweak them according to his personal preferences.
He spent the next few months experimenting with different cones, crossover freqs, enclosure stuffing and a few other tricks I had shown him. Less than a year later, he had settled on his preferred setup, built a second kit out of the leftovers that wasn't half bad. I added some final touches, he sold off the extra system for $3k. Most importantly, he was absolutely in love with his home-made hi-fi sound and it only cost him about $4500 + a lot of fun time playing with it.
The lessons he learned can be applied to any speakers, much like I've been doing forever. Sometimes a commercial speaker might sound 95% good, but have a few annoying flaws. With a bit of elbow grease and know-how, those flaws can often be addressed with an afternoon and just a few bucks.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.