THX Caught With Pants Down Over Lexicon Blu-ray Player

SchlimpyChicken writes "Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players' internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both failed a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified."

Comments

Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Entropy98]

Expensive isn't always better. Ever heard of Denon's $500 ‘Audiophile’ Ethernet Cable

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[larien]

"designed for the audio enthusiast" - i.e. the only people who will pay $500 for a cable they could buy for I think in that way, it's perfectly designed.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

actually, there IS something to that cable. very very minor but its there.

I believe that cable is NOT for ethernet even though it uses rj45. I THINK its used for i2s in audio and that is VERY timing dependant (clock and data on diff wires).

now here's where most people don't know something and think they do: ethernet cable these days is NOT equal length wires! yet i2s for spdif break-out NEEDS each wire exactly the same length (timing matters, again). and so you cannot really use ethernet cable. look it up, it has unequal twisted pairs inside for noise reasons (ethernet spec) but this does NOT meet i2s audio specs (they do NOT want unequal length wires).

I think that's the reason.

other than that, yes, most 'fancy wire' is stupid snake oil for rich morans. but there IS something (albeit small) about this that makes *some* sense.

(check etherent spec on wiki. I bet you didn't know that the wires were not all the same length. I didn't know that until it was pointed out to me, in this very context)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea why twisted pairs are twisted do you? Care to cite the appropriate physical law for your assertion that the lengths of twisted pair in CAT* cables are not sufficient for audio signals?

There is nothing about these cables that makes sense to anyone who knows anything about electronics.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

let me explain it, this time with wiki goodness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable#Connectors_and_other_information

section:

Individual twist lengths

By altering the length of each twist, crosstalk is reduced, without affecting the impedance.[12]

Pair color [cm] per turn Turns per [m]

Green 1.53 65.2

Blue 1.54 64.8

Orange 1.78 56.2

Brown 1.94 51.7

this is what its about. ethernet cable (modern spec) has UNEQUAL LENGTH WIRES.

this will 'mess' with digital audio clock and data (i2s). hence you do NOT want to use ethernet wire for things that have rj45 connectors on the back of AUDIO GEAR.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

You have no idea why twisted pairs are twisted do you?

ahem. as both a designer and builder of digital audio equipment, I have to say you are DEAD WRONG. I fully know about differential encoding using twisted self-shielding. its the same that POTS uses and same that pro audio uses with xlrs. same idea.

but running pairs next to each other interferes. THIS is why they use unequal length PAIRS. PAIRS. that's the key, each pair 'beats' at a slightly diff frequency (swr, really) and there is some natural attenuation due to this.

yes, I know of what I speak, thank you very much mr AC...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[imsabbel]

Sorry, still no point.

Signal speed in copper is about 15-20cm per second.
Even if they were running those things at a GHz (how many hundreds of audio channels do they transport), being correct to the cm would be quite ok.

And even bog-standard cables are easily in side that tolerance.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

btw, I am NOT defending the price on this! just the fact that there IS something to the denon cable that most people are not seeing and don't even know about (the ethernet thing with diff length pairs inside).

it should be priced MUCH lower, of course. but still, the fact is that i2s does require exact length wires on all the links between the spdif receiver chip and the dac chip (which is what i2s is all about, really; its not even an external interconnect but intended entirely for use INSIDE cd players, dat players, dvd players, etc).

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

modded down? check my fact! oh right, facts don't matter here on slash.

seriously, check my facts, guys. you'll find that i2s DOES use rj45 connectors on some audio gear. audio alchemy used mini-din connectors but it was the same idea (i2s link between transport and dac).

before you mod down, please do research. THX (lol)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[imsabbel]

I tell you, audiophiles have NO IDEA OF SCALE.

I am working with HF stuff. I run on cables that cost as much as that one, but in bulk supply from industry vendors (Huber+Suhner, for example). Because they are linear to 18 Ghz.

I also did an experiment where i had to synchronize two signals to some picoseconds, and that is damn hard. Damn hard in the sense of "a day of quality time with a network analyser and a few delaylines".

---

Speaking again on HDMI: Yeah, it matters for it, as its fucking running at several hundred times the datarate than an audio connection.
HDMI is specified to transport up to 10Gbits/s, multiplexed on only 19 conductors.
Compare again with audio datarates...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[gafisher]

The speed of sound in air is about 35cm/sec. Electrical signal speed in copper is much, MUCH higher, about 95% of the speed of light.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[FSWKU]

Additionally, signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer.

How does a 2-direction arrow silkscreened onto the connector improve anything?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

The question is: does the Denon units use the Ethernet protocol?

The answer to this question will determine if you're smart or if you bought into their marketing chant.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[gowen]

Please do the calculation and tell us what the difference in transit times is for, say, 40m of cable.
Clue: do actually believe that a band who's musicians use different length guitar/mic cables cannot possibly play in time?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm AC, like that is a good argument. You are full of shit suggesting that the difference in wire length in CAT* means shit considering the signal levels are converted to digital. Your Ethernet cables either work or they don't. That is the whole point of using digital transmission. POTS systems are analog as are balanced XLR audio signals. Again, please demonstrate that you have any clue why the pairs are twisted. You can even use wikipedia if you want. This test will not be marked.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

i could be wrong, but this sounds like cat5 to me, (rather then 5e where the twists are all the same)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Gordonjcp]

ethernet cable these days is NOT equal length wires! yet i2s for spdif break-out NEEDS each wire exactly the same length (timing matters, again)

But the different twist rate of the pairs in Plain Ordinary CAT5 don't make any difference. You're talking about a difference of a few millimetres over a whole 305m roll of CAT5 - in a sane length of patch cable that would make a difference in the order of a few femtoseconds.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, interconnect and speaker cables do (audibly) benefit from good quality, to a reasonable extent. Sub $500 though and assuming all the kit is of similarly high fidelity. The funniest item I've seen in the "beyond audiophile" category is Electra Glide's Ghengis Khan -- $1500 for a frigging power cord. Perhaps better invested in a noise filter or an update on the house's wiring...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

take a deep breath and calm down a little.

read up on spdif, jitter and i2s. come back when you've prepped on the subject matter.

this is NOT ABOUT ETHERNET. m'kay? rj45 does not always (!) mean ethernet. sorry but some manuf's DO overload that connector for other purposes.

you can argue if the diff in wire length in i2s is *audible* but you cannot argue that having equal length wires on a timing critical DAC can't be helpful. having signals reach the endpoint at diff times is BAD.

please read up on digital audio a bit before you foam at the mouth at people.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Toonol]

There's difference of about 25% in the length of a twist. That translates, probably, into a less then 2% difference in wire length. The transmission speed of electrical signal in wire varies, but it's a significant percentage of the speed of light, probably around 0.5c. Now... figure how much a total length difference of 20cm (in a 10m cable) delays a signal traveling at 0.5c.

The impact on the audio signal is irrelevant.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

TheGratefulNet is clearly modding his posts from another account. There can't be that many uneducated mods on Slashdot now can there?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[anss123]

Actually, interconnect and speaker cables do (audibly) benefit from good quality, to a reasonable extent.

Interconnect, yes. Speaker cables, no.

Plenty of blind tests have shown that there's no audible difference between the most expensive speaker cables and cheap telephone wires. If you look at the math you'd see that the wire noise is something like a hundred times less than the distortion introduced by the speakers themselves, so spend those the $500 on better speakers and use whatever wire you got for cables.

Interconnect cables transmits much weaker signals so noise have a greater effect there.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[johnny cashed]

Well, I dispute your argument with wiki goodness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2S

Note what they say at the bottom: IS signals can easily be transferred via Ethernet-spec connection hardware (8P8C plugs and jacks, and Cat-5e and above cabling).

Care to correct wikipedia?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

when you dislike the facts, do you usually throw a tantrum about the poster?

there's logical fallacy for that. ...left as an exercise to the reader.

no, I'm not self-modding. sorry to burst your bubble but I really do know a thing or two about digital audio and the mod-pointed ones apparently see that.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[JaredOfEuropa]

So this thing is like typical Monster cable. Better than the vanilla product, but way overpriced.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Toonol]

Signal speed in copper is about 15-20cm per second.

What? Signal speed in copper is over 100,000 KILOMETERS per second. Am I completely misunderstanding what you're trying to say?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

My god, somebody mod parent up!

All the audiophiles posting on this article are melting my brain.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

I always thought that was the reason why they used digital cabling in the first place: to get a perfectly lossless transfer and have CRCs to prove it.

"Common off the shelf" ethernet parts have now an uncorrectible bit error rate below 10^-10 or so, which means a cheap "small-office-home" Netgear or D-Link part solution will have one bit off every 10 seconds when continuously blasting at full 1Gbps.

One bit off, every ten seconds under maximum transfer speeds.

Software and protocols handle that on the receiving/sending units, that's why we don't have noticeable data corruption at all when transferring endless amounts of data across small home networks. That is two units connected by less than 30 USD worth of networking equipment.

With higher level equipment, medium and large company grade material, this bit error rate is down to 10^-15. That is 1 uncorrectible bit error every 11 *days*(!) while continuously operating at maximum capacity. With 150USD worth of networking equipment, of which is certainly less than 10 USD for the cable alone.

If the Denon link protocol cannot handle 1 single bit error every 10 seconds: shame on them.
If the components Denon uses for their Link interface have a higher bit error rate than enterprise-level network switches: shame on them.
If these components actually perform worse than cheap commodity SOHO parts: feces will be hitting the fan.

I don't know if audiophile humans can even detect a single bit error every ten seconds. I don't know if that would warrant spending that amount of money even if they actually did.

But I certainly know that digital high-end equipment must outperform cheapest commodity hardware, I also know that software and protocol on either side of the link must provide for and correct single bit errors. The resulting data stream on application level must be much lower than 10^-15 single bit errors using regular cheap Cat5e cabling. That is 1 bit error every 10 hours at 10Gbps, and I know for fact that enterprise grade storage systems have much less than that, or we would have corruption on all our filesystems within the blink of an eye.

If a resulting bit error rate of less than 10^-15 is still producing visible and audible artifacts, someone made a big mistake in unit or software design or manufacturing.

If a bit error rate of less than 10^-15 or even 10^-20 is desired, more shielding is needed. We're talking about centimeters of lead here, since the remaining bit errors are caused by cosmic radiation, not only in the wire, but in the entire circuitry of the connected units.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for the a good laugh. I love hearing audiophiles brag about wasting money on cabling, and talk like they are experts on subjects they obviously know nothing about. I have no idea how sensitive the ear is to clock jitter, but I can tell you that the only clock that matters is the one driving the audio DAC, and that it is not the same one that is used for the ethernet connection.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[johnny cashed]

I won't lie, most of this is over my head, I'm no EE. I was just using "wiki goodness" to dispute your "wiki goodness".

Am I surprised that wikipedia might be wrong? No.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

I don't own the denon and so I can't say for sure.

I actually build my own spdif hardware and audio dacs (my audio gear is all DIY stuff). and I do use i2s as an 'interconnect' between spdif receivers and the dac chips (when we build dacs, we take great care to layout the pcb traces to ENSURE that the i2s lines are exact(!) lengths. its just proper engineering.)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

>>>ethernet cable (modern spec) has UNEQUAL LENGTH WIRES. This will 'mess' with digital audio clock and data (i2s).

Even if we assume that's true, digital error correction will correct any clock skew, so it does not matter if the wire are unequal. You will get the same result as if the wires were equal. That's the advantage of digital audio - it's self-corrects.

You're the typical audiophile who is still thinking in analog terms (which can be affected by inferior wire), and not realizing the new digital formats make it unnecessary to buy a $500 cable because error correction makes even a $5 cable work perfectly.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

but I can tell you that the only clock that matters is the one driving the audio DAC,

you omit source-related jitter?

you're not a very thorough person, I can tell.

hint: you can't fully undo jitter at the reclocking phase. you can attenuate some but if the source adds jitter then you can't magically take it all 'back' via reclocking.

you are mostly right in that the BIGGEST effect on jitter is at the receive end between spdif receiver and dac.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[imsabbel]

Sorry, you are right of course.
I usually work in nanoseconds, but left out the "nano" in this post.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Captain_Chaos]

What everybody seems to be missing: it is the twist lengths that are different! Not the wire lengths.

I find this whole argument ludicrous. You can pump a hundred millions bits of information per second over a cat 5 cable using Ethernet, but for a few hundred thousand bits of audio per second you suddenly need $495 worth of snake oil to be added?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

Even if we assume that's true, digital error correction will correct any clock skew, so it does not matter if the wire are unequal.

ahem.

spdif is realtime, NO ACKS and no retries.

care to rethink your 'solution' ?

there is no digital error correction that fixes clock skew. error correction is one thing and clock dejittering is entirely separate. apples and oranges.

we're not talking about wrapping digital audio in tcp/ip, here. pure spdif does NOT do ack'ing or retries or any classic datacomm things that you're thinking of.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

You're the typical audiophile who is still thinking in analog terms

no, I'm not. I work in both analog and digital domains. I'm not confusing a single thing here.

I never once talked about distortion in wires (since there isn't any in digital) or s/n or frequency response or channel sep. all those would enter into an analog discussion of wires.

I think you're the confused one, here.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Dahamma]

given a choice of 2 interconnects where one is to exact-length and the other is varying length, which would you choose, all else being equal? and ignoring the insane markup (yes, its uncalled for!).

What are you talking about? The insane markup is the whole point! You are saying that there is probably no measurable difference - in that case, any good engineer would choose the less expensive solution. End of story.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

And I'm saying engineers who don't provide software or hardware level compensation for slight differences in wire lengths should hand in their engineering degree. A Cat-x whatever bundle of cabling will always present a certain tolerance for length or length ratios. Thermal expansion is more than enough for that. Engineers who don't plan on correcting that and rely on perfect cabling instead are lazy.

Using a protocol designed for use on printed circuit boards for external runs of cable is also very high on the list of causes for forfeiting engineering degrees.

And those who are able to see a difference between a "pure" perfect datastream and datastream with the same CRC that has been recreated through forward error correction or a retransmit within 1/10000 of a second - with their naked eyes and ears - should be declared the new Master Race, because they are obviously super human.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

well, a lexicon (LOL!) only works when you know the actual definitions of the words you use. ;)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

>>>ahem. as both a designer and builder of digital audio equipment, I have to say you are DEAD WRONG.

(falls over laughing)

Oh that was good. A digital audio designer? Yeah. I believe that. Well then you should know that digital audio is self-correcting. It does not matter if the twisted-pair wires are unequal or equal, because you will get the same result regardless. That's the advantage of digital audio - it's unnecessary to buy a $500 cable because error correction makes even a $5 cable work perfectly, such that the received bitstream is identical in both cases.

Stupid audiophuck. We're not in the error-prone analog world anymore.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

(shines ethernet cable)
(attaches fake Denon label)

I've got some amazing Denon wire here, personally spit-polished to ensure the absolute best in digital transmission quality. And at only $249 this is a real bargain! (audiophiles stampede into the room). My god. It's almost like being Timothy Geitner - I'm printing my own money.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

their salesman get to go to hawaii for year-end bonus get-aways?

dunno.

there is no tech reason for directional markings on twisted pair cabling. THAT one is pretty laughable, I'll admit.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[LordVader717]

You both are mistaken. Electrical cables almost all carry signals at about two thirds c, whether coaxial or twisted pair doesn't make much difference.

Anyway, the thing is that the IS2 protocol apparently has a maximum clock speed of 3.125 MHz. So the signal length is about 63 meters, which is much much larger than the length of their entire cable.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[jgardia]

sorry, but the maximum speed of i2c is 3.4 mbps. you will need about 9m difference in length to have 10% of phase difference between your clock and your data, using the maximum speed (the usual one is 100-400 kbps). I agree that cat5(e) was not designed for i2c signals, but is more than enough for this application.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

any engineer would:

- ignore the high cost profit-filled item
- realize they had a good idea
- make one himself from cat3 wire (perhaps; since that DOES have equal length wires inside the bundle)

that's what a real engineer would do. not just use a wire that is out of spec but build one for almost no cost that IS in spec.

why not? its almost a no-cost item to DIY yourself. if you can have exact length wires for pennies via a DIY, why NOT do it right?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

I design computer chips. Nothing high-speed, just 500 megahertz, but even I know it *is* possible to eliminate clock jitter. You can make the final received data look as good as the original source, such that even with an oscilloscope you can't see any difference.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

yes, you are correct on all that.

speaker level wiring does not matter one bit. headphone wiring, otoh, does to some extent. headphones are like 'very very sensitive' speakers. you can hear hum and noise in phones you can't with speakers.

speaker drive is also at a MUCH higher voltage level than line-level. speaker wiring does not pick up noise since the drive level dwarfs any 60hz hum that might be nearby. also, fwiw, most speakers are actually balanced (ground lifted and each connection is equidistant from ground. that's most of what you need for balanced mode operation, in fact). line level (consumer, not pro), otoh, is unbalanced and does need extra help to avoid noise.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

Clue: do actually believe that a band who's musicians use different length guitar/mic cables cannot possibly play in time?

wow, the 'experts' here are really keeping me busy helping them re-learn things.

musicians playing realtime do not have the same time constraints as digital audio at, say, 192khz and 24bits. with such a high samplerate, having the clocking be precise DOES matter.

otoh, musicians are not playing in the digital domain and you're not trying to align word-edges in a serial stream.

you could not have made a worse analogy. even if you used cars ;)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

0.72ns

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Kjella]

easy proof (similar idea): look at the inside of an hdmi switch. it has parallel twisted pairs, too. look at the squiggles on the pc board traces. they are 'making up length' with lefty/righty (tech term, lol) loops of copper trace. TIMING MATTERS on parallel digital signals!

Of course it does, because the HDMI signal is 165MHz+ (HDMI 1.0, later added higher modes). It matters for two digital devices to talk to each other, but there's no way a human could recognize picosecond jitter in the decoded video or audio which runs in kilohertz for audio and hertz for video. And if the digital signals were wrong, like the LSB of one sample running over into the MSB of the next sample, you'd know extremely quickly unless you're blind and deaf as it'd all be noise.

In short, your technical knowledge is as lousy as your tech terms, because the situation audiophiles describe will never happen. Either you plug in a digital cable and the decoder will decode it perfectly with a timing accuracy far, far greater than human senss or the decoder will fail and it'll all be shit. It's never "almost right with jitter", not on the KHz scale.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

in this context 'twist length' MEANS wire length.

ie, the 'twists' (read: wire pairs) are diff lengths.

please don't ask us to explain how english works.....

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Opportunist]

Given that the maximum cable length under best conditions (I'm not even accounting for cable twisting here) is about 100m, at 0.5c the delay between sender and receiver is about 6.6*10^-9. Not quite 7 nanoseconds, if I am not mistaken. The time it takes your computer to execute about 30 atomic instructions. Considering your reflexes take a billion times longer, I would be amazed if you can hear THAT.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Opportunist]

Still, at the end of the day (or the wire, rather) you get a signal that is composed of 0s and 1s. There is no "in between", there is no "bit rot" in the medium. That might have been real for analog transfer when it mattered that the signal was transfered verbatim. It can NOT be transfered any other way today. It is EITHER 0 OR 1. There is no in between.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[mwvdlee]

No, no, that cable actually works and does improve your audio. The only problem with the Denon cable is that they've wasted money on pretty packaging. I, on the other hand, can sell you a similar audio-quality cable without the pretty packaging for just $450. For an additional $200 I'll spraypaint it in special audio-improving green. Remember; audiophiles are always right if they are rich.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Opportunist]

We're not talking about data loss here, but data degeneration. And it used to be a problem with analog cables. A signal might have been distorted by a badly shielded cable because the signal was sent into the wire and then reproduced the way it was received. If it was altered along the way, that alteration was often audibly noticable.

That doesn't apply to digital data. If a 1 is sent and is received as a "0.8" or a "1.2", it will still be interpreted as a 1. Simply because there is no 0.8 or 1.2, as there used to be in analog times. Yes, the signal can still degenerate, but since we use discrete values of signals in digital media instead of a "sliding scale" analog signal, that degeneration is easily compensated. It can now be identified correctly and it is adjusted accordingly. So that signal degeneration plays a lesser role now. Of course, if you have REALLY crappy cables it will show. But the average cable that wasn't tied in a knot first will do just fine.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

Well it turns out you're right. S/PDIF doesn't use error correction. It's as error-prone as analog. What idiot would design a digital transmission protocol without built-in error correction?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Opportunist]

I believe you that the wires are different in length. I just don't believe those few inches difference make a noticable difference in audio quality, considering signals don't exactly travel at a speed of an inch per second...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheGratefulNet]

its true that i2s was not designed as an external protocol. neither was sata, for that matter; and they came up with the MINOR tweak called 'e-sata'. very minor actually.

it turns out that if you keep the length 'short' that i2s can go between boxes. audio alchemy did this in the 90's (DTI series of boxes and dacs). others also have done this. its do-able.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[MattskEE]

All of the issues that you mention, distortion (presumably frequency dispersion), S/N, and frequency response, will all play a significant role in digital communication. Poor performance in any of these three "analog" factors will limit the maximum speed of digital communication on the cable. After all, a digital signal is just a way of interpreting an analog waveform.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

The difference in wire length for i2s is either very audible or not audible. It does affect the DAC and matching clock and data lengths is important, but it's a data corruption issue - if the lengths differ enough that the signal is out of spec with regard to the setup and hold times of the DAC, you get glitchy audio. This isn't an "analog" difference.

Clock jitter may be audible, and mismatched clock skew between outputs can be too, but skewed clock and data to a single DAC will not cause any audible changes until you exceed the specifications and then all hell breaks loose.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Ethernet signals travel at a very large fraction of the speed of light. Light travels around 11 inches in a nanosecond. So you're claiming picosecond intolerances in your clock signals.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds all like bullshit to me. Sorry. The music samples are surely buffered, before they leave the DA-converter. So it seems rather pointless to me, how the digital data arrives there. As long as the music samples arrive in time and error-free and the final DA-converter runs a stable clock, it should have no influence whatsoever, how the choppy or distorted the signal gets there, as long as it is error-free on a digital level.

The only problem that I can imagine is the accuracy of the clock, but like I said, I assume there is a buffer and then the clock of the DA converter is adjusted to the clock of the incoming digital signal via some PLL circuit ( phase-locked loop ), which decouples it from the timing accuracy of the digital signal on those wires.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

[URL http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/digital/messages/14/149759.html%5D

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[msauve]

Mod parent up.

His point is correct, although the details are a bit misleading.

Just to give an impression of the magnitudes involved, I2C high speed (here's the spec) signals have rise/fall times in the 10-80 ns range. The setup time, which depends on the synchronization between the data and clock lines, has a minimum spec of 10 ns. If the implementation puts things in the center of the window, there's about an 80 ns setup time, so their might be 70 ns of slop available on either side.

Twisted pair cables will have a velocity factor in the 70% range. i.e. electricity travels through them at about 210 000 000 m/s. In 10 ns, electricity would travel about 2.1 meters.

How much margin any particular I2C implementation has depends on many things, but it should be clear that any decent implementation won't be affected a 10 ns delay to either signal, which equates to a couple of meters of additional wire.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[dougisfunny]

Right, and if you're using a protocol for data transmission sending packets of data, there would be no issue. If you treat the 8 wires in the cat 5 cable as separate signals, and don't use any protocol, it would be feasibly like receiving data from 8 out of sync sources. Kinda a stupid thing to do, but the audiophile world is kind of like that. I personally would send packets and reconstruct the data on the receiving end.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[MattskEE]

Clock skew, when clock is sent on a separate connection from data, can definitely be fixed, it's just a question of whether or not it was included in the design. It's not too hard to step a received clock up or down in frequency with a PLL, and shift it forward or backward in time, in the digital or analog domain, relative to data. Then typically there would be some kind of control or calibration code sent on startup, or periodically, to calibrate the clock. But who knows whether it exists in I2S chips, I sure don't.

S/PDIF of course does not have a separate clock, it is sent inside the data stream, so there is a separate clock recovery circuit which is set up by recurring bit patterns in the data stream. If I recall, for ethernet, each packet is prefixed and suffixed with a certain length of 01010101... to get the receiver clock sync'd. The length of cable does not change with time, so you can have the length whatever you want and fix it in clock recovery. If you have multiple data channels (different speakers?), the time delay difference is insignificant compared to the sound, but it could be fixed by similar methods if it was critical. Again, just depends how they design it.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

I don't know if audiophile humans can even detect a single bit error every ten seconds.

Any human can detect that. With 16-bit or 24-bit words, there's a fair chance that that bit will hit one of the most significant bits of the audio word. This will cause an audible click that anyone can hear (especially with calm music). Actually, I'd say audiophiles may be less likely to detect it, since they tend to live in their own little lalaland where immeasurable BS sound qualities are more important than blatantly obvious clicking.

On the other hand, one single bit error every 10 seconds for audio cabling (relatively low speed) is ridiculously bad.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

And you should read up on the definition of jitter. Even if one pair was 50 m longer than the other it wouldn't increase _jitter_.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

No he is not. Some of us do know what we talk about. Some of is do know about checking facts before attacking people who write something that doesn't seem to fit in out own tiny little mental framework.

Posting as AC in order not do destroy my mods.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

You may be interested to learn that most digital audio interconnects these days still don't use error correction. Some use parity to detect errors, and may use error concealment techniques to hide errors (interpolation), but they don't use true digital error correction that results in an identical output. This means that you still need a reasonably decent connection, crappy connections which cause errors every few seconds do result in apparent noise (especially with systems that don't use parity and error concealment). These errors aren't really common though, because building a reasonable quality digital cable is by no means rocket science (or expensive), but this has nothing to do with error correction.

Digital audio storage (CD, Flash memory, etc) does use error correction.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Taimoor]

I'm laughing my ass off. You don't seriously think the jitter caused by that miniscule difference in cable length will fool with anything designed to use twisted pair as an interconnect, do you?

We're not talking about memory busses running at several GHz, we're talking about relatively low-bandwidth interconnects between devices. And this is assuming that you're not encapsulating everything and just using ethernet signaling like everyone else in the pro audio world does.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

You're confusing jitter with clock skew. Clock skew means nothing as long as the input signal is still within the setup/hold times of the receiver. It either works or doesn't. This isn't to say that you don't need good matching, just that better matching will not improve quality.

Jitter is different. Jitter is uneven clocking. On the other hand, jitter is almost nonexistent on separate clock/data connections because any delays in the clock are consistent.

Jitter does matter in things like S/PDIF that combine clock and data, because then the data will affect the distortion on the clock and it will be jittery when recovered. This is what all the talk about jitter is: S/PDIF (and similar) clock recovery. Don't mix it up with other issues and other interfaces.

S/PDIF does have improved quality if the signal is less distorted, because it improves jitter. This problem can be completely eliminated by using a buffer before the DAC, or at least a PLL to clean up the clock (it only affects DACs that clock straight off of the recovered S/PDIF clock). Other interfaces (I2S) with separate clock and data do not have this problem because any distortion on the clock is consistent cycle to cycle.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[gafisher]

Thanks for the clarification. Please revise my "much, MUCH" to merely "much, much." ;-)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Taimoor]

You're full of shit, sorry. Cat5 is well within tolerance for i2c data transmission over any reasonable length... the signal would degrade well before the clock and data lines go out of sync.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Antique Geekmeister]

He was right. You don't know.

Pairs of wires are twisted together to couple them to each other, rather than to their environment. This is useful for both digital and analog signals, and is key to differential signals which may accumulate quite a large "common" signal over their length from environmental factors, especially differences in "ground". Similar effects can also be achieved by wrapping one wire inside the other, also known as coaxial cable, but that's far more expensive to make and more awkward to terminate.

The details of what happens if the size of the twist happens to match a harmonic of the basic transmission frequencies is left to the reader. The consequences are easy to imagine, but difficult to calculate.

Different pairs are twisted at different rates to keep them from coupling to _other pairs_. A nearly inevitable result of this is that over a long cable, the tightly twisted pair winds up being slightly longer than the less twisted pair. But the key is that the twisted pairs do _not_ synchronize with each other due to the differences in twisting, not the minor differences in length.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[MattskEE]

At 20kHz two chunks of aluminum makes for a pretty nice cable. With 50GHz coax you need tiny precision machined connectors (2.4mm), and a very narrow cable with a low permittivity dielectric. Such a cable costs about $2,000.

The reason for the precision, size, and expense at those frequencies (as you know but others probably don't) is that if you have a large cable, there are multiple different wave equation solutions (modes) which allow power of a particular frequency to travel down a cable, and they will propagate at different speeds in the cable (and different attenuations), so what you get out of the cable is a distorted version of the input. So you must make the cable with size on the order of the smallest wavelength you intend to transmit. And it has to be precisely made because imperfections, scratches, and so on need to be even smaller or they will cause an impedance shift which reflects some signal back at the source.

At 50Ghz a wavelength is 6mm. At 20kHz it is 15km. This is why it is easy to make very nice audio cables, and hard to make nice HF cables.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a sense of proportion is needed when it comes to different cable lengths. It's worth finding out for far an electric signal will travel in one tick of the signal clock.

Speed of light in a vacuum (according to Google) is 299,792,458 m/s and the speed of propagation of an electrical signal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity) is about 66% of that in coax.

Let's assume the 'speed of electricity' in our cat 5cable is 50% of the speed of light, say 150,000,000 ms.

Looking at i2s clock speeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2S) the bit clock that marks each bit ticks at "sample rate" * "number of channels" * "number of bits per sample". The single word select line suggests only 2 channels for I2S.

At a typical (from the Wikipedia entry) bit clock speed of 2.8224MHz our electrical signal will travel 150,000,000 / 2,822,400 which is 51m.

So a 51m cable length difference would result is a clock skew of 1 full tick cycle.

I doubt there's that much of a length difference between the different pairs...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[SchlimpyChicken]

I have been told (directly, not third party) by one of the highest authorities at Denon Electronics that their cable is a shielded Cat5e cable... They only made it to satisfy custom installers who wanted something ridiculous to sell clients who had more money than sense. Off the record of course...

In this case Denon aren't bad guys, they just aren't stupid. They had enough requests and knew these guys would simply go elsewhere to get what they wanted (another product they could sell people who, if they dropped a $100 bill on the ground, would think it a waste of time to stoop over and pick it up).

In this case, the people at fault are the installers who can't seem to charge for their time and instead want to cultivate an industry where their services are "free" and everything is paid through them buying products at cost and selling them at retail to clients. The really big installers know how to run a business, but the middle and lower tiers are largely fueling customer ignorance of the value of their services.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

>>>That doesn't apply to digital data. If a 1 is sent and is received as a "0.8" or a "1.2", it will still be interpreted as a 1. ..... So that signal degeneration plays a lesser role now. Of course, if you have REALLY crappy cables it will show. But the average cable that wasn't tied in a knot first will do just fine.
>>>

Well said. If a digital signal "1" degrades below 0.6 there's a possibility the computer inside the receiving unit will misinterpret that "1" as a "0" but as you said that's unlikely, even with a low-priced bargain cable. You don't need to spend $500.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[AmiMoJo]

The signals travel at about 2/3 the speed of light down an ethernet cable. Over a 1m cable with those variations you are talking about femotoseconds of difference. Audophiles will go on about jitter but minute variations in air pressure due to your breathing or the sound itself will cause much larger variations.

It isn't clear what protocol is used here either. It appears to be a Denon specific thing. Most good DACs re-clock the data anyway now these minute differences are even less important. I did a test where I connected two PCs together with a digital optical cable. One had an expensive Onkyo soundcard and the other used the on-board sound. I used one PC to record from the other and sent an entire album over the link. I then trimmed off the silence at the start and end and did an md5 sum on the data. They two sets were identical, so even cheap sound cards can "recover" from any jitter flawlessly over ~60 minutes of music.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

"Out of sync" and "generates errors" are not the same thing. Once the 8 signals are clocked-in by the receiver, all the signals will be in sync with one another again. You would have to stretch your S/PDIF cable over several miles before you'd see any sync-related errors.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

i2s != i2c. i2s is more like spi than i2c. the dac I'm using for a project right now runs i2s at ~ 24 mhz.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[PopeRatzo]

I actually build my own spdif hardware and audio dacs (my audio gear is all DIY stuff).

I'm impressed, but you must admit, at least, that makes you a little "eccentric" (in the best definition of the word).

I'm curious: can you hear the difference when using unequal cable lengths?

I've known "audiophiles" to claim some pretty wild stuff, so I have to ask.

  [Note: I produce recorded music for a living now, so I have a professional interest]

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I bet that 4.6 megabit/s (per channel) throughput requires some serious signaling hardware!

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[ThreeGigs]

No, please let ME explain this.

The wires are in pairs. Color coded pairs.
Depending on your point of view, the green pair is TX (transmit) and the orange pair is RX (receive).
Since the green pair (solid/striped pair) is twisted together, both green wires are the same length. Both orange wires are the same length (although green and orange may have slightly different lengths).

ALL of the signal data is transmitted in ONE DIRECTION on ONE PAIR (man I love caps emphasis) whose wires are the SAME LENGTH.

Understand that yet? Data from component A to component B travels over two wires which are the _same length_. Data back from component B to A travels over another pair of same-length wires. There is no "messing" with clock data, as it's all serial. And even if it used the 1000-T/TX standard requiring 2 pairs per direction, the difference in length of conductors in a 10 meter long cable (10 meters would be a very big audio rack) is 4.44 centimeters (assuming 24 ga and standard insulation thickness and miswiring to get longest/shortest paired). Rounding that up to 5 centimeters, and using 300 million meters/second for speed of light, and .64c propogation speed in the wire, I get about one four-billionth of a second difference. Meaning your sample rate would need to be in the GHz range, and which means if you can tell the difference, you would be able to "hear" VHF and UHF radio waves.

Keep rationalizing though... it keeps my debunking skills fresh.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Idbar]

Please do the calculation and tell us what the difference in transit times is for, say, 40m of cable.

And then, if any doubts, divide by 26 because the original cable was 1.5m long.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[TheRaven64]

Thanks, I was too lazy to do that bit of the calculation. Now let's put that into some more relevant terms. The highest sound that a typical human can hear is around 20kHz, let's be generous and say and audiophile can hear 25kHz (the upper range of my hearing is well above average, but is still a way below 25kHz). At 25kHz, the wavelength of the sound is about 1.36cm (assuming one atmosphere pressure), so that gives the absolute shortest wavelength you're likely to hear. In 7 nanoseconds, this sound will travel 0.000175 wavelengths. That means that this skew, over a 100m cable, will potentially make the sound out of phase by 0.0175%. Now, the human ear is very good at detecting differences in phase. It's something that you're likely to find subconsciously irritating, even if you aren't able to tell what it's caused by. Even a magical audiophile ear (the one we're assuming can hear ultrasonic audio), however, is going to have difficulty spotting a phase variance that small.

I always assumed those ethernet cables were a joke. I'm astonished that people take them seriously. If I had a few million dollars, I'd buy one to reward the manufacturers for making me laugh, but I never thought people would buy them expecting a real difference in quality.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[uglyduckling]

The problem is, you're coming across as defending that ridiculous Denon cable. Even if you can't buy off-the-shelf ethernet cable that's correctly twisted, for less than ten dollars and a pocket calculator you could easily construct a small selection of RJ45-RJ45 adaptors that would correct for the tiny length discrepancies of the common lengths of cables.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying, in all your knowledge that these guys decided to use an RJ45, with 8 wires + shielding, to connect I2C, which as far as I know is a serial protocol with clock and uses only 4 wires + shielding. BUT it makes a difference with their cable? I think the ones that decided to use RJ45 started with their wrong foot their design.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[gabebear]

there is no digital error correction that fixes clock skew. error correction is one thing and clock dejittering is entirely separate. apples and oranges.

By sampling the digital signal several times faster than the transmission speed, you can detect clock drift and jitter and correct for both. I know any Serial/UART/USART controller you find today handles clock skew/drift and jitter this way, and a quick search of SPDIF controllers shows that they do the same.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[ThreeGigs]

Note that when you twist two wires together, they reach a shorter distance, because the wire now has to follow a longer spiral path. More twists means more distance. So to make up for the loss in length you need to use more wire. Thus a differing number of twists means a different amount of wire is needed to reach the same distance. Not a lot, but there _is_ a difference.

In ancient times, clamps were made by putting a wooden rod between two ropes and using the rod to twist the ropes, pulling the two ends closer together. Same principle.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[cdrudge]

Audophiles will go on about jitter but minute variations in air pressure due to your breathing or the sound itself will cause much larger variations.

That's why the only setup a true Audiophile will have is a listening room setup inside of a vacuum chamber. No worries about changes in air pressure.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Alioth]

Really? The clock is *that* intolerant on a 3 and a bit Mbps signal that a couple of mm is going to really make a difference?

Sorry - but a normal ethernet cable will be more than adequate. You're wasting your money if you spent $500 on the Denon cable - you've been had. Ensuring the PCB traces are exactly the same length isn't good engineering for this particular task, it's simply wasting your time. I simply do not believe the clock tolerance is measured in picoseconds.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Splab]

Also since the total lenght of any audiophiles cabling will be way below 100m, the "out of phase" factor will be quite a lot less (remember the Denon cable is 1.5m long).

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. Unless your equipment is 100m apart there's no way this is a factor.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[mako1138]

It doesn't matter for i2s, it's a clocked interface. As long as setup and hold times are met, the data will be valid. Picoseconds aren't going to mess things up when the setup and hold time specs are measured in nanoseconds or more.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[jo42]

Hey buddy,

I'm working on a deal with a Nigerian Prince that has inherited the exclusive rights to an oxygen free copper mine from his recently deceased father, the King. Extensive quantum phase testing has shown that this oxygen free copper has the rather unique ability to transmit signals at 99.6% of the speed of light and timings on unequal length wires are less than 42 femtoseconds. He's looking for investors with bank accounts in Switzerland to fund a working facility. The payoff should be massive since we could sell this stuff for at least a $1000 a ft.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the Grado RA1 Headphone Amplifier.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's as error-prone as analog."

No it isn't. Analog always degrades. Digital degrades according to the bit-error ratio. Even error correction (the non-ack kind) has a non-zero probability of bit errors. With a sufficient quality cable the bit error ratio becomes inconsequential.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[AmiMoJo]

Even in a vacuum the hairs in your ear will cause some distortion. True Audiophiles shave their inner ears.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure that different twist lengths also imply different wires lengths?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[ultranova]

Just because you can't measure it doesn't mean that an audiophile can't hear it.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[ultranova]

What idiot would design a digital transmission protocol without built-in error correction?

The kind that wants to sell $500 cables to be used with it?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[isomer1]

(please mod parent up)

Just to run the numbers available -
In cat5 you have 4 twisted pairs with the following arrangement [1]:
color cm/turn turn/m
green 1.53 65.2
blue 1.54 64.8
orange 1.78 56.2
brown 1.94 51.7

That makes:
green = 1.53 * 65.2 = 99.756
blue = 1.54 * 64.8 = 99.792
orange = 1.78 * 56.2 = 100.036
brown = 1.94 * 51.7 = 100.298

So a roughly 0.5% difference in wire length. Using a low-end estimate for the speed of an EM wave [2] of 66% the speed of light we still have: 1/(3.0e8 * 0.66) = 5e-9 s/m. So that at the end of a 100m length of cat5 (the spec limit) the ~0.5m difference in length would mean the signals would be separated by roughly 250 picoseconds.

I have trouble seeing how that could possibly be enough to impact any audio signal perceptible by the human ear. If anyone else has more numbers to run please chime in.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable#Connectors_and_other_information
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Ant P.]

Ah, the sight of an ignorant audiophile attempting to justify their ridiculous wastes of money when faced with reality... truly a sight to behold.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny this is mentioned. I play with a wireless and get out in the crowd to bump elbows. I have moved far enough away that I have to anticipate the timing (30ish yards for example). It was doable, but took practice and you had to focus on it.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

My numbers were for "copper layer" of run-of-the-mill ethernet using cheapest available parts AND transferring 1Gpbs straight the whole time.

You are right, you have a 12.5% chance to hit the most significant bit and that will produce an audible click since the whole sample will be off by half the volume.

But I only demonstrated the single-bit error rate at the link level, which is more than offset by error correction and CRC mechanisms built in layers above.

At the application level, where the pure video and sound bits travel, the chance of meeting a single bit error is probably lower than being hit by aircraft debris on your way to the grocery store. "Probably", because most of that depends on the (software) engineers responsible for implementing these layers and for the Denon Link, I don't dare to say anything.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[m.ducharme]

I've found that there is some benefit to having a heavier gauge speaker wire, in extreme conditions. I used to work at a smaller electronic store, and was responsible for taking care of the audio/video department. I had to run two each of every speaker we carried, all from one amp, through switches so that any pair of speakers could be played alone, or all of them could be played at once. Needless to say, this involved a lot of wire, and I found that if I used the lighter gauges, the whole thing sounded like garbage. I think 16 ga was about the lightest I could get away with and still have it sound good (though of course it wouldn't pass muster for an audiophile, but then we weren't selling gear to audiophiles), and I generally just ran 12 because we often had a lot of it handy.

I also found that with such a setup we did get line noise from interference, but again, it's a pretty extreme situation, and the store's electical was rather elderly and being taxed to the very limits.

I do agree that what kind of wire used would have made no difference, I could have wired it up with lamp cord wire and gotten the same effect.

I've done a lot of work as a sound tech for live shows (as a volunteer and amateur, not a professional), and I can say that the only benefit I've found to more expensive cabling has nothing to do with the sound -- well-made cable tends to stay where you put it when you lay it down, and it will generally lie flat instead of looping back up and needing a lot of tape to hold the loops down. Clearly this would not be a huge issue for a home listener.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[timeOday]

No, there is nothing wrong with $5 SPDIF cables. Maybe, MAYBE, if you spent a long time and tried really hard, you could get an SPDIF connection to mostly work but with a significant bit error rate, by wrapping it around sharp corners, or putting dirt on the ends or something. In practice, I've never seen it not work.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Bluesman]

And even then none of this matters because the delay would have to be so long as to introduce error in the eventual conversion by the DAC, which is clocked at a MUCH slower rate, and low-pass filtered to remove any high frequency artifacts from the signal.

And that's only if they're transmitting raw data instead of packets, which would be monumentally stupid.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Pikoro]

As far as I can tell so far (I have yet to scroll all the way to the end), there is only one audiophile posting, and that is TheGratefulNet.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you actually believe that the contraction for who is is the same as the possessive pronoun "whose"? How can you geeks know so much technical trivia but stumble over the simplest grammar?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it's just like homeopathy then.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

Using a protocol that absolutely requires perfectly identical conductor lengths on internal PCBs can be solid engineering.

Using that protocol outside of separate units, over flexible wiring, is questionable, since there is no control over wiring specs, thermal expansion, wiggling in the cable etc..

Which is probably the reason the Denon Link cable is that expensive: Ethernet cabling is probably incompatible with that protocol and the optimal cabling for the protocol requires very low tolerances for everything.

Which is not to say the Denon Link cable is anything but price gouging: solid engineering would've either
- required rigid connectors between units where length is independent of wiggling and twisting of a cable
- put all the components inside the same box to get over the need of external connectors
- design and use a protocol that increases the wire length tolerance
- use a cabling that already has identical strand lenghts (DVI or HDMI?`)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Nursie]

Well not only that but there's error checking and correction built into most media and a lot of protocols, so I'd be damn surprised, even if you did have bit degradation, if that amounted to anything on the other end.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[hufman]

I don't think this has to do with the length of time that a wireless signal takes to be transmitted. I think it's affected by the length of time that the music from the rest of band takes to travel through the air.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[SpeZek]

Even if you shave your inner ears, the electrical signalling in your brain can have a minute effect on how you perceive sounds. True audiophiles remove their brain.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[molecular]

The speed of sound in air is about 35cm/sec.

WHAT?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=speed%20of%20sound

The speed of sound at sea level is 340.29 m / s

1cm = 0.01m, so 35cm = 0.35m, therefore you're off by a factor of 10^3

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[nitehawk214]

God dammit, stop fucking responding to this TheGratefulNet guy. He has successfully trolled all of slashdot. Look at his profile, he has responded to every single insightful and informative comment with bullshit.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[sribe]

Yes, well. Are you aware that the speed of sound is somewhere around .0000005 the speed of light?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

but running pairs next to each other interferes. THIS is why they use unequal length PAIRS. PAIRS. that's the key, each pair 'beats' at a slightly diff frequency (swr, really) and there is some natural attenuation due to this.

??? For equal length parallel runs if twisted pair, please describe how radiated emissions from an aggressor twisted pair are injected differentially onto a victim differential pair thus creating perceptible noise at the receiver. All the twisted pair noise injection I have witnessed is common mode which is easily rejected with a common mode choke or a differential opamp.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[u38cg]

You're doing it wrong. You need to charge *more* for your spit-shined cable, not less. Cheaper cable is just clearly cheaper. Can't you hear the bits screaming in pain, man?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Bluesman]

With 16-bit or 24-bit words, there's a fair chance that that bit will hit one of the most significant bits of the audio word.

Even at the bare minimum sampling rate, this would cause a sudden spike for 1/22,000th of a second, and an equally sudden return to the "appropriate" level. This is an extremely high frequency artifact, which would likely get filtered out by any number of low-pass filters or by the speaker cones themselves.

You can try this yourself: find a .wav file and change one byte of it in a hex editor. Try to hear the difference between that and the original.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[mgrivich]

If you assist a shady deal, you share responsibility for that shady deal. If you have the choice of assisting in a shady deal, or selling nothing, the better choice is to sell nothing. Of course the best option is to figure out how to make money without selling dishonest goods. You also seem to be saying, "It is the customer's fault for being an idiot." Tell me when you car gets stolen, is it your fault for not putting a tracker on it? When you get mugged, is it your fault for not taking combat training? We can't be good at everything. It is the moral obligation of the experts to not steal from the non-experts.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

The bits may LOOK the same but they're SAD! On the INSIDE!!!

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Greetings Mr Record Producer.

There's a world of misery in high end audio these days. First off, I do NOT have a high end DVD player, as I have yet to find a DVD player with decent enough audio out. But, I and my neighbour both have really awesome stereo systems and we regularly test different cables and suchlike, and oddly enough, cabling, even for digital, does make a difference, sometimes dramatic.

My system:
Computer: iBook, USB to (DAC)
CD: Rotel 855, spdif out to (DAC):
DAC: Musical Fidelity DAC, w/ M.F. power unit, kimber cable to:
Pre: Bryston, to:
Amp: B&K, using amazingly cheap yet excellent flat audio cable to:
Speakers: Home built. SEAS 8in woofers with 5in Audax mids and 1 in tweeters, in ported forward firing towers.
I also have a turntable: SOTA Comet with a REGA tonearm and Sumiko Blue Point Cart that goes to a Rotel ttable preamp. I also have an old Onkyo FM tuner that I rarely use.

My friend's system: Copmuter: IBM thinkpad, USB to DAC
CD: Rotel 855, spdif out to DAC:
DAC: Benchmark to:
Pre: Melos optical, to
Amp: Phase Linear 400 to
Speakers: Watson Lab 10s (monster towers. Filled with Audax drivers)

And we did a series of tests. Our results were:

1. The best listening on both systems was this arrangement:
24bit FLAC files on Computer via USB to DAC to AMP to SPEAKERS.
The FLAC sounds better than CD because of the error correction in the CD player accounting for defects in the CD, dust, finger prints, vagrant cruft, the fact that the discs aren't perfectly circular, etc.

2. Getting good electricity was paramount - plugging directly to the wall socket noticeably screwed with the sound.

3. We found that the Preamps very very very slightly altered the sound stage. We both have high quality passive preamps, and they shouldn't change anything, but they did. The Bryston was less affecting than the Melos. We swapped preamps one day, and decided the Melos sounded a wee tiny bit nicer, but was slightly more tiring with my speakers and amp. As a consequence, the ever so slightly better sound was to go directly from the DAC to the AMP.

4. Next to solid electric provided by power conditioners, cabling made a big difference. We both use fairly high end Kimber cables, so that is not the issue. What is supremely weird is the USB cable made a difference. We had some junk USB cables sitting around and used those. Then we both chipped in and got a stupidly expensive ($85) USB cable. It sounded great. That afternoon, I bought a hard drive that came with a USB cable. The FREE CABLE sounded better. No shit. On both systems. So, we got our money back on the USB cable and took our families out for pizza and beer.

Also, the SPDIF cable made a huge difference. The cheap plastic SPDIF lightpipe thingie sucked. It wreaked havoc with the soundstage. However, the SPDIF RCA style optical was WAY better. Why? No idea.

5. The second best arrangement was with the Preamps back in the system. Frankly, the differences were tiny. My neighbour noticed it more than me.

6. We both have shorter cable lengths. We both used to have longer cables, but after repeated testing on both systems, the longest cable either of us now has is 1 meter, except, or course, for the speaker cable. The speaker cable is an interesting issue. For years I used heavy duty lamp cord. Then I bought balanced studio TRS cables. Then I figured out, any decent cable is just fucking copper. Pure copper. It's NOT the cable: it's the interconnects. building my own cables is do-able as I can buy high end silver interconnects, and solder them to pure copper cables. I still have some Kimber cables, but it's mostly home built.

People poo poo home built, as if a kit is inferior. If you're careful and precise, and know how the stuff works, homebrew gear can be VASTLY superior. Example: I bought a pair of Polk Audio Monitor 5s at a pawn shop for $60. I used them until a tweeter failed. The cabinets were in PERFECT cond

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[BetterSense]

I never argue with audiophiles that they can't hear a difference. I even agree that their magic rocks, etc. can make their system sound different. I insist, however, that there is no change whatsoever in the output of the system. Just as you said, some products can make a stereo sound different without changing the output of the stereo system whatsoever. The listening happens in the brain. If a magic rock makes their system sound better to them, well, is it really a waste of money?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[nabsltd]

I don't think that asking "how english [sic] works" of someone who does not understand correct capitalization and punctuation is a productive use of time.

It's not as if you can't use upper case letters (since you sometimes do)...it's just that you don't know when to use them.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[BronsCon]

They were born with one?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[emt377]

That doesn't apply to digital data. If a 1 is sent and is received as a "0.8" or a "1.2", it will still be interpreted as a 1.

This is not the issue with SPDIF. SPDIF has a variable data rate and the clock is embedded in the modulation. The source can (and will!) vary its transmission rate. The model is that you have a mechanical CD transport that reads bits off a disk, sending them down a wire as they're decoded. Because the transport is physical its actual rotational speed will vary. The disks also vary (within tolerances) in density on the disk itself; the drive mechanism is PLL locked to the disk contents, not a master clock. If the pits on the disk get denser it slows down a bit, when they get sparser it speeds up.

This model is called streaming. When A/V engineers talk about streamed data, like an Elementary Stream (ES), this is what they mean. MPEG-2 is also a streamed model for instance; if you read the specs you'll find bounds and tolerances on data rates, intermediate buffers, jitter, etc. It's how the standards are created. They're not anything resembling IP datagrams, the closest you'll get to that is transport streams which basically packetize and mux multiple elementary streams into a transport stream. The reason the models are created like this is that audio and video generally and sent down completely independent paths and need to retain the their sync. Or at least that was the reasoning when the standards were created, these days it's mostly just a pain in the rear.

If you run two self-clocked signals at variable rates down two wires of different lengths, the receiver will see the bitstreams arrive at a slight skew. Since they're both variable rate to begin with it's no trivial problem to try to heuristically determine when the bits were actually sent, or read off the disk, or were meant to be read of the disk when it was mastered. The issue isn't whether the clocks will be off, but whether it's audible.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed. Subjective tests have to be double blind otherwise they are scientifically invalid and meaningless.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[jo_ham]

Who modded the parent post troll?! The above information is a fact. A readable, look-up-able fact.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[ThreeGigs]

Egads, man.

its the same that POTS uses

Bzzzt, wrong. POTS uses CAT3, which is untwisted. Straight bundled wires.

THIS is why they use unequal length PAIRS

Bzzt again. That is why they use different _twist_rates_ , the differing lengths is simply a result of that.

Twisted pairs are twisted so as to equalize exposure of each wire to external EMF interference. Straight wires can act as antennas and shields, where one wire is subject to EMF energy while shielding the other, thus creating an imbalance in voltage which can at best flip a bit on the wire, or at worst create enough of a differential to arc over your electronic bits at either end. Twisting exposes each wire equally, so the received energy cancels itself out.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... First, POTS often doesn't use twisted pair (look at most any phone cable in your house) and it's not differential but a DC current loop. Second differential is not an encoding but a signaling method. The "twisted" part isn't for self shielding, but to reduce common mode rejection. Essentially the two legs of the differential pair will receive equal noise from an adjacent noise source and the differential receiver can filter out this common mode noise (know as common mode noise rejection).

Also, based on another one of your posts, "twist length" has nothing to do with the relative lengths of each wire in a pair. It's basically how tightly the cables are twisted. If you have 10 twists per meter (10cm twist length) or 100 twists per meter (1cm twist length), both legs of the pair have the same length (although they are BOTH longer but the same length in the 100 twist case).

I really hope you're not an engineer.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DavidTC]

It's sorta like the lottery. It's a stupid tax.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

->. Getting good electricity was paramount - plugging directly to the wall socket noticeably screwed with the sound.

Hey where do you get your electricity from? Flying a kite in a storm I suppose?

I've known "audiophiles" to claim some pretty wild stuff, so I have to ask.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[AmiMoJo]

So what you are saying is that two guys spent large amounts of money on hifi gear and now both of you can hear a difference between digital cables which all the science and testing says are the same?

Psychology is always a problem with this sort of thing. Unless you can show that you can tell the difference in double blind tests then I'm afraid you won't be able to convince me. Every time people have done double blind tests the results have shown that they can't tell the difference between cheap digital cables and expensive ones, probably because there isn't any.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[GameboyRMH]

Hmm, mod parent interesting. GP was probably compensating so that the music would sound synchronized when it reached him out in the crowd, but people standing near the stage were probably noticing that the guitar (or whatever) was out of sync.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Hatta]

And we did a series of tests.

Were they properly blinded? If not, they mean nothing.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DavidTC]

If a SDPIF cable starts losing bits, it will be rather noticeable. It will be full of pops and clicks.

Having a 'bad signal' without it being blatantly obvious is near impossible, and if you get a bad signal, I suggest you move your audio equipment further away from your unshielded nuclear reactor or your kilowatt FM transmission tower or unwrap it from around powerline step-down transformers, or whatever the fuck is causing the problem.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[AmiMoJo]

It's like going to a fancy restaurant. The food might taste the same or even worse than a moderately priced on, but you got dressed up and paid a lot of money for it so you feel like the whole thing is a bit higher "quality". Quality being an entirely subjective measurement.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[maestroX]

I'm curious: can you hear the difference when using unequal cable lengths?

Yes.
It is common knowledge that the human body is not built symmetrically and distance between ear and brain vary from one another.
I usually tug along my portable CAT scanner for adjusting the cable lengths properly and provide my customers with the best aural experience possible.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[seebs]

I might believe some of this if it survived double-blind testing. Without that, you're just comparing Monster Cables to coat hangers.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[skelterjohn]

To make it so it sounded synchronized to him, he would only have to sing normally with the music. Unless you mean make it so the amplified version of his voice was in sync, in which case it would sound great to everyone *except* him.

Since only one of those requires effort, and he said there was effort involved, I'm gonna say it sounded great to the front row as well as the back.

Assuming the music was great in the first place. s/great/in sync/

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DavidTC]

I'm having trouble figuring out, exactly, how this would be relevant anyway.

I mean, what it is delayed compared to? I don't understand. Is there some signal path that isn't using this sort of wire? Aren't all the wires in CAT5e twisted the same amount? Where exactly is the 'delay' coming in?

And, even if there is, are they asserting that their wires are within 0.5% tolerance in length in the first place? Really? On a meter of cabling, that's 5mm. Connectors are bigger than that. The inside connectors hooking them into the system are longer than that.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Opportunist]

Nope. Sorry. When I go to a fancy restaurant, the price is not just the grub. Much of the price is presentation. You have waiters with style. You have fine silverware and porcelain. you have nice, clean linen table cloth and table decoration (not to mention the decoration of the room) and all the whole fancy crap.

You might argue that some of the price tag of that expensive amp or speaker set is in "decoration", i.e. design. But a cable nobody ever gets to see?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DJRumpy]

Speaker wiring should be at a minimum, shield from external signals and crosstalk. I used to 100+ feet of speaker wire in my home. It used to pick up transmissions of some sort, meaning I could hear audio from the speakers with the stereo turned off. I never could figure out exactly what I was hearing, but it was clearly words of some sort (actually if some one could shed some light on this I would be grateful).

All that said, you can buy decent speaker wire for a few bucks, not $500 ;)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DavidTC]

Yeah, that's what I keep saying.

It is possible to 'degrade' digital audio with really crappy connections or very bad interference. And when I say 'really', and 'very', I mean really and very.

At which point the entire thing will turn into click and pops and hisses. Horrible, obviously, total failure.

You can't have 'poor quality' digital audio. You either have digital audio, or you have digital gibberish, or at least digital gibberish mixed into digital audio.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[emt377]

Of course it does, because the HDMI signal is 165MHz+ (HDMI 1.0, later added higher modes). It matters for two digital devices to talk to each other, but there's no way a human could recognize picosecond jitter in the decoded video or audio which runs in kilohertz for audio and hertz for video.

HDMI isn't clock jitter prone though since it's fixed to a negotiated rate. The audio component, if I remember correctly (I haven't looked at HDMI in a few years) is packetized between video lines (or is it frames, I forget) in a negotiated format, transmitted at the video clock rate. The rate has to stay within some fraction of sample period or the receiver loses sync. (Resulting in a momentary flicker as it resyncs.)

In SPDIF the rate isn't fixed but has to fall within tolerances. There is no fixed clock; instead it's inferred from looking at the data stream (each bit makes two transitions for this purpose). The purpose of Denon Link (which works just fine with a $3 UTP cable from monoprice.com, guaranteed) is to extend SPDIF to more than two channels.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Ethernet signals travel at a very large fraction of the speed of light

0.59c isn't THAT large.

http://stason.org/TULARC/networking/lans-ethernet/3-11-What-is-propagation-delay-Ethernet-Physical-Layer.html

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

You clearly haven't tried it, at least not with calm music. Here, try this. That's a single-sample, single-channel glitch at around second 16, created by changing a single byte in a WAV file with a hex editor (and then encoding to Vorbis for bandwidth reasons - this does not affect the effect of the glitch significantly). It's quite obvious.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

The problem is there are no error correction or CRC mechanisms in I2S digital audio and S/PDIF digital audio, which are by far the most common. S/PDIF does parity and the receiver can mask (not correct) errors if it's smart enough, but don't count on it.

Things like retransmissions are taken for granted in communications protocols, and things like CRCs are taken for granted in storage media, but digital audio streaming interfaces are really quite simple in comparison.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[wgoodman]

the RCA style optical cable?

It's one or the other.. not both.

Then, after you go on about how much you spend on cables, then you say you like lamp cord as speaker wire because all cables are just copper.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

You can have poor quality digital audio, in one very specific case that audiophiles love to extend to the rest of the world: (very) jittery clocks caused by self-clocking modulation with no buffering or cleanup at the receiver side. This is what they call jitter. It's a true effect and it does affect signal quality at the output (how audible it is is subject to debate). The issue is that digital signal data is digital, but digital signal clocks are analog: the timing is determined by "analog" clock edges (time isn't quantized). This is fine for periodic simple clocks, since any distortion will be uniform and the result will still be a stable clock. However, once you merge clock and data into one stream (like S/PDIF), the recovered clock has artifacts that depend on the data and the kind of degradation that the signal suffered after traveling through the wire. The actual clock is still a clock, it's just that its edges are no longer uniformly spaced. If you feed this to a dumb DAC that clocks from its input, you get audio samples that aren't exactly uniform, and this is a measurable effect that could conceivably affect audio quality. Specific DAC types (sigma-delta etc) may or may not further aggravate this.

Thing is this only affects the specific circumstance of self-clocking protocols and dumb DACs with no digital processing, clock regeneration, or buffering. Add any of those and the issue goes away entirely, and we're back in the purely digital world where things either work perfectly or suck completely.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Khyber]

The female navy Admiral that was responsible for FORTRAN (I think) says that every nanosecond a pulse of electricity can travel down one foot of copper wire.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[smaddox]

Unless you did a double-blind (single-blind at absolute minimum) study, this is all completely useless evidence. It is circumstantial at best.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[theLOUDroom]

What's funny about this is that you never mention the use of even one single piece of lab test equipment.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Headphones have a higher impedance than normal speakers but a decent signal cable will eliminate any problems. I mean a $10 cable won't be recognizable from a $5000 one. If the headphones have a very high impedance, or use a dedicated amplifier, then they of course must be treated as a high impedance device with all those precautions you usually take when dealing with these beasts. In that case you need also a low capacitance cable, screened and not twisted.
Normal ethernet cable (which makes excellent speakers cable) is unsuitable for high impedance signals because its internal capacitance would limit the frequency bandwidth acting as a low pass filter, but in this scenario a few meters of old cheap RG58, the one used decades ago in 10 BASE 2 ethernet, which works reliably up to several hundred megahertz, will make no difference from a $500/meter signal cable.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

hint: you can't fully undo jitter at the reclocking phase. you can attenuate some but if the source adds jitter then you can't magically take it all 'back' via reclocking.

Yeah, you can. See, this is where you audiophiles fail: you take some word that refers to a real concept and mangle it into fairy tales that have nothing to do with reality.

Jitter is real, it affects craptacular dumb DACs driven by a clock recovered from a self-clocking signal, and it's eliminated completely by any form of clocked digital processing or buffering on the signal after clock recovery. Or in other words, yes, it exists, no, it doesn't affect 99% of AV receivers out there.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[greg1104]

The purpose of Denon Link nowadays is to provide a better path to line up the signal and clock on audio it transmits. It's not taking the audio data, converting it into packets, and sending it over something Ethernet-like. As such, some of the criticisms that are based on presuming it operates just like a network cable are misinformed. It's unlikely the cable is anything special, but reasoning about it from the position that it's just transmitting Ethernet isn't appropriate.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[kdemetter]

Because the human mind is a very lenient compiler.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[greg1104]

The issues here are not around carrying digital data, they're about carrying a clock signal. In the Denon Link example, there is no data besides the clock anymore, there's no data bits to be extracted, so comments about zeros and ones aren't even relevant to that case. If I send you the right data, but it's at the wrong time, that's not really the right data anymore, and that's going to be audible once that lag ("clock jitter") becomes high enough and random enough. I doubt that's really the case here, because of the internals of how the clocks are transmitted and recovered nowadays make it really unlikely for jitter to show up in any quantity, but looking at the data bits isn't the right area to discuss what might be happening. Digital audio transmission doesn't just have to get the right bits there, they have to show up at the right time, and in some cases you can't just put a buffer and reclock in the middle.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume he means an expensive power conditioner.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Call us back when you've actually performed a real ABX test. (see http://home.provide.net/~djcarlst/abx_wire.htm for examples)

Until then, you're just another audiophile wanker who's hearing imaginary differences.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[geoskd]

there is no digital error correction that fixes clock skew. error correction is one thing and clock dejittering is entirely separate. apples and oranges.

And in Ethernet, clock skew doesn't mean what you think it does. The Ethernet protocol has built in methods to deal with clocking issues (which is partly why there is a maximum Ethernet cable length). Otherwise, the length of the various twisted pairs in Ethernet makes no practical difference. In the protocol, there is no correlation between signals sent over any one pair vs another. They are independent signals, which require no correlation with the other pairs. SPDIF, is similar in its designation of signals, and similarly does not care much about the length of the pairs. As you mentioned, there is no retry opportunity with real time digital audio, but the only question is what percentage of data packets are unrecognizable on the receiving end. With Cables less than 2 meters long, and a transmission rate of less than 10Mbit, coat hangers (not even twisted together), would likely have a vanishingly small lost packet percentage. Regular $5 Ethernet cables would loose less than 1 packet in every 100,000 hours of use. If you want to verify this for yourself, get a copy of ethereal (now called wireshark), a small Hub (not a router), and plug your hub in between the source and the receiver, and plug you PC with ethereal into the hub, and sniff away. You can then see the number of dropped packets, the number of collisions (should be zero because twisted pair Ethernet doesn't really have this problem anymore), and the total bandwidth used. You will find that the difference between the Denon cable, a radio shack $5 cable, and a coat hanger jig is practically zero for such short lengths. (the coat hanger jig might have a few badly formed packets, but even that could be due to bad solder joints, sloppy connections.)

Any setup that has zero errors when used for Ethernet, will have zero errors when used for SPDIF: End of story.

-=Geoskd

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[gafisher]

Mea culpa. Electricity /still/ moves faster than the cited "15-20cm/sec," but but so does sound. Thanks for the correction.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[dotgain]

Yo. I don't know if you actually believe all this utter nonsense you're spouting, of it you're just trying to see what you can get away with, but nonetheless:

Thanks. You've caused a lot of knowledgeable people to stand up and correct your unending bullshit. From those people I've learned a thing or two that I didn't know before, and that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't been here today.

Again, whether you actually believe your bullshit, or you're just doing this for fun, cheers.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[dgatwood]

I would generally agree. If you're talking about data that never leaves the digital domain, you're correct. There's one exception, of course. If you have jitter in the clocking for an ADC, once the analog data is captured wrong, digital timing corrections can't readily correct it, though interpolation could to some degree.

That said, in this case, we're talking about pure digital data, which renders that argument moot. Clearly, any amount of timing jitter introduced in the digital domain can be corrected up until the point where you start getting bit errors, at which point the degradation would be so obvious that you would notice it immediately and you'd say the hardware was defective.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[mike260]

It's just a shame that all that cash goes to the least scrupulous companies.
Someone should start a rumour that the perfect speaker-casing material is Haitian rubble.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

I design GHz+ PHY controller logic for a major semiconductor company. I deal with both Tx and Rx deskew logic, as well as extensive clock domain crossings.

In short, you're incorrect. You *can* fully undo jitter at the "reclocking phase". As long as setup and hold times are not violated between the source data and clock (which it won't as many have pointed out), the data will be perfectly latched into the register on the receiver end. If the transmitted clock signal isn't strong enough to drive the Rx logic, as is often the case, then adding an oscillator and PLL will ensure that there isn't a clock domain crossing.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[chriso11]

The ONLY place where I expect the digital bit stream to have any problem is in the DAC (or when the sampling for the ADC). The BER (bit error rate) in a standard digital link at 192KHz audio is going to be on the order of 10^-10, which means 1error in every 18minutes of audio. I doubt even trained ears can notice a 1bit error over that interval. And heck, the interface is probably even better - 10^-12 BER isn't out of reach.

As for jitter: if you have a 30KHz signal, which only your audiophile dog can hear, a 10ps jitter RMS (which can be considered around 70ps pk-pk jitter) would be translated by the DAC into >115dB SNR; and it would not introduce distortion, only noise ( a good chunk of it would be then filtered out by the system lowpass filters in the audio stream). If you are dealing with a 3KHz tone, then the SNR would be >135dB.

I've had to fight jitter problems on high speed ADCs (100+MSPS) in the past; you have to do BPF and clock divider techniques there; audio systems don't need that. To me, 192KHz is DC. The wavelength of the ~10Mbit/s interface clock is around 100ft - and for a digital system you would only close the eye by 1% with a 1foot mismatch.

   

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[dotgain]

I love it. You talk about "attenuating" jitter.

Y'know how I said earlier that I wasn't sure whether you're trolling or dead-pan? Yeah, I take that back now.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[mike260]

Mod parent +1, Danceable

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[dotgain]

It's a fact that SPDIF doesn't use ACKs/ retransmits, yes. But that's not even relevant in this case. Clock recovery / regeneration never had anything to do with that.

While -1, Troll is not the correct mod for an insubstantial argument, at this stage the GP is quite deserving of the downmods. I'm surprised more of his posts aren't -1, Funny.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[geoskd]

I actually build my own spdif hardware and audio dacs (my audio gear is all DIY stuff). and I do use i2s as an 'interconnect' between spdif receivers and the dac chips (when we build dacs, we take great care to layout the pcb traces to ENSURE that the i2s lines are exact(!) lengths. its just proper engineering.)

There is a vast difference between building your own equipment and designing it. Building something from a kit requires only knowledge of the assembly techniques required and an ability to follow, paint-by-number style, instructions. Designing something requires fundamental understanding. It is clear from your numerous posts that you are clearly skilled as an assembly technician, but are equally clearly lacking in formal design skill. If you were in fact a skilled *designer*, you would understand the way in which the SPDIF spec is designed and why they made the decisions they did. Poor quality cabling is a design consideration that can, and is, compensated for in the design of the IIS specification. As such, only minimal quality cabling is required. In fact, IIS borrowed heavily from Ethernet, and the two specs are remarkably similar. If you were a skilled designer, you would also be aware that modern interconnect specifications (anything more recent than 1990), are designed with tolerances for signal skew, crosstalk, and hundreds of other little annoyances that engineers deal with. The long and short is that the assembly instructions are written to strict tolerances so that even if an amateur assembler is sloppy in the construction of the final product, it will still be within needed tolerances and function as expected. A good engineer always works form the assumption that all parts of the project they are not directly involved with will be done slipshod, and that their part must be able to tolerate the faults of the other components. Not all engineers are good, but interface specs are almost always designed by good engineers because they are the only ones who understand enough of the project to be able to tie it all together in an interface spec.

-=Geoskd

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[dotgain]

Given that "twist length" and "wire length" relate to each other inversely, I don't think one means the other in any context.

1mm twist = much more copper to travel over. 2m twist = almost completely untwisted.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Schaffner]

Well, it was Grace Hopper and she's the mother of COBOL, not FORTRAN. She used to give out "nanoseconds" at her lectures. They were 11.9 inch lengths of wire, which represents how far electricity can go in a nanosecond. A friend of mine still has one of these "nanoseconds" he got from her.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Sir_Lewk]

Note to the moderators:

Disagreeing with a post and pulling quotes from wikipedia does not automatically warrent an Insightful or Informative mod. The post must also actually be insightful or informative.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Psychopath]

First, we both agree that expensive audiophile cables only exist to separate fools from their money.

However, your explanation assumes that the Cat-5 used by all audio equipment conforms to 10/100/1000Base-T wiring standards, which it may or may not.

Nothing prevents any manufacturer from creating a proprietary interconnect that happens to use standard Cat-5 twisted-pair copper wiring with RJ-45 connectors. They could transmit 8-bits of data in parallel with no error correction over all eight wires if they chose to do so. They could even transmit an analog signal.

I still agree with your conclusion, just not your argument.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[honkycat]

I dunno, if they're honest about the specs, I don't see that it's shady. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for people who throw multiple $100s on a cable without taking the time to understand the technology a bit. If you have the disposable income to do that and don't care about wisely investing in your equipment, that's your own problem. A market of morons with more dollars than sense exists, and I don't blame Denon or Monster Cable or whatever for catering to it. Anyone with limited funding will take the time to decide whether they need magic in their cables or not anyway.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Fnord666]

and provide my customers with the best aural experience possible.

I hope you weren't dictating this post in a public place. It could definitely be taken the wrong way.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Culture20]

Ethernet signals travel at a very large fraction of the speed of light

0.59c isn't THAT large.

Large enough for your mother.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[HungryHobo]

I'm guessing the guys who sell these cables are just very very smart engineers
http://xkcd.com/670/

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anubis350]

Speaker wiring should be at a minimum, shield from external signals and crosstalk. I used to 100+ feet of speaker wire in my home. It used to pick up transmissions of some sort, meaning I could hear audio from the speakers with the stereo turned off. I never could figure out exactly what I was hearing, but it was clearly words of some sort (actually if some one could shed some light on this I would be grateful).

Quite obvious, Ghosts!

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[hedronist]

I think you are trying to refer to Grace Hopper. She was a pioneer in the use of compilers (as opposed to assembly language). One of the languages she created was FLOW-MATIC, which evolved to become COBOL.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[geminidomino]

I usually tug along my portable CAT scanner for adjusting the cable lengths properly and provide my customers with the best aural experience possible.

As opposed to the guys selling the "audiophile" gear, who are solely concerned with giving their customers a harrowing anal experience...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Man On Pink Corner]

this is what its about. ethernet cable (modern spec) has UNEQUAL LENGTH WIRES.

facepalm

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[BikeHelmet]

"designed for the audio enthusiast"

Those people are fools! I only buy Monster cables.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Dahamma]

One reason: any GOOD engineer also understands the value of time vs money, and doesn't need to waste that valuable time making a simple cable by hand when a perfectly good mass produced cable can be purchased for a few dollars.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marqs]

The ones that meade UDP and RDP for example.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[PopeRatzo]

People poo poo...

Greetings back, Mr Audiophile Snob.

Tell you what. Forget about "double-blind".

Let's have a little wager: We'll take a system and try cables that you claim are significantly different. I don't need you to identify the different cable types, or even to tell me which cable "sounds better". All I want you to do is judge whether or not I have changed cables in between auditions of any music you choose.

We can even do a test between the cheap TOSlink and coaxial/RCA SPDIF cables that you claim are "WAY better" (caps yours).

Now I'm not talking about using any DC Live-Forensics software for analysis, but just your plain old ears.

If you can tell me correctly when I've changed cables and when left them alone, and can do it 8 out of 10 times, I'll apologize for calling you full of shit.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

If it is NOT packing the data into packets, sending it over a regular Ethernet stack and reassembling it with all checksums calculated and all error correction done, then they're doing it wrong.

And no, latency is not an issue: as long as the audio and video signal is perfectly synchronized, it will not matter if the output is 3ms behind the actual laser readout.

Packetize the data, make sure audio/video keeps perfect synch and then use regular software with large buffers to leave room for retransmits and forward error correction to work their magic.

If any system that COULD use software instead relies on the physical link layer to provide a perfect bit-for-bit transfer, it is a kludge, not engineering.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[fm6]

Don't get me started on cables. When I got my first component stereo, I sprung for a spool of "speaker cable". OK, not a lot of money, but lamp wire, which is much cheaper, works just as well. Probably better, since it's better insulated and doesn't kink as easily.

But what I should ask is this: what do you mean by "better"? Often the only difference between two products is their branding. But people still buy the more expensive brand. I've caught myself doing it, even though it's something I try to watch out for.

(My favorite branding weirdness: Whole Foods buys Crystal Geyser bottled water, puts a Whole Foods label on it, and then puts it on the shelf next to its "competitor" at exactly the same price.)

So this is one of those caveat emptor situations. People who make stuff are always going to get you to pay as much as possible for the stuff they make. It's how the system works. Really, there's nothing unethical about using branding to jack at up a price, as long as you don't lie about the differences with the other brands. (As they often do.) Of course, jacking up the price by a factor of 100 is a bit much, but it's really not any worse than Scotch Tape for $1.25 a roll versus generic for $1.00. Ultimately, it's a question of the consumer being well-informed.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Mal-2]

Speaker wiring should be at a minimum, shield from external signals and crosstalk. I used to 100+ feet of speaker wire in my home. It used to pick up transmissions of some sort, meaning I could hear audio from the speakers with the stereo turned off. I never could figure out exactly what I was hearing, but it was clearly words of some sort (actually if some one could shed some light on this I would be grateful).

Your terrorist neighbor was running a numbers station, obviously, and you are a terrorist sympathizer for not reporting it!

Seriously, I bet it was just passing CB radios, or maybe old-school VHF cordless phones.

Mal-2

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you have just never heard the gains to be had from optimal audiophile speaker cables.

The cables have to meet two criteria:

  - Shielded coax cable with 8 ohm impedance. It is basic transmission line theory to match your 8 ohm speaker load with an 8 ohm transmission line.

  - The Oxygen Free High Conductitivity copper used in the cable must have a thickness greater than the skin depth of the lowest frequency to be passed through the cable.. say about 15 Hz for the audiophile ear.

Now meeting these two criteria means your speaker cables have a huge diameter. It is truly impressive to see such massive cables between the amplifier and speakers. But let me tell you, there is nothing better than the sound though these audiophile level speaker cables.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[SimonTheSoundMan]

You can drill 1mm holes in CD's and it shouldn't skip or sound odd. If a bit of dust on the CD makes it sound bad, your CD player needs calibrating or fixing.

You're system would have sounded less clean with the premaps in the signal chain. You MF DAC has a preamp already, the gain is high enough, why use another gain stage? Less is better, unless you want a certain sound.

SPDIF RCA style optical

You what? It's one or the other. I guess you mean SPDIF over copper terminated with RCA plugs. Sometimes the clock isn't carried down fibre optic SPDIF but is over copper, or vice-versa. Your DAC will lock on to the clock of the USB interface if there is one, that would make a difference in quality.

You should have spent half your money on acoustic treatment, you would have a far better sounding system. :)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[SimonTheSoundMan]

You're = Your.

Before the pedantic ./ Russian spelling and grammar army come to get me.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[PhunkySchtuff]

24bit FLAC files on Computer via USB to DAC to AMP to SPEAKERS.
 
The FLAC sounds better than CD because of the error correction in the CD player accounting for defects in the CD, dust, finger prints, vagrant cruft, the fact that the discs aren't perfectly circular, etc.

OK, your credentials just went out the window with this statement. If the digital error correction is doing it's thing (being, you know, digital) it is a perfect reproduction of the data that was on the disk. If it's not doing it's thing, and is corrupting the digital signal, you'll hear it as pops and clicks. If the 24-bit FLAC sounds better than the 16-bit CD, it's because the FLAC has more dynamic range. It may also be at a higher sample rate as well, also generally giving better results.

Also, the SPDIF cable made a huge difference. The cheap plastic SPDIF lightpipe thingie sucked. It wreaked havoc with the soundstage. However, the SPDIF RCA style optical was WAY better. Why? No idea.

The plastic TOSLINK interface is immune to electrical interference, however I have heard numerous people claim it doesn't sound as good as a coaxial SPDIF interface. The RCA style interface you're using is definitely NOT optical, it's electrical.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[PhunkySchtuff]

No, speaker cables can have an adverse effect on the sound. If you take the typical super-thin wire supplied with a lot of even half-decent stereo systems, something like 20 or 24 AWG, and substitute it with something more hefty, even if it's your typical lamp cord, you will hear a (slight) improvement in sound. Going further to the "handmade in a high-altitude monastery, on the second full moon in the month, and only touched by the hands of virgins" speaker cable, there is no difference between that and coat-hanger wire.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[karnal]

Actually, you will see collisions because you just plugged a hub in between your source and receiver.

Getting something like an Ethernet Tap or a switch that can mirror a port would be an option as well. Problem here is that if the switch/Tap doesn't have a capture buffer and you max out the link both ways, you will have issues getting all of the packets to your capture machine (assuming all connections are made at the same speed - sender, receiver and capture port)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Jeremy Erwin]

Does ethernet use low voltage differential signaling?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Jeremy Erwin]

The Cable that Denon supplies with its universal players is 1.5 m. The ultra premium cable is also 1.5 m. But what if you wanted to connect a player over a longer distance-- say 15m? It would be nice to have a firm spec so that you could properly source a cable that will sync.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Jeremy Erwin]

Digital may be digital, but they player's still spinning a disc. Its still has a fan. A audiophile company might be able to reduce the operating noise of its player. I'm not sure that such improvements are really worth thousands of dollars, but a beefed up chassis is still worth something.

(I have a Sony ES SACD player I picked up for a song. It's essentially a rebadge of the plain old Sony, with the addition of a headphone jack, a heftier chassis, and a marginally cleaner power supply. I had an opportunity to inspect the player it was based on, and IMHO the controls of the ES player just feel a bit better. Is it worth a $250 premium? No... but then, I didn't pay the premium.)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Ralph Spoilsport]

So what you are saying is that two guys spent large amounts of money on hifi gear

Hahahaha!!!! No way, man. I spend as LITTLE as possible on my gear.

Computer: iBook- used. $400. $100 for external drive.
CD: Rotel 855 - free. A friend of mine gave it to me.
DAC: Musical Fidelity DAC - used $250
Pre: Bryston - used, $350
Amp: B&K - used, bought it from a friend moving overseas for $175
Speakers: Home built. SEAS 8in woofers with 5in Audax mids and 1 in tweeters, in ported forward firing towers. - The MDF / particle board I inherited when I bought my house. It was out in the garage. The SEAS I paid real money for - $250 each. The Audax were pulled from a dead pair of Watson Lab 7s (woofers were toast, crossover ruined) I got for $50.
I also have a turntable: SOTA Comet - used $450.
Rotel ttable preamp - used - $175.
Onkyo FM tuner - pawn shop $50.
Total Cost: $2300 for the entire pile, and: I spent 10 years putting it all together, so that's all of $230 a year - the price of a crappy boom box.

So, no I don't spend a lot on gear. I spend a lot on CDs. So far, I would calculate I have spent well over $20k on CDs.

You also wrote:

Every time people have done double blind tests the results have shown that they can't tell the difference between cheap digital cables and expensive ones, probably because there isn't any.

And if you BOTHERED to read what I wrote, you would have seen:

We had some junk USB cables sitting around and used those. Then we both chipped in and got a stupidly expensive ($85) USB cable. It sounded great. That afternoon, I bought a hard drive that came with a USB cable. The FREE CABLE sounded better. No shit. On both systems. So, we got our money back on the USB cable and took our families out for pizza and beer.

Where I was agreeing with you. So take your attitude and stick it where the sun don't shine, you dope.

RS

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Of course they couldn't tell the difference between Monster Cable and Coathangars. Everyone knows Monster Cable sucks balls.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Ralph Spoilsport]

You can drill 1mm holes in CD's and it shouldn't skip or sound odd. If a bit of dust on the CD makes it sound bad, your CD player needs calibrating or fixing.

Wrong. Listen to Oval. They made a career out of that kind of thing.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Ralph Spoilsport]

OK, your credentials just went out the window with this statement. If the digital error correction is doing it's thing (being, you know, digital) it is a perfect reproduction of the data that was on the disk. If it's not doing it's thing, and is corrupting the digital signal, you'll hear it as pops and clicks.

No. the error correction can be noticed through alterations in sound stage.

RS

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Vastad]

Regardless of whether this was double-blind tested or not, I love what you've done and you have inspired me to consider making DIY audio equipment. I'm wondering how difficult open-air headphones are as a DIY project....?

I know I've always wanted a portable pocket-sized pre-amp and those are obscenely expensive when bought pre-made or on commission. There was a guy who used to take commissions for them on eBay but he quit as even with the decent money, it wasn't worth the time and effort.
I don't like modern 'clicky' or touch-screen volume controls. Give me an old fashioned rotary knob any day and some of that sweet cross-gain magic.

Do you have any resources like websites or books you could recommend?

Thanks in advance!

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Meaning your sample rate would need to be in the GHz range, and which means if you can tell the difference, you would be able to "hear" VHF and UHF radio waves.

Er, yeah.

As soon as we start transmitting radio waves using ultrasonic transmitters instead of electromagnetic ones...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[PhunkySchtuff]

No, the error correction happens at such a low level in the decoding of data from an optical disc, that it doesn't introduce any meaningful delays, and the recovered data is bit-for-bit identical to the data that should have been read. If it isn't you're doing it wrong. If there is enough unrecoverable data that the ECC can't do it's thing, then you will hear it, but it will be totally obvious that there are errors.

Have a look at Reed-Solomon Error Correction. When reading data off a CD, the entire block is read, ecc codes and all. It's not as if an error forces the transport to backtrack and re-read the block to get the ecc codes if it doesn't get the data right the first time around, unless the CD skips which is a tracking error, it reads each block once and only once.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, don't try and reason with true believers.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DavidTC]

I'm not quite following. Are you saying there are DACs that don't...sync their own clock to the stream? Wouldn't that just result in gibberish as the entire thing desyncs?

Oh, wait, you mean they don't have a clock at all, I guess? They instantly decode the signal, and make that tone, and then make a new tone when they get some new bits, as fast as possible, with no regard to actually trying to decode the sounds at correct spacing?

Well, that's just stupid. I can see how that would, in a very slight manner, affect the sound. Although considering we're talking about nanoseconds here, this is of course more audiophile silliness.

But, anyway, the real question is: What the hell are 'audiophiles' doing using such a dumb design? Maybe that $25 DVD player with a digital input is like that, but surely that $5000 receiver has a signal buffer hooked to a clock?

Oh, it does? And they're just morons. Right, I forgot.

Actually, the real question is what the hell this has to do with microscopic differences in cable length anyway. Cable lengths don't alter the clock. Are we assuming multiple signals on different twisted pairs?

Aren't all devices that have RJ-45 (As opposed to the lower-end coax) already the highend stuff? Is there really any device at all that accepts an RJ-45 cable but can't clean up the clock?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

you're a fucking dumbass you faggot

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

Differential signalling: yes.
Low voltage: no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_signaling

Just like HDMI, DVI, USB and eSATA.

And they carry Gigabits per Second, i2s carries only 6.1 Megabit/s when playing SACDs or similar.

The simple fact that audiophile-grade interconnects are concerned with "jitter" point out the whole debacle.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[marcansoft]

Oh, wait, you mean they don't have a clock at all, I guess?

Most DACs don't have their own clock. They depend on a signal processor before them to provide the proper clock rate. If there is no such signal processor and the signal comes straight from a demodulated S/PDIF clock, then you get some jitter.

Clock syncing is actually a non-trivial problem, because clock rates tend not to be exact (and S/PDIF has no sample clocking - it just feeds data at whatever rate the sender chooses). A self-clocked DAC would end up drifting out of alignment with the source and have to either skip or duplicate some samples every now and then, which probably won't sound very good without some filtering. So a dumb DAC will always use whatever clock it gets from the input. Syncing is of course performed whenever you have a DSP, both because you have to do it and because a DSP has the hardware and software capable of doing it. And just about every S/PDIF receiver uses a DSP.

Oh, it does? And they're just morons. Right, I forgot.

Correct.

Actually, the real question is what the hell this has to do with microscopic differences in cable length anyway. Cable lengths don't alter the clock. Are we assuming multiple signals on different twisted pairs?

On S/PDIF clock and data are merged, so cable quality (which is tied to cable length) affects the recovered clock. Since the clock is tied to data, phase errors due to the cable do not result in a consistent phase error after clock recovery. As you degrade an S/PDIF connection, the recovered clock quality suffers until the point where you get data bit errors. Again, this is irrelevant for just about all S/PDIF receivers (which use a DSP); I'm just trying to explain where the original claimed issue comes from.

ren't all devices that have RJ-45 (As opposed to the lower-end coax) already the highend stuff? Is there really any device at all that accepts an RJ-45 cable but can't clean up the clock?

I don't know what the RJ-45 interface is about so I wouldn't know what to tell you here. It's been claimed it's I2S but I somehow doubt that. Anyway, the kind of "high-end" stuff made by "high-end" companies that also make "high-end" cables probably has lower chances of getting these kinds of issues right. It's what you get when companies are more interested in catering to bullshit audiophile claims than actual good design.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[AmiMoJo]

Total Cost: $2300

That's hardly a small amount. Most people listen to midi systems costing 1/10th of that.

I should point out at this point that my own set-up cost about £1300, but the difference is I bothered to do double blind tests which is why I use the stock cables that came with the equipment.

The FREE CABLE sounded better

You are not agreeing with me. I am saying that all your USB cables sounded exactly the same because they are pure digital and USB features error recovery anyway.

Try to understand that and then maybe you can post something intelligent in reply.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Joebert]

So what you're saying is that their mother can be satisfied faster than the speed of light ?
How would you know ?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Jeremy Erwin]

And therein lies the problem. Plain old Cat5 cable isn't shielded, so the signal might not propagate along a long cable. The audiophile cable is only 1.5m, as is the cable that is supplied with the player. If you needed a longer cable, you'd need some sort of specification.

The arrows, iirc, have something to do with the grounding--perhaps to avoid ground loops?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DavidTC]

Most DACs don't have their own clock. They depend on a signal processor before them to provide the proper clock rate.

Ah, now that I think about it, it makes more sense to say that that way. That's what I was thinking, except I forgot it would be called a DSP.

And it's probably a 75 cent chip that every single S/PDIF input has. In fact, I bet it's part of the spec, and you can't actually label the device as S/PDIF without it.

I can even figure out what's going on: Probably once, back in 1982, some incredibly crappy device that used an entirely different digital data format lazily didn't have a DSP. Thus, from then on, every single audiophile has lived under the theory that digital signals are instantly decoded to audio. Because their word operates on assumptions and rumors and no understanding.

I, OTOH, despite having almost no knowledge about this, or signal processing at all, know the entire damn point of a 'clock' on a signal is to use the signals at a specific time interval, not as soon as possible, and assume there's something in every device that accepts a 'clocked' signal to do exactly that.

On S/PDIF clock and data are merged, so cable quality (which is tied to cable length) affects the recovered clock. Since the clock is tied to data, phase errors due to the cable do not result in a consistent phase error after clock recovery.

Yes, but I'm still not seeing twisting has anything to do with anything. I can see arguments for a shorter cable, but if a moronic audiophile wants the absolute shortest cable, surely companies would sell ones in a billion different lengths, like a 4" cable, a 3.75" cable, a 3.5" cable, etc, instead of one that is 0.5% shorter thanks to slightly less twists. Or people would make their own cables.

Usually I can at least figure out what dumb theory audiophiles are operating off of, but this has me stumped.

The only thing I can guess out of this is that altering the twisting makes the wiring exactly the same length. Whereas in normal twisted pair they are deliberately not exactly the same length, to reduce crosstalk.

Of course, even then, the problem still isn't jitter. It's that one channel is playing a femtosecond out of sync with the other.

But only in imaginary audiophile land where audio equipment (and the human ear) has those tolerances, and doesn't do any sort of processing before sending the combined signals to a DAC...hey, wait a second, that doesn't even make sense. Something has to merge the signals before DACing them, and to do that, it has to rebuild them as a single signal, and...

...bah, this is so stupid I'm just going to give up.

As you degrade an S/PDIF connection, the recovered clock quality suffers until the point where you get data bit errors.

...and, thus, audiophiles use cables slightly more likely to get crosstalk.

Exactly the behavior I'd expect from them.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[DavidTC]

Yes, and the earthquake magically^Wpseudoscientifically^Wscientifically changed the phase state of the copper wiring there, making them a perfect superconductor.

Everyone buy scrap wiring torn out of Haitian buildings! No matter what it costs you.

Now we just need to get the recovery teams in on this, fund the rebuilding of their economy on the backs of morons^Waudiophiles.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[statusbar]

Your post is absolutely correct except that the CD Audio Error Correction is not always 'perfect'. On larger errors it will generate interpolated data.

--jeffk++

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[phoenix321]

The problem is that they use an inferior protocol over unsuitable media needing a ridiculously expensive cable to compensate. But we knew that, did we? :)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Jeremy Erwin]

Inferior to what? HDMI has its share of flaws.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol how is this modded Informative. He is totally incorrect.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Culture20]

So what you're saying is that their mother can be satisfied faster than the speed of light ? How would you know ?

I wish I could transfer my "funny" mod down to you. :)

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[tlhIngan]

OK, your credentials just went out the window with this statement. If the digital error correction is doing it's thing (being, you know, digital) it is a perfect reproduction of the data that was on the disk. If it's not doing it's thing, and is corrupting the digital signal, you'll hear it as pops and clicks. If the 24-bit FLAC sounds better than the 16-bit CD, it's because the FLAC has more dynamic range. It may also be at a higher sample rate as well, also generally giving better results.

You're assuming an audio CD actually performs error correction.

Which, it doesn't to a meaningful extent. It's also why the block size on audio is bigger than data (2300-ish vs. 2048 - the extra data is used for more resilient error correction). You have a primitive error detecting code, and a cheap error correcting code. Good players may make use of both, but most don't.

The reason you don't hear pops and crackles is because of the filtering on the analog side - the low-pass filters get rid of the majority of pops and crackles, and you're unlikely to hear LSB errors in the first place that make it beyond the filter.

Most CD players can't do a re-read because the access times are too slow - the anti-skip ones can, but thta's because they hide the re-seeks in the 5 or 10 second buffer, but it's still logic that must be implemented for little benefit.

When you rip a CD to FLAC, though, if you use a good ripper that can do C2 error correcting and detecting, and actually do it, you can get a cleaner rip. After all, if players actually used the data, we wouldn't need things like Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia. And many "copy protection" techniques relied on corrupting either the C2 or the data, leaving it to the traditional players to work fine, but the more advanced ones to mess up, or even regular DVD players.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[hazydave]

The issue isn't human perception, anyway.

But as far as that goes, it's usually down in the lower ranges of milliseconds, for things you're trained in.

Most musicians can hear delays on the order of 5-10ms, give or take.... this is why there's been so much effort, in things like MIDI and specialized audio drivers for computers, to keep things down to a few milliseconds of latency, tops.

R/C drivers notice the difference between 10ms and 20ms of latency very readily, particularly if they're driving higher-end racers (I designed one of the first all-digital R/C controllers). Here's the thing... you're driving a 12" car at an actual 60-70mph over a radio link. At that scale, lots of stuff can happen in a relatively short time.

For most things, people are far more forgiving about latencies... it's only special training that makes one sensitive to very fast things.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[hazydave]

And naturally, you did all of these tests double blind, so you know the results are not related in any possible way to expectations. Right?

A couple of truisms... the Sony/Philips optical over TOSlink is basically "cheap consumer crap" level digital. There's not a great deal of standardization of driver levels or receiver sensitivity, and this plastic. They all are...the standard here is plastic fibre. S/PDIF over a proper 75 ohm RCA cable is a much better bet. Better still is the AES/EBU digital connection over balanced cable, and usually XLR connectors... better in multiple ways, particularly if you need a long run. Like all modern serial streams, S/PDIF and AES/EBU contain data and clock in the same signal... you don't get jitter issues going digital to digital, but you can definitely get dropouts if the signal is corrupted along the way. Unfortunately, there's error correction and not usually any way to monitor it in consumer gear. Which leads to snake oil salesmen selling "high end" plastic optical cables that have magical properties.

TRS does you absolutely no good for speakers, or any other connection, unless you have differential drivers and receivers. If you're a noisy environment, naturally cable length may matter, but it's far more likely the cable shielding is the real issue. Signals between gear are usually either -10dBV for consumer gear or +4dBu for professional signals... low level enough that you need to worry about shielding. Again, balanced doesn't help here one bit unless you have balanced drivers and receivers. Speaker connections are measured in large values of volts, and not usually subject to noise problems. Sure, that does depend on environment... if you're setting up audio in a very noisy area (I did an audio setup at a carnival once, where the air was just full of crazy noise from multiple power generators) -- there's you're glad your PA uses shielded speaker wires (which it did, but we had problems with other cables picking up random audio frequency noise... a 15ft cable just held in the air measured nearly 2V on a handy volt meter).

Home built is fine... my Dad built his entire audio system back in the 1960s, including a huge speaker rig based on some Altec Lansing plans, all tube of course. And mono... stereo had not yet caught on. Of course, my Dad was designing very delicate analog measurement gear at Bell Labs for his day job. Not everyone should be building their own audio gear. And it's more difficult still to do it right "from scratch", rather than from a well designed kit.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[hazydave]

I2S was originally supposed to be a board-level interface anyway, not something you run across cables. Sure, that's done now, and it usually works, but it does invite the chance of clock issues. Good digital interfaces for over cable, like AES/EBU, Firewire, Ethernet, etc. are pure serial, with the clock embedded in the signal. That way, no possibility of data vs. clock skewing.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Opportunist]

You ARE aware that 10 ms is 10,000,000 ns, yes? We're talking about 7ns here.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[alexo]

In this case Denon aren't bad guys, they just aren't stupid. They had enough requests and knew these guys would simply go elsewhere to get what they wanted (another product they could sell people who, if they dropped a $100 bill on the ground, would think it a waste of time to stoop over and pick it up).

ObXKCD.

No shock

[darkitecture]

The audio industry being less than honest?

Say it ain't so!

Re:No shock

[Sycraft-fu]

I've never understood why you'd want to buy a "high end" Blu-ray player anyhow. Reason is I can see only two setups:

1) You own a low end TV and receiver, or maybe no receiver at all. You've got no digital inputs. Thus your Blu-ray player's DACs have to handle the conversion. However, their quality matters little. Why? Well you've got a low end setup. You clearly are not concerned with quality. As such a cheap player will do fine. Improvements to its DACs and supporting analogue circuitry won't be noticeable to you.

2) You own a high end TV/receiver and care a great deal about quality. In the case you hook the Blu-ray player up using HDMI. Reason is HDMI gives you the best signal. However in this case, the player isn't doing anything other than nabbing the data and passing it along. The analogue conversion happens in other units. So again, the quality isn't important. Your receiver's high quality DACs will handle the audio, the Blu-ray player will just send them data.

I just can't see the case where you'd need good analogue outputs for Blu-ray.

I can see potentially buying something like the Oppo player, if it had a good warranty and build quality. Makes sense to maybe pay more to have your gear last, but I can't see paying more for one just because it supposedly had better circuitry. Even if it does, you aren't going to make use of it. You'd be a fool to buy a high end HDTV and then not use the digital input, as the TV processes everything digitally internally.

Re:No shock

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one potential argument to buy a highend player: if done properly, I'd expect them to come with a serial interface to connect it to a matching receiver or pre-amp or some high-end home-control / remote control system. As far as I'm aware, that has never been available even on Lexicon's old Pioneer kit based DVD players, but it used to be a standard feature on e.g. Meridian, TagMclaren or Denon's high-end kit.

Re:No shock

[Stevecrox]

Its simpler than that, the PS3 is £250 and will do pretty much every type of audio and video you can think off. Considering the PS3 will no output to multiple devices (through component, HDMI and TOS) why would you buy any other Blu-ray player?

Save the money and buy a better Amp and speaker set.

Re:No shock

[complete loony]

Though there is still some data decoding happening in the blue ray player. HDMI doesn't carry an MPEG4 or h.264 encoded stream, it takes raw video frames. That said, I doubt the codec is any different between models.

Re:No shock

[Shawn Parr]

This overlooks one group of people who actually exist in large numbers but are often overlooked:

3. You have a nice HDTV and HDMI digital for that. But you also have a very nice audio system, but one that you put together before the HDMI specification was well established and thus it does not have HDMI. But your Receiver/PrePro/Amplifiers are very good, and you don't want to just replace them just to get ones with HDMI built in. But luckily they can take 5.1 or 7.1 analog inputs from a player with good quality outputs.

This is exactly why I like the Oppo BluRay player. At the time for a minimal cost increase over other BR players I was able to use both a digital connection to my TV, and use the latest audio upgrades on BR along with my older, but very good, audio system. That being said I would never pay the $2000 plus for the 'high end' BR players. The Oppo is excellent, and I don't even have the special edition model with upgraded audio components. I'm sure it's fabulous, but the regular one I have is really really good.

Why replace perfectly good equipment just to get a new connector, when you can still use it and get great performance out of it? I occasionally get the itch to replace those components, but when I research new ones I just don't see enough upgrade for what it would cost to justify it at this point.

Re:No shock

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have that Oppo player, and the reason I chose to spend nearly 500 bucks was NOT exclusively video. The Oppo happens to be the only sub-1000 bucks universal player I've found, that is capable of playing DVD-Audio and SACD in addition to BlueRay and up-converted DVDs, and that's worth a lot for some people like me with large collections on DVD-A and SACD material, which DOES sound substantially better than anything else.

Re:No shock

[timeOday]

But your Receiver/PrePro/Amplifiers are very good, and you don't want to just replace them just to get ones with HDMI built in. But luckily they can take 5.1 or 7.1 analog inputs from a player with good quality outputs. This is exactly why I like the Oppo BluRay player.

How old are we talking? You don't need HDMI for sound, just SPDIF or digital coax. Any 10 year old receiver has those.

Re:No shock

[Shawn Parr]

SPDIF/Coax can't play back the new lossless codecs available on BR disk. Whether you believe they are better or not, it is nice to have the option to hear them.

Re:No shock

[CronoCloud]

What, the receiver in your example doesn't have optical or coaxial digital? Why not HDMI > TV > coaxial out> receiver

Re:No shock

[petermgreen]

The thing I don't (note: i've experianced wthis with both gaming and DVD playback, I haven't tried bluray playback yet) like about the PS3 is the fan noise. It's fine when you first turn it on but after running for a while the fans spool up and then it becomes loud enough to be annoying especially annoying when you are trying to use it late at night and therefore want to keep the volume down.

Have they fixed the fan noise in later iterations of the PS3 (mine is a 40GB pal model so fairly early)?

Re:No shock

[sremick]

There's one potential argument to buy a highend player: if done properly, I'd expect them to come with a serial interface to connect it to a matching receiver or pre-amp or some high-end home-control / remote control system. As far as I'm aware, that has never been available even on Lexicon's old Pioneer kit based DVD players, but it used to be a standard feature on e.g. Meridian, TagMclaren or Denon's high-end kit.

A serial connection is an option for the BDP-83.if you order direct from Oppo. It adds $89 as they do the mod on-demand.

Re:No shock

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are forgetting another one.

4) You like pretty things that look alike and match.

Check out the sex that Copper and Brass colored components are from ADA in the 30 years. These system weren't cheap and at the time, someone, somewhere, thought they looked great.

People pay big bucks for this everyday with other industries and products as well..

Re:No shock

[sremick]

I've never understood why you'd want to buy a "high end" Blu-ray player anyhow. Reason is I can see only two setups...

Well, that's being rather narrow then. The reason I own the Oppo BDP-83 (and I was one of the first 50 people to own one, getting in on the early-adopter program in January well before its release) was because I owned an Oppo 983 before that and I had become used to the top-notch DVD upscaling abilities. I use a projector setup on a 92" screen so the shortcomings of standard-def are considerably magnified. I did not want to lose DVD-upscaling quality when I went to blu-ray, nor did I want to have to mess with 2 different disc players. So for me, the BDP-83 was perfect.

I really couldn't care less about the analog audio outs (I use HDMI), or the myriad of media support (SACD, DVD-A, etc).

I can see potentially buying something like the Oppo player, if it had a good warranty and build quality. Makes sense to maybe pay more to have your gear last

Well, that's the other thing: it has amazing build quality, and Oppo support is second to none. The few people who've had to make use of it were consistently blown-away by the speed, efficiency, professionalism and courtesy that Oppo support provides. There's something to be said for that.

Then there's one last issue you overlooked: firmware updates. If you follow the AV forums, you'd find that there's no single Blu-ray player manufacturer that works as hard or as fast as Oppo to come up with firmware fixes. Unfortunately "Blu-ray" and "firmware updates" come hand-in-hand as studios play games and experiment with the complicated spec (and out of spec). Your blu-ray player is only as good as the company behind keeping your firmware current. I have watched them work one-on-one with customers who identify problem discs, having the user mail them the disc to test in some circumstances in order to confirm whether it's a faulty disc or indeed an issue with that release, then returning it promptly to the user, often with a new "beta" firmware right behind.

Not to mention the new features we keep seeing, such as subtitle repositioning, DLNA network streaming, Blu-TV, HDMI "auto" negotiation (bitstreams audio formats your receiver supports, sends all others as LPCM). And that's just the latest firmware.

It says something for Oppo that when I bought my BDP-83, my (discontinued) 983 sold on eBay for not only more than I paid for it, but more than its original MSRP.

There are many reasons to go with Oppo. You don't have to be a crazy audiophile to appreciate them, just willing to do a little research.

Re:No shock

[Shawn Parr]

As I stated in another reply above, SPDIF doesn't have the bandwidth for the new lossless codecs. If you have a nice audio system, it is nice to have the option to take advantage of the better audio codecs. Eventually the audio will be analog so having it go analog in the BR player can be just fine depending on how the rest of the system is set up.

For instance my receiver (Outlaw Audio 1070) is one of very few that can do analog bass management for multichannel sound, so even if the Oppo doesn't have acceptable bass management (for instance if listening to SACD's in DSD output mode) I can still get bass management without converting back to digital. That receiver also has quite good analog input, output, and amplifier stages in it, so just going out and grabbing a low or mid end Onkyo/Denon to replace it will not be much of an upgrade. It would be for features I'm sure, but I'm pretty sure it would not be for pure sound quality.

Re:No shock

[Anonymous Coward]

SPDIF/Coax can't play back the new lossless codecs available on BR disk. Whether you believe they are better or not, it is nice to have the option to hear them.

NO it's not can't play back, it's WON'T play back, because of HDCP & the mafiAA.
Ripping the disk first before playback to a different set of non HDCP codecs avoids this insanity.

Re:No shock

[Kumiorava]

Slim is a lot more silent, that was the main reason why I sold my old PS3 and bought the slim version. I had the BC version of PS3 so people were willing to buy it for same price as new slim.

Re:No shock

[Sycraft-fu]

I can see that to an extent, and I can see buying a nice player like the Oppo either way. It was the $2000 stuff I couldn't see. After all, I'd say if you can afford $2000, your money is much better spent on a new receiver that has HDMI than on a Blu-ray player.

As to why you'd use HDMI, well a couple reasons:

1) Less problems. I moved from analogue out on my computer to digital out because of fucking ground loops. I have no idea where it was sneaking in, everything has a common ground point, but whatever. I no longer have the problem now that the data is sent digitally to the receiver.

2) Processing on your receiver. Some receivers (perhaps most) won't process analogue sound. They do nothing but set the levels and send it to the speakers. However they'll do full processing on digital sound including setting delays, crossovers, doing room EQ and so on. This is another reason I do digital to my receiver. I want to use its more advanced crossover (which can have a separate crossover per channel) and use its room EQ (Audyessy MultEQ XT is 100% worth it in my opinion).

3) Less cables. You can significantly reduce cable mess. One HDMI cable from player to receiver, one from receiver to TV, and that's it.

4) Sync with your TV. This may not be an issue, depending on the TV you have, however some HDTV have a lot of delay in their processing. Means the audio is out of sync with the video. With HDMI, the TV can tell the receiver the delay, and the receiver will compensate and keep everything in sync. It will also take in to account the delay of the sound to your listening position, which it measures.

Re:No shock

[SimonTheSoundMan]

The PS3 is shockingly bad at playback of DVDs. The scaling isn't good (well I gave a Fujitsu plasma which should do well at scaling compared to the PS3 anyway), and the processing on the PS3 makes everything look like it's made of plastic. My £200 Denon DVD player on the other hand looks much better. I haven't tried a BD-P, wonder if the PS3 is just as bad as it is at playing DVDs.

My Arcam and Musical Fidelity hi-fi is purely analogue too, PS3 lacks 7.1 out.

Re:No shock

[Jeremy Erwin]

You own a high end TV/receiver and care a great deal about quality. In the case you hook the Blu-ray player up using HDMI. Reason is HDMI gives you the best signal. However in this case, the player isn't doing anything other than nabbing the data and passing it along. The analogue conversion happens in other units. So again, the quality isn't important. Your receiver's high quality DACs will handle the audio, the Blu-ray player will just send them data.

Some high quality receivers/prepros actually predate HDMI.

Re:No shock

[squidinkcalligraphy]

The last CD player I had (remember CD players?) was a "high end" player. I'm not an audiophile, and couldn't tell any difference in sound quality. But when it came to playing scratched CDs, it performed much, much better than the "low end" players I tried.

Similarly with DVD players, my dedicated player connected to the TV deals with dodgy discs better than my computer does.

I'd guess something similar might happen for blu-ray, at least with legitimate "high end" gear. There is a lot of processing what needs doing between the pits on the disc and the electron flowing down the HDMI cable. The accuracy of the motor speeds, the quality of the lenses, the error correction processing... cheap gear probably skimps on those things. As long as your disc is in mint condition it won't make any difference. But as soon as that's not the case... (although ironically those with high end gear are more likely to keep their discs in mint condition, lessening the need for high end gear)

Re:No shock

[Anonymous Coward]

Blue-ray data isn't "just the bits." The standard is interpretive, and some players interpret the data better than others. Furthermore, some players have 24fps playback, and others don't. If your player doesn't, it has to invent extra frames to make up for the fact that it's playing in 30fps.

oh..heh

[Anonymous Coward]

"THX certified" is that about as useful as "Designed for Windows"? or maybe "Windows Vista Certified"...hahaha

Re:oh..heh

[Cramer]

Or in other words... "We paid THX a lot of money for this Logo." (which is what we Tivo Series3 owners have always said.)

Editorial Competence

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFS: when a couple websites

Come on, elementary grammar. Bothering to do it right shows respect for the audience.

Re:Editorial Competence

[Anonymous Coward]

This coming from someone writing sentence fragments.

Credibility.

[headkase]

Years to build, seconds to destroy. So, who comes out on top over THX now?

Re:Credibility.

[Trepidity]

Sadly it's been a years-long downwards slide with THX. They used to certify only high-end theatres, then added high-end home theatre setups, then the standards for commercial theatres slowly started slipping until basically everyone who wasn't showing films in a tin can got certified, then they started certifying middle-of-the-road home theatre setups, then individual pieces of home-theatre hardware, and recently even some decent but not exactly world-class Logitech computer speakers.

Re:Credibility.

[gafisher]

This doesn't diminish the THX standards; just THX's commitment to maintaining them.

Re:Credibility.

[Sycraft-fu]

Ya. While over all I like the idea of certification grades, THX did a bad job of it. Part of it was that they don't do enough to differentiate the certification types. They all feature THX in big letters and then something small that tells you what the actual certification is. Ok, well that matters a lot. A high end Ultra 2 certification on speakers pretty much means they can handle theatre reference levels of sound. They can truly give you a home theater. Their lower end stuff? Not so much.

Also when it came to computer speakers they started compromising too much. It wasn't a matter of backing off on some specs that really didn't matter too much, they changed it so much to accommodate the lower end nature of computer speakers as to make it more or less meaningless.

Personally, I don't buy THX gear. It is a waste of money in my book. All the gear I seem to like the best doesn't bother getting THX certified. They don't need a label saying "This is good for home theater." You take a listen to it and you say "This is good for home theater," no badge needed.

In some cases, they impose restrictions that aren't acceptable to manufacturers either. Speakers are a good example. The high end THX spec (don't know about the lower ones) requires speakers to be sealed with a natural rolloff at 80Hz. Ok, well maybe I don't want that. In fact, I for sure don't want that for music. I want more full range speakers, and I'd like them ported as that increases low end efficiency. Ok, well they can't be THX then, no matter how good they are.

Really, if you are looking for good home theatre, you'll do much better buying high quality gear you like, and making sure to get a receiver that has a good calibration solution like Audyssey MultEQ. Having your setup properly dialed in to correct levels and delays and such is way more important than if the speaker is precisely what THX likes.

Re:Credibility.

[TubeSteak]

In some cases, they impose restrictions that aren't acceptable to manufacturers either. Speakers are a good example. The high end THX spec (don't know about the lower ones) requires speakers to be sealed with a natural rolloff at 80Hz. Ok, well maybe I don't want that. In fact, I for sure don't want that for music. I want more full range speakers, and I'd like them ported as that increases low end efficiency. Ok, well they can't be THX then, no matter how good they are.

Buy a (sub)woofer.
With a woofer, you won't notice the 80Hz rolloff.
If you're porting a mid-range in order to bump up the low end, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Credibility.

[DarkOx]

True but your typical $500 - $1000 receiver from the later 2000's probably can produce output that is every bit as clean and generally good as a $2500 from the mid 90's or prior.

Better DACs that use more bits and hardware that internally uses higher sampling rates has become cheap. The noise floor is lower on modern equipment too as chip manufacturing even analog chips like opamps has improved greatly; much lower distortion. DSPs have gotten cheap as well; in even modest setup these days the internals are fully digital. Traditional noise is a much lower factor if the first thing you receiver does with any analog input is use some more isolated circuits to digitize. All the processing, effects, surround decoding etc gets done digitally. In the case of a digital source like HDMI or SPID its not analog until right before the final amp that is going to drive your speakers.

Not having any line level analog transmission is probably the biggest factor in the improvements. I am not sure THX has really gone down hill so much as typical kit is just way better than it used to be.

Re:Credibility.

[TorKlingberg]

THX probably knew they were losing credibility and decided to cash in quickly.

Re:Credibility.

[zippthorne]

A high end Ultra 2 certification on speakers pretty much means they can handle theatre reference levels of sound.

.

Then the theaters are wasting their money. I have yet to sit in a non-IMAX theater where the speakers aren't overdriven to the point of distortion.

Re:Credibility.

[Sycraft-fu]

I have a subwoofer. I have a subwoofer that is the size of a small hot water heater (SVS 20-39 PC+). However that doesn't mean there isn't reason to have better main speakers.

Also I was speaking more generally, from a manufacturer's point of view. Not everyone wants a sub, not everyone has room for a sub. Some people just want a nice 2-channel setup. Ok well one of the ways to make your speakers perform better for that in general while still keeping the size down is to port them. This is no longer black magic, these days it is easy to precisely calculate what size of port you need with a given woofer and enclosure and so on. Also, ported speakers with better extension in no way are excluded from working with a sub, your equipment can handle the crossover just fine.

There are plenty of reasons for manufacturers to not want to say "Oh just use a sub." You'll find this across all ranges of speakers too. Take some JBL ES20 speakers. Cheap 5" bookshelf speakers, about $200 for a pair. Nothing special about the design or materials, built for price. Ported, for better bass response. Ok so let's look at the other end, B&W 800D speakers. High end audiophile speakers featuring a diamond tweeter, Kevlar midrange, dual 10" woofers, elaborate custom cabinets, and basically the highest end everything. $20,000-$25,000 for a pair. Ported, for better bass response.

It is a very legit and useful design strategy for speakers, and THX completely excludes it. As such there are speakers that blow away any "THX" speakers simply because of a different design philosophy, not because they don't perform well.

Re:Credibility.

[itslifejimbutnotaswe]

The reason is that the 80Hz 12dB/octave rolloff is additive with the 12dB/octave rolloff at the same frequency that is sent to the mains with any THX certified receiver. This matches the 24dB/octave lowpass sent to the sub. Thus, you get seamless sound. If you don't have a sub, make sure you don't have the highpass enabled on the receiver. Low bass requires the movement of lots of air, ported or not. A small-ish sub (eg 400mm cube) can easily push much, much more air than most floorstanders, simply as the drivers used can pump much more air linearly (large Xmax) and because the power fed to the sub is much, much higher.

Re:Credibility.

[Sycraft-fu]

Yes but there's no reason a receiver can't deal with that itself. A crossover, especially a digital one which is how they all do it now, can be pretty much any curve you like. It can quite easily change the steepness as needed. If the speakers don't roll at 80Hz, it can use a 4th order filter. For that matter, maybe you want to use a second order filter on both mains and sub. Less phase shift with a lower order filter.

Also, as I said in my post, I do have a sub, a huge one. With it's current tuning (it has a tunable high pass via an electronic filter and port blockers) in my room it produces flat bass output down to about 13Hz, and can cause vibration in the drywall if I so choose. I still use speakers with a good range though. In part it is because I like the line anyhow, in part it is because bass is not totally non-directional at 80Hz (80Hz is just a good tradeoff between being largely non-directional and reasonable) but also because you get better sound if your speakers aren't working near their rolloff. You get speakers that can go lower than you need, and cross them before they roll and it gives you less distortion and greater overall output.

I'm not saying using sealed speakers is wrong. I'm just saying there are legit reasons not to, subwoofer or no. You'll note that a LOT of manufacturers make ported speakers.

More newsworthy...

[Anonymous Coward]

is the fact that anyone takes THX seriously anymore.

The moment they started "certifying" those horrid Logitech surround setups should have made their irrelevance clear.

Re:More newsworthy...

[samwichse]

Funny, I'm using a set of Z560s right now as my home theater setup. They sound great... tons of bass for the explosions, nice and crisp for the highs.

Been using them almost 10 years now and I've never heard anything compellingly better anywhere else I've been.

But feel free to look down your nose at this setup, after all it only cost $150 all in. It must be shit.

THX BYE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Enuff said.

Dear Lexicon

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please don't ruin your company. I know times are bad, if anything just sit like we are and keep what ye has. Why not venture out into re-issuing older vintage models with enhancements for modern times? Or repairing the ones that still exist? it seems much more valuable to the community to actually make and possibly service your own product instead of opposing claymines doin case artwork for a doomed product then punk'd by the THX fail which doomed it

Re:Dear Lexicon

[Dahamma]

Seriously? Yeah, Lexicon's ridiculously overpriced equipment used to be worth the ridiculous prices, but *now* they are ruining the company and overcharging.

Or maybe they have ALWAYS been charging a 500%+ markup on their products just because they could. I'm not saying Lexicon doesn't have some of the best products in the business - just that the best products in the business do NOT need to cost 5-10x the average products in the business...

Re:Dear Lexicon

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe they have ALWAYS been charging a 500%+ markup on their products just because they could. I'm not saying Lexicon doesn't have some of the best products in the business - just that the best products in the business do NOT need to cost 5-10x the average products in the business...

According to whom? Lexicon have done well until now, the reason is they know their audience. The people who would want absolute perfection although they can't really tell the difference is precisely the same type of people who'd gladly pay 5/10x the price. Also it's not a very large niche, so if you can't get a serious mark-up on your snake oil products, then the company can simply not sell enough units to continue to exist.

So in a way, it's a good symbiosis. The company gets their money, and the customers who wants to pay a lot for undetectable perfection, pay a lot and get undetectable perfection. Everyone's happy, and there's no objective reason why these niche companies should lower their prices.

Re:Dear Lexicon

[Anonymous Coward]

Lexicon were bought out by Harman International many years ago.
When they were bought out, most of the people who did the real design work were fired or left, leaving mostly just a name. The people who designed those wonderful old Lexicon reverbs are long gone.

Harman is a company that now own AKG, Audax, Digitech, DOD, Soundcraft, Studer, JBL, Crown and a number of other once proud music equipment companies.
They swap products and ip between the brands however they like, which has lead to lower quality rebadged 'engineering' all round, as the owned companies do much less individual research and development. Sometimes this is good, like Digitech getting Lexicon reverbs in their gear, but mostly it leads to a blandness and lowering of quality.

This rebadging of a Blu-Ray player as 'Lexicon' is exactly the kind of thing Harman do.

Re:Dear Lexicon

[Dahamma]

Lexicon, along with many of the other high end brands, sells the majority of their products through the CEDIA market. I can guarantee you through experience that anything sold through that market has a huge markup compared to the mainstream consumer gear. You can argue all you want, but it's simply a matter of manufacturing costs, wholesale, and retail markup, and those numbers don't lie.

Re:Dear Lexicon

[Anonymous Coward]

Lexicon used to be a real company, but were bought out by Harman International some years ago.

Since then, they are a company in name only.

DONT LET HARMAN BUY YOU.

Re:Dear Lexicon

[Skuld-Chan]

Read up on it - the vast vast majority of all this expensive audiophile hardware is snakeoil. More than one study has shown even audiophiles can't tell the difference between good hardware and crap.

It wouldn't surprise me if Lexicon's stuff has always been marked up 500% from what it actually cost to make.

Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[Tanuki64]

...because I always buy cheapest. Mostly people who deem themselves audiophile and cannot understand that I am not. For me a cheap player was always enough. Now I also have the satisfaction that I am not cheated. At least I get what I pay for. :-)

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely true. Same goes for almost any electronics and computers.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[FlyingGuy]

I was involved in a quite heated ./ discussion about this and the conclusion was as follows:

Spend on the source ( cd player / turntable / receiver ) and the reproduction units aka speakers.

As for a lot of hi-end equipment there are still a few worth paying the price for like McIntosh but most of what you get these days is just what this is all about, selling the brand, screw whats inside, sell the brand..

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[dangitman]

Haha, and some people ridicule me ...because I always buy cheapest.

That's just as stupid as always buying the most expensive thing. What you should be looking for is quality and value.

I'm curious, though. Do you apply this philosophy to everything? For example do you always buy the cheapest food, regardless of how it tastes, or how nutritious it is? Are you posting this from a 286 or a Vic 20, rather than a more expensive modern computer?

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[TheGratefulNet]

I took another tact; dump my 'receiver' and go full DIY route. I have all home-built DACs, preamps and amps. all using really decent components (not boutique but just regular japanese panasonic FM low ESR caps, etc), high quality ground-planed pc boards and carefully built by hand (my hand) and tested and aligned using test gear.

if this kind of hand-made gear was sold on the open market it would cost $5000 (in that range) for this level of gear. but you can SEE the quality in the build, in the design (peer review and vetted) and my gear will last 10 years or more. I can't remember the last time I got a yamaha or sony to last 10 years!

custom DIY gear can also be built with discrete components. almost no commercial gear is done this way, anymore.

I almost cry when I see people paying upwards of $1k for a 'receiver' when I know full well the crap parts and assembly (and design) that went into it.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[Tanuki64]

That's just as stupid as always buying the most expensive thing. What you should be looking for is quality and value.

But how can I determine quality? Most THX buyers would have thought, that they bought quality.

I'm curious, though. Do you apply this philosophy to everything? For example do you always buy the cheapest food, regardless of how it tastes, or how nutritious it is? Are you posting this from a 286 or a Vic 20, rather than a more expensive modern computer?

With food it is easy: I buy what I like. If I cannot distinguish two products by taste, I take the cheaper one or the better looking one. I totally disregard statements like 'bio' or 'fresh' or 'vitamins'. I cannot verify them so I assume it is a lie. I always assume vendors lie to me. Often enough I have been proven right by one food scandal or another.

Your 286/vic 20 question is a bit provocative. Of course I have a modern computer. However, for the stuff I need a computer I don't need an expensive high-end machine. So I can take a cheaper one. Harder to cheat with computers anyways. For instance ram. When it is advertised that it contains 4gb of ram, it is easily to spot when it has only 3. Faster ram? Better quality? I would not notice the difference so I don't care. When I take the cheapest I cannot be cheated.

Still, you are not totally wrong with you question. I do buy quality, but only if I can be absolutely sure it is quality. This means I can verify it myself.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[dangitman]

But how can I determine quality? Most THX buyers would have thought, that they bought quality.

By using your intelligence, your senses, your common sense. By reading reviews and examining test data.

Faster ram? Better quality? I would not notice the difference so I don't care. When I take the cheapest I cannot be cheated.

On the contrary. Poor quality RAM is a significant cause of computer crashes and problems.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[Tanuki64]

By using your intelligence, your senses, your common sense. By reading reviews and examining test data.

And how often do we read about manipulated test data? And reviews, when was the last time you read about astroturfing campaigns of large companies? I started to ignore reviews when more than once my own reviews were deleted because they were not too advantageous for the reviewed products. So reviews too are mostly worthless unless they come from friends you trust.

Intelligence can only be used when enough data is available. And my senses...as I said, with food I only rely on my senses.

On the contrary. Poor quality RAM is a significant cause of computer crashes and problems.

So what? When I have computer problems I test my ram. If it is faulty I return it. Cheap does not mean 'need not to work'. But this is a legal problem, which is handled differently in different countries.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[dangitman]

Well, of course you can't rely on reviews alone. That's why I suggested a variety of methods. And, of course, I included "common sense" which involves realizing that test data might be inaccurate, or reviews biased.

Overall, I've always found buying the least expensive item to usually be one of the worst choices. If you buy based simply on what's cheapest, you often end up with stuff that breaks and is unreliable. You end up paying more in the long-run, because you need to replace your stuff more often, and you also get a worse experience while using that stuff.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to fork out for the most expensive gear, which often has minimal advantage over the mid-range gear. Unless, of course, you have very specific needs where paying several times more is absolutely worth it.

In summary, it all depends on the particular scenario, and going with a one-size-fits-all rule is not very wise.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost cry when I see people waste their time with senseless bullshit when they could have bought a $250 yamaha receiver (mine is over 10 years old) and never thought twice about it. A bunch of glorified cavemen with tiny little bones vibrating in our flesh don't need perfection because we cannot discern it.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[flanders123]

That's nice. I personally buy mid-range stuff because I am not audiophile enough justify paying for "the best", but have a good enough ear to dislike most speakers sold at WalMart.

Re:Haha, and some people ridicule me....

[FlyingGuy]

I hear ya. Look inside the stuff being built for generic consumer consumption and the components are not "bad" it is just that they are barely adequate to do the job. Why spend the money on a 1/2 watt 1% resister when a 1/4 watt 10% one will just squeak by when operating at its current limits and well if the bias goes a bit off in the circuit because the tolerance is 10%, "Hey no one will notice and besides it will just make that stage run a little hot, so put in the 1/4 watt 10% and we will save 4 cents."

Power supplies that barely handle the load, cheap DAC's, final output circuits that will clip and distort and kill speaks whn driven to rated output, etc. etc.

A friend of mine still owns a power of Panasonic "monoblocks" that are pure class A power amps that he purchased in the late 60's that are still just a pure joy to listen to.

had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was working for a Bang & Olufsen dealer I we had the case of a broken TV we had to pick up from a client and fix it. The TV in question was a rebadged panasonic with a nice B & O frame. We repaired the tv in the workshop and tested it. After that we put it back in its B&O frame and returned it to the customer only to find it wasn't working. Why? One of us had managed to accidently press the original panasonic powerbutton while putting it back in the B&O frame. Try explaining that to a customer.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[TheGratefulNet]

want a worse example? lets continue with panasonic but lets enter LEICA into it!

rebadging was never quite the same as when 'red dot' leica did it. they took semi-crappy pany digicams, slapped a leica logo on it, LIED TO THE PUBLIC about the lineage of the camera (saying it was qa'd in germany which is an out and out LIE) and then sold the cams at several times the pany price.

LEICA used to be a real high end camera company. they lost face when they pulled this stunt. there are leica lenses in the $3k range that are 'real leicas' but a $500 digicam that is rebadged is not a real leica even though the brand lies thru their teeth about it (when dpreview.com was pressed, they dodged the issue. probably due to lost advertising income if they fessed up that the fz50 and vlux1 are the same friggin cameras. touch that 'third rail' and you lose advertising revenue and review samples. yup, we know the game, guys...

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[commodore64_love]

This also works in the opposite direction.

I have a Sears-branded record player, but of course Sears doesn't manufacture anything so I opened it up. It had a Panasonic label on the circuit board, so I got a better quality unit that what I originally thought.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[LordVader717]

This is standard practice in the electronics industry and anybody acting surprised at this article just hasn't been paying attention to consumer electronics in recent years.
Particularly with TVs, there are only really a handful of factories making the components.
There's hardly ever much difference between products from "premium" brands and others. They're all made with economics and logistics in mind, which most of the time means outsourcing to chinese manufacturers and using ready-made designs. They all use the same chipsets and the same components.
That's why you'll often find that "good enough" is as good as it gets. Unless you understand what you're paying for, don't pay a premium.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[commodore64_love]

Yes but THX isn't supposed to be dishonest. George Lucas created THX specifically so we, the consumers, could avoid the cheap junk and get a "like the theater" experience at home. I'm surprised to learn that THX has devolved to be as pointless a label as "UL" on a lamp.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[gEvil (beta)]

Yes but THX isn't supposed to be dishonest. George Lucas created THX specifically so we, the consumers, could avoid the cheap junk and get a "like the theater" experience at home. I'm surprised to learn that THX has devolved to be as pointless a label as "UL" on a lamp.

Woah! Hold on a second! Are you telling me that George Lucas is trying to pass crap off to an unsuspecting public?!?!?!?!? Say it ain't so!

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[ceoyoyo]

I've never understood why anyone would judge a lens by the name on it. Leica makes some fantastic lenses, and some absolute crap ones. Canon makes some great lenses, and some absolute crap ones. Nikon ditto. All of them charge appropriately.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[ankhank]

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/compare_post.asp?method=sidebyside&cameras=panasonic_dmcfz50%2Cleica_vlux1&show=all

Only $100 difference now.

The verification word for this post is: sensible
Dang AIs are getting smarter every day.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[Anonymous Coward]

Leica still makes great stuff. Their lenses are well-worth the money if you really need the ultimate in quality. Quite different than the audiophile snake-oil biz. The differences are measurable. Granted, you do reach a point of diminishing returns but, in this case, there really are measurable differences. And the new M9 digital rangefinder camera appears to be amazingly good. Kudos to Leica for being able to build a full-frame digital M-series rangefinder at all.

I *do* have a problem with some of their rebadging on Panasonic and other gear (though some of the Panasonic stuff is quite good, too). Leica recently went there own way with the X-1 compact camera. Ironically, a lot of people are saying they would have been better off re-branding the (excellent) Panasonic GF-1.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[ZosX]

I have an fz28 and I bought it for the glass. That glass is amazing for a P&S camera. Out of all the superzooms the pannys have the best glass by far. From what I understand Leica designed the glass but panasonic manufacturers it. Yeah the lux cameras are basically rebadged panasonics with some changes to the firmware and I agree that it is pretty lame, but don't knock the leica branded glass on the fz cameras.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[Doctor_Jest]

It's not George.. he's only the apprentice. It's really Steven Spielberg... He's the real power behind all this. Didn't you watch South Park's expose'? :)

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[LordVader717]

Well $499 certainly isn't "cheap junk". And I bet you it's roughly on par with the brands Lexicon intends to compete with.
Apart from that there seems to be the perception that the THX certification isn't particularly useful anyway, especially with high-end gear.

Re:had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[Jeremy Erwin]

UL isn't pointless. Would you buy a non UL certified Turkey Fryer?

THX?

[JustOK]

Wow. I'm sticking with THC.

Re:THX?

[Anonymous Coward]

THZ just as good. In fact, is better. Is two more than THX.

Re:THX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guys, get it? A weed joke!

Will you set the clock in your Blu-Ray player to 4:20 too? Did you get that subtle one? Another weed joke! Ha ha!

The depth and sophistication of humor from potheads is incredible.

Re:THX?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that THC products enhance my audio experience far more than THX ones.

Re:THX?

[JustOK]

So, you'd prefer your funny bones to always be out of joints?

I set the clock but it changes like every 5 minutes or so. I think there might be a pattern.

Hehehehe "joints" sounds funny. Try it... "joints". It rhymes with "yoints". hehehehe

Re:THX?

[JustOK]

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

Re:THX?

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter what equipment you have, THC will increase your enjoyment of most movies and music, far more than THX will...

Could never happen with computers...

[lucm]

Imagine a company that would take a few hundred bucks worth of regular PC parts, add a slightly modified free open-source OS, package the thing in a white shiny box and sell it for a few thousand bucks... What a scam it would be!

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[AHuxley]

The magic is in the firmware, color support ect :)

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[commodore64_love]

I like your post but there is a minor error. OS X is not open source. It's derived from NeXT which is a closed-source OS from the 1980s that was ported to the PowerPC platform, and is still closed source today.

Wow. I can't believe I just defended Apple. That's like defending Chrysler's practice of taking a Dodge Stratus, rebadging it a chrysler sebring, and then adding 10,000 to the pricetag. Honda/Acura and Toyota/Lexus do the same deal.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you referring to Apple by any chance? In that case, I don't really see how you can compare the two, seeing as Apple has spent a great deal of time creating probably the best OS ever, OSX.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a company that would take a few hundred bucks worth of regular PC parts, add a slightly modified free open-source OS, package the thing in a white shiny box and sell it for a few thousand bucks... What a scam it would be!

I take it the reference is for OSX. Hate to disagree. It's hardly "slightly modified". Also a prime example of the difference between Mac and Windows is I bought two machines at the same time, one OSX Leopard and one Vista Pro. The Vista Pro was a higher end machine than the Mac. After six months the Mac still works perfectly and the PC is bricked. I finally broke down and ordered Windows 7 Ultimate and I'll have to redo the machine when it comes in. The fun part is reinstalling all the software. Just in the last three years alone I've owned four different Macs and twice that many PCs, I do graphics work. Other than a hard drive dying on my first iMac after two years the Macs have been rock solid and virtually every PC has required constant fiddling just to keep them working. Eventually all the PCs developed major problems and required reinstalling the OS. I never once had to do this with a Mac. If there's a scam here it's with Windows and not Macs. I'm stuck with them because some of my software and hardware is Windows only but if I could live without them I would in a heart beat. Back in the day redoing the OS wasn't that big a deal but now they are so large and the software has so much security it's a nightmare every time I have to start over. I hope Windows 7 sorts out the mess but either way I hate all the changes. XP was serviceable and fairly easy to use. Vista was a mess. They ruined a perfectly good filing system, far better than Macs, and somehow managed to turn off by default all the useful stuff and turn on all the annoying and useless stuff. Add in all the instability and insecurity and the only things keeping the average user with Windows are they haven't tried Mac or they can't aford them or are unwilling to pay the extra. The software limitations don't really affect 90% of the users out there except gaming people. The newer iMacs are pretty good and the two Mac Pros I've owned were excellent. My first iMac gradually died, first the superdrive and eventually the hard drive but the OS never missed a beat. The newer iMac seem to be much better quality and better all round machines. Also with the last two machines I bought the iMac took minutes to set up. I was over an hour before I could use the PC running Vista. I know were are all supposed to make fun of Macs but honestly if you just want a machine that works I'd go with Mac every time. All my PCs are miserable media players. The Macs just pop in a DVD and they just work every time.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[jo_ham]

That depends if you think the cost of the box they put the parts in is worth the price difference.

I know your post is not altogether serious, but the difference is that people who buy such things (mostly) are well aware of what's inside the box that they are handing over money for. Not so in the case of this bluray player where they are literally rebadging a cheaper product and selling it deceitfully as a $3500 machine.

I wish my iMac was cheaper too, but I still think it was worth the price I paid for it. :)

Also, "slightly" modified is a bit of a stretch I think, perhaps?

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Waccoon]

Only white? I'll pay an extra $150 for black.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I will agree with you on the stratus (which if I remember correctly is basically an eclipse chassis ripoff, although it may've been a shortened galant or something.), both Honda and Toyota have been using significantly different chassis for most of their coupe and sedan model cards for years. The SUVs however are often the exact chassis/engine/sheetmetal, with a few cosmetic changes to differentiate. Even then if you go and compare the electronics in them the Lexus models are usually MUCH more advanced than the Toyota counterparts (Haven't gotten to poke around at the newer honda stuff as much, our school was a T-Ten academy until toyota discontinued it year before last.)

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[jo_ham]

Then you are talking to the wrong "Mac people", or are wilfully ignoring the ones who are telling you otherwise, unless we are going to expand this to "the sort of people who don;t read slashdot", and if you're going to include the nominally "clueless" users then you have to do that for the Windows side too.

Assuming you are just talking to people with actual computer knowledge, there are very few Apple users who believe the components inside the box are some sort of magical things that are just not used by PC makers.

It's a long known business practice of Apple that has served them well - it's turnkey or nothing. Their direct competitor is not Dell or HP, or even a whitebox home builder, and not even really companies like Alienware who go for the prestige/high performance in fancy case gamer market. They're just kind of off on their own, doing their own thing. If you want a hassle free OS X box, you buy it from them. Sure you can make yourself a hackintosh if you like for less money, but you lose out on the form factor and warranty and so on. Those things are worth it to some people. The form factor of my iMac alone was worth the price I paid for it over the equivalent spec PC from any other vendor, not to mention OS X (and the ability to triple boot if needed).

It's simply not the case that Apple drop PCs into Apple cases and put the price up - not *literally* in any case (and watch this paragraph get selectively quoted by an AC for instant karma) - the components may be the same, but what size and shape is that $300 AMD machine? How loud is it? What version of OS X does it run out of the box?

The Mac Mini is expensive because it uses laptop components and crams them into a desktop form factor, and laptop parts cost more than desktop ones do. A better comparison would be a 3Ghz laptop, minus screen (and yes, even then the PC will be cheaper).

My iMac is the same - C2D 2Ghz, 2GB Ram, 500GB Sata HD (self upgrade - stock was 250GB), 20" 1680x1050 screen. I know that I could get a PC with those specs in late 2006 when I bought it for *much less*, but then I lose the all-in-one form factor and the fact that I can just pull the wall plug, put it into its box (that has a carry handle) and travel transatlantic with it several times as checked baggage as if it was just another suitcase.

Sure, most people who have one won't be moving it very often, but even at home, it is a very small footprint and small use of space for what it is - it's fabulous not having a tower stashed under my desk.

Not everything about buying a computer is about finding the most CPU+GPU for your money.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't NeXT continue living only in the form of libaries in the OSX, strictly speaking?

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[thetoadwarrior]

A Mac would be considerable to a high end PC and they're about the same price. A mac will be better than something bought in Wal-Mart because the Wal-Mart PC will have shit parts and will be subsidised by all the crap installed on it.

Yes you can clean it out and even re-install a clean copy of windows to ensure it works to its best but then you're paying with your time rather than money.

Tight-wads love stories like this to justify buying the cheapest shit out there but in general you'll find middle of the road stuff is the best. High-end stuff is always over priced and is more about brand than performance. Low-end is for people in trailers and will mean cheaper parts, less support or something.

Mid-range is basically a real high-end and aimed at normal people. Where as anything that is advertised as being high-end is for pompous jerks with more money than sense. These are the sort of people that don't care how long it lasts because they can buy 2 more to replace it.

Apple does sort of move into the high-end market but, as I said, a good PC that won't be out of date in 2 months will cost about the same. Apple will likely charge more and they realise that which is why they act like Nazis and like to have their systems closed up as much as possible. Having fewer pieces of crap software on your system and less hardware variety will lead to perceived quality increase despite using the same parts.

While it's the same parts inside, it's also what's on the outside that makes a difference and Apple has lead in design and usability. Even their old G4s had nice doors that are opened via a handle rather than some funky ass piece of metal that requires you to take the screws out and even then they can often be a pain to slide in and out of place or some big ass U shaped piece of metal that is more likely to cut you than go back on properly.

What you're paying for on average with a Mac is for them to employ more designers and usability experts than Acer will ever have and Nazi-like control. Sure they could subsidise the cost with shit-ware from Norton, McAffee, Real, etc and it would be cheaper and it would still have a superior design to a Wal-Mart PC but then it would run worse and there wouldn't be much point in moving to OSX and giving up all your Windows software if you're not getting the stability.

Unlike the case with Lexicon, I don't think Apple hides the fact their hardware is the same stuff inside and that their quality comes through other means which do work if you're willing to give up the freedom. It happens that I' not willing to give up the freedom so I've never owned a Mac. It's just too easy to build your own quality PC.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lexuses aren't just badge engineered, dude. There is no USDM Toyota-badged equivalent to any given Lexus. You cannot buy Lexuses at Toyota prices, because they are real luxury cars that don't even share any platforms with the likes of the Corolla.

Not gonna defend the Sebring, though. And I don't actually have any experience with Acuras and Hondas, because I'm British, and Honda doesn't feel the need to misrepresent any of their cars' origins over here.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a company that would take a few hundred bucks worth of regular PC parts, add a slightly modified free open-source OS, package the thing in a white shiny box and sell it for a few thousand bucks... What a scam it would be!

If you think OSX is "slightly modified", stop holding Command+S when you turn it on.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful, the angry /. mob's Apple sense is tingling.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Skuld-Chan]

Who said anything about OSX? :0

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Neil Hodges]

I like your post but there is a minor error. OS X is not open source. It's derived from NeXT which is a closed-source OS from the 1980s that was ported to the PowerPC platform, and is still closed source today.

You may want to read this:

Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects.

Darwin forms the core set of components upon which Mac OS X, Apple TV, and iPhone OS are based. It is compatible with the Single UNIX Specification version 3 (SUSv3) and POSIX UNIX applications and utilities.

Darwin's heritage began with NeXT's NeXTSTEP operating system (later known as OPENSTEP), first released in 1989. After Apple bought NeXT in 1997, it announced it would base its next operating system on OPENSTEP. This was developed into Rhapsody in 1997 and the Rhapsody-based Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999. In 2000, Rhapsody was forked into Darwin and released as open-source software under the Apple Public Source License (APSL), and components from Darwin are present in Mac OS X today.

Darwin version 10.2 corresponds to Mac OS X 10.6.2.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[klui]

Well, that's the problem with reading some article and taking it as gospel. The closed-source nature to OS X refers to its Cocoa classes, which were based on the NS classes of NeXTSTEP.

OS X opened up the kernel but the environment and look and feel are enabled by the programming classes, not the kernel nor the supporting utilities. Even under NeXTSTEP the core OS used BSD and that source code was available, albeit not maintained very well.

Re:Could never happen with computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

You find a few hundred bucks of regular PC parts that are like those in my 27" iMac or my Macbook Air or even my Macbook Pro and I'll suck your dick, troll. Go back to using your horrible plastic Toshiba laptop, or your jaundice CFL backlit Dell LCD panels. Who gives a shit about OSX, you get what you pay for hardware wise.

Can there be a difference?

[RJabelman]

What puzzles me about Blu-Ray players is whether there can actually be a difference in picture and audio quality between cheap and more costly players. Ignore the analogue output - I appreciate the "better" player can have a better DAC. Also, I appreciate the "better" one could be more responsive in the menu system, load faster etc. But when it comes down to actually playing the movie, surely the player's just reading the data, decoding it according to a specified algorithm and spitting out the decoded version over HDMI?

Re:Can there be a difference?

[Xugumad]

The fancier players tend to try post-processing the input to make it look "better", in order to validate their price. This made a decent amount of sense with DVD players, where motion compensation, de-interlacing and other things could really make a difference.

In reality, for Blu-Ray, buy a slimline PS3 and call it done, unless you want a player with a specific feature (DVR, Blu-Ray recording, etc.)

Re:Can there be a difference?

[commodore64_love]

That's a difference in the codec software. I've observed the same with m PS2 which plays DVDs just fine, but doesn't apply any kind of filtering so dark scenes look pixelated. The same DVD on my Sony 5-disc player applies post-processing filters to smooth the pixels and create a near-flawless image.

Re:Can there be a difference?

[tepples]

Also, I appreciate the "better" one could be more responsive in the menu system, load faster etc.

Likewise, a player might support only the basic profile, Bonus View, or BD-Live.

But when it comes down to actually playing the movie, surely the player's just reading the data, decoding it according to a specified algorithm and spitting out the decoded version over HDMI?

Algorithms for processing the video to compensate for the fact that 24 fps doesn't evenly divide into 60 Hz are another.

But it was greatly improved!

[Greger47]

The blog got it all wrong! Lexicon if very honest about taking the Oppo player and improving upon it, and boy they did!

It's common knowledge that the audiophile listener derives his pleasure not from the quality of sound reproduction but from the price tag of his equipment.

So an audiophile is getting 7x the pleasure from listening to the Lexicon compared to the Oppo. Beat that if you can!

/greger

Re:But it was greatly improved!

[Toonol]

There's a lot of customers out there secretly wishing they could FORGET that they have an inexpensive BluRay player, so they could return to their preening. I think of it like a double-blind test; if nobody had busted into the thing, no audiophile would ever have noticed the cheap hardware just by listening.

Re:But it was greatly improved!

[johnny cashed]

But its got a billet aluminum front face!

An aside: as a machinist, I loathe the term "billet aluminum". Way overused and very incorrect. But hey, some people pay a lot of $$$ for "billet aluminum"

What was it PT Barnum supposedly said about suckers?

Re:But it was greatly improved!

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought audiophile was Latin for "a sucker is born every minute!"

No it works fine with normal Cat-5

[Sycraft-fu]

They say as much in the manual of Denon gear that has the port on it. You have to realize they used stick Denon Link on most of their stuff. They do it much less now that HDMI works well. The original purpose of it was to get a digital multi-channel uncompressed audio signal off DVD-A and SACD. Prior to HDMI, there wasn't an interconnect that did that so they rolled their own. Now it isn't so useful so they've pulled it off most of their gear.

At any rate, I don't think they were seriously expecting people who bought $1,000 receivers to get a $500 cable. As I said, the manual doesn't say you need to. What I think it was is audiophiles whining. They do sell some pretty expensive stuff, like a $7,500 processor/preamp. Some people who buy that probalby sniveled at the though of having to use an ordinary ethernet cable for their precious data. Denon then decided that if these people wished to waste money, they'd be happy to stick a vaccuum in their pocket and suck it out.

I don't believe it uses I2S, as they specifically talk about jitter immunity, and even if so it wouldn't matter. The data from any of the digital inputs doesn't go to a DAC, it goes to a SHARC processor (or sometimes more than one) where it is manipulated according to the setup of the receiver. From there it goes to the DAC. So it is going to get re-clocked anyhow.

Re:No it works fine with normal Cat-5

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years ago I worked for a famous chip company with only one real competitor. When they came out with a chip that was smaller, faster, and used less juice than ours, we were, ahem, green with envy.

And we raised our prices.

The marketing VP explained to us at a meeting that people will perceive our chips as being better, even when they know the facts prove otherwise, because if it "costs more it must be better."

I'd like to point out that most "audiophiles" are usually scrounging vintage gear at Goodwill, and pretty much tweak their analogue gear with rubber bands and safety pins or whatever words. It's the guys with too much money who are buying the alleged high end gear.

Monster Cables

[jamesl]

I'll bet they forgot to use the Monster Cables.

How many more products like this are there?

[dangitman]

One of the sites linked to by this story, in turn linked to a glowing review of this Blu-Ray player by another site that praised its superiority over the very Oppo unit it is "based" on.

With my interest piqued, I browsed a little more on this site, and found a review for an HD projector that sounded weirdly similar in that it appears to be a JVC projector that has been repackaged and rebadged at a higher price, and got a similarly glowing review. Without any real technical scrutiny, of course. I wonder how many more products are out there of a similarly repackaged and fraudulent nature.

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[SchlimpyChicken]

There are a ton. In particular, JVC's DLA-RS2 projector got rebadged by a ton of companies (Audioholics also exposed the Meridian MF10 as a rebadged JVC), all of whom insisted that they made "dramatic" improvements to the picture quality. The problem is - reference is reference, and black is black. The system can only get so black, and a $350 calibration can bring the JVC DLA-RS2 to near-perfection. Happens all over the industry. Lexicon actually has a history of doing this, but this time they got caught in a more blatant example - and pulled THX down with them in the process.

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[dangitman]

I find this very interesting, as I deal quite a bit with this kind of equipment. However, I guess the difference is that I don't really follow small, less-known companies that sell equipment for suspiciously marked-up prices, or make bold claims about their quality.

Sure, I know there are tons of Chinese/Taiwanese companies making cheap knock-offs of popular products, but this is an entirely different game. How do they find enough suckers to fall for it? It seems so obvious and too easy to be caught out.

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I worked in the custom A/V industry, this practice was a big part of why I left.

We flew out and visited Runco, a premium manufacturer in CA, where they "made" waay overpriced LCDs, plasmas, and projectors. But even when we were there we could see "making" a plasma was the process of jamming a Panasonic TV into a metal frame. The markup almost doubled the price over the Panasonic. (Runco has apparently gone out of business since then.)

Projectors—their bread an butter—were almost no better. They had created their own market segmentation by buying out a competitor, (Vidikron), and then rebadging the same models at different price points. Since we were new, we couldn't become a Runco dealer, but we could become a Vidikron dealer. However, they basically expected us to sell the Vidikrons by saying "oh, it's just like a Runco...but different!"

This crap, alongside having to compete against Bose (we learned from insiders that their $100+ horrible-sounding cube speakers cost $1 to produce), (I've got a Monster-in-my-pocket-) Best Buy, and every so-called "trunk-slammer" in a 200 mile radius, forced me to get out. I just couldn't bring myself to smile and say how wonderful someone's new system would be when I knew that they could get the same quality for way less, and just paying someone in the know to set it up properly. Of course, one also can't make a living just plugging in TVs and A/V equipment.

Posted anonymously so I feel comfortable using brand names. (And seriously, don't ever let anyone you care about give money to Bose or Monster.)

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[Rmorph]

One of the sites linked to by this story, in turn linked to a glowing review of this Blu-Ray player by another site that praised its superiority over the very Oppo unit it is "based" on.

The hometheaterreview site owner has even gotten involved in the comments on that review, with accusations of "conspiracy" against a few of the commentators who are referring to Slashdot. The comments are much more fun to read than the article itself!

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[SchlimpyChicken]

Not anymore - he deleted the entire thread... I wonder if anyone has it in their cache or has a snapshot for posterity sake... they should submit screen caps to the guys at AVRant.com.

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[SchlimpyChicken]

He removed all the comments that got put on that site... It was a VERY interesting example of apparent corruption (of the Editor) who was obviously defending one of his advertisers. He was attacking everything and everybody EXCEPT Lexicon and THX. Of course, in the end, when he was being attacked from all sides he deleted the thread entirely.

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[Rmorph]

I posted some transcripts of the deleted thread on my website www.stabbingpixies.com (front page link): For info I was also involved in the thread discussion that got wiped as the user "m".

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://zzj.itf-inc.com/downloads/lolhtrthread.html

^ most of the comments that got deleted

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[hazydave]

Of course this happens, and all the more in the world of digital. In many cases, there's absolutely nothing left to do to improve the device. A true audiophile is not going to use the DACs built-in on their device anyway... they'll probably have a separate HDMI driven DAC box, many times more expensive than a Blu-Ray player ought to be, so they can feed their tube amps or whatever. And folks like me (I care about real improvements in audio, but am immune to the "snake oil" level of this business) will run the HDMI directly into a good quality digital amp, and be happy enough. Low-end folks will use the TV's speakers (well, one can assume that's why they still bother building speakers into TVs... I haven't used my television speakers since five main televisions ago (current DLP, previous CRT-projection HDTV, previous CRT-projection SDTV, and previous tube based SDTV were each integrated into an audio system).

So your Blu-Ray player is a computing device, primarily. There's not much room for improvements in performance versus the low-end: no DACs, not much analog at all. Features, sure... little things. But there's still a crazy market for upscale hardware. Not a huge one... not really large enough for independent product development, at least not from any major CE company. At best you get a consumer board with higher-spec components, at worst you get that same old consumer board. In both cases, maybe tweaks to the firmware to make it look upscale on-screen, maybe even offering a few options not available on the regular product. And of course, a nice expensive looking case.

I'm not claiming there are no high-end units designed from the get-go as high-end units, but there's only so much you can do of any real value to affect the look and sound of the Blu-Ray, as used in high-end systems. And the fact that this same board gets much better reviews in the high-end box than the low-end box is simply telling what everyone here pretty much knows: for the most part, the audiophile emperor is not wearing clothes.

Re:How many more products like this are there?

[alexo]

Mod up please. The transcript is hilarious!

Well, at least B&O is about looks

[SmallFurryCreature]

I don't think you buy B&O for quality but for the looks, they got very nice designs. Frankly, I am not really all that upset about all this, but then I have been used to PC's doing the same for ever.

Personally I always smiled when people wanted Compaq over Dell because it was a better brandname... guess it is, if you want a cheap IBM clone, go to the one who created the first.

Apple is really just an intel PC but with a "nice" design on it. I say "nice because my arm is resting on the edge of a macbook and OUCH. Sharp plastic edge, who thought that was a good idea?

Open up your brandname computer, and see what is inside that makes your X an X. Wanna bet it is almost entirely the casing, and even that is probably desinged by the same laptop company as its competitor.

It ain't much different in the food sector, the cheap no-name brand comes from the same production line.

About half a year ago I was shopping with a friend, who insisted on buying the "brandname" sugar because it was better... It is SUGAR even if it came from different factories, which it doesn't, the LAW dictates EXACTLY what sugar must be. There is no room for quality difference. If there was any, the quality control from the government would be all over them. The only difference is that for the cheap stuff, they use whatever granular size they got in surplus, but for thee and coffee that hardly matters. For some tasks, grain size matters, so what they do is they produce a certain granular size, fill the order they got and then anything left over is put in the cheap consumer bags. If you are making certain cookies (arnhemse meisjes) you need a large grain. Of course if you need that, just shake the cheap bag to see if you got lucky.

Rebadging the same crap to charge more is nothing unusual. I am just amazed they had the balls to do it so blatantly, come on, they could at least have insisted on having a new batch of components made in a different color, and put them in indivudual boxes to hide the layout.

Re:Well, at least B&O is about looks

[commodore64_love]

So is a $200 eMachine as good as a $400 Compaq of equal specs?
 
;-)

Probably not. In my experience eMachines use cheap power supplies that die within a year.

Re:Well, at least B&O is about looks

[dotgain]

That doesn't sound right. Cheap power supplied are supposed to fry everything connected to them within a year, not die within a year.

Crowbars and fuses are sooo 20th century.

Re:Well, at least B&O is about looks

[DavidTC]

Sugar is one of those things manufacturers can't actually claim are 'better' than other brands. All sugar is considered to be 100% identical, legally. (Paradoxically, this does allow them to claim to be 'the best', because if everyone is identical, then everyone is tied for 'best'. They're also 'the worst', but somehow that never makes it into their ad.) This makes sense, as it's really all just bought at giant auctions out of grain silos from unknown farmers and stuck into bags.

In fact, I'm not even sure your 'grain size' concept is correct. I suspect what's going on there is that cheaper sugar is in crappier bags, which let in more moisture, which make the sugar turn into 'rock candy' or whatever the technical term for that is. Or perhaps it's already done that in the silos, and they have to 'recrush' it back to smaller size, and the expensive places are better at that. Regardless, I don't think it has anything to do with 'sorting', because you can run sugar through a crusher easier than trying to sort it.

Sense of Perspective. Get One.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes this is a troll post, but all this has just proved to me that you so called audiophiles are the biggest bunch of pretentious wankers ever to exist

I2S clock jitter does NOT affect audio performance

[msgmonkey]

As someone who has actually interfaced I2S sigma-delta DAC's to DSP's I can tell you are either confused or have your facts wrong.

The clocking setup is typically a master clock running at 256X, 384X or 512X audio frequency running into the DAC, it is the stabilty of this clock that determines the accuracy of the analogue output.

The I2S bus has three lines, CLK (data clock) which runs at 32X frequency (for 16bit audio), DATA (the actual bits) and LR which indicated if the data is on the left or right side. Jitter on the data line has no bearing on the quality of the output as long the data is present on the clock transition as it is latched and presented synchronously to the analogue section of the DAC.

Although I2S was not designed for cable comunications you could easily get away with using it for short distances since even at 24bits and 96Khz the clock rate is only 4.608MHz with a cycle time of 217ns. Assuming a latch window of 25% of cycle time of gives us 51ns, any device producing that much jitter would have to be pretty badly designed.

So to cut a long story short, yes for I2S using ethernet cable is more.

Is this really a surprise?

[DrXym]

Audiophiles are stupid. As long as something comes in a chunky heavy box with knobs, meters and valves they'll pay a substantial markup even if the innards are nothing special. Onkyo and Pioneer have both sold Blu Ray players which are almost the same as $100 Magnavox models sold in Walmart with a huge markup.

The really, really stupid audiophiles don't stop at $3500 though. Go and have a laugh at the Goldmund players. How does anyone ever manage to play a blu ray without a "magnetic damper". I expect if you cracked them open they'd be built around the same SOCs powering devices costing 1/20th the price.

Re:Is this really a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh, someone should tell those customers that a CD/DVD/BlueRay works differently than Vinyl... on the other hand... IF I get someone to write to them, I'd rather get some nigerian friend to do that.

Purpose of 80 Hz rolloff

[Lonewolf666]

While THX has no convenient spec for download on their homepage, I have gleaned the following from various forums (errors of the posters possible ;-)
-80 Hz is the crossover frequency between subwoofer and full range speakers
-The subwoofer is fed the signal over a low pass filter with 24db/oct at 80 Hz
-The full range speakers are fed the signal over a high pass filter with 12db/oct at 80 Hz. Together with the natural roll off that amounts to a high pass filter with 24db/oct.

My semi-educated opinion (electrical engineer but not specializing in audio) is that
1) This setup actually makes sense for a subwoofer system.
2) If you don't want to use a subwoofer, ignore it and get some non-THX setup without the high pass filter for the full range speakers. Good full range speakers will cover significantly lower frequencies than 80 Hz, and with the high pass filter you would throw those away.

Oppo is a really solid player.

[(H)elix1]

For those not familiar with the brand, Oppo is one of the top consumer grade players out there. when I wash shopping for an up scaling DVD player, it was consistently one of the better recommendations on the AV forums and friends who did some serious (but not stupid) home setups. I love mine. In the case of several movies, it seems to skip the FBI warning - bonus!

If you were to 'hide' any consumer grade stuff into what is positioned as l33t/your left arm hardware, an Oppo would have been my first guess.

Re:Oppo is a really solid player.

[drxenos]

I too have an Opp upscaling DVD player (DV-980H). I always read comments like yours about skipping the normally unskippable clips (UOP) with an Oppo, but I can never figure out how. Can you tell me was the magic is?

Re:Oppo is a really solid player.

[ahabswhale]

I have an Oppo BDP-83 and I've heard this claim before about their upscalling players but I think it's bullshit. The reason I think it's bullshit is that it's illegal to skip the FBI/Interpol warnings. All Oppo can do is get you to those warnings faster so you can move on to your movie quicker. Oppos are very fast so it's possible some people weren't looking at their screen when the warning came up but I can guarantee you it did (unless they have some weird bug with some specific disks). The only other possibility is that someone managed to hack the firmware but I haven't seen any hacked Oppo firmware out there.

Re:Oppo is a really solid player.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is not illegal to skip the FBI warnings. If anything, it's against the license that the manufacturer pays in order to use the DVD technology, but that does not affect the end user. It's the same as the region codes. An Oppo has a code you can enter to make the player region free. They won't allow Oppo to seller a region free player, but it is certainly not illegal for an end user who knows the code to make use of it.

Re:Oppo is a really solid player.

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't illegal. Where did you come up with this shit? If it were illegal then ALL discs would block you from skipping it. Some let you skip. some let you fast-forward. Some don't allow either. It is up to whomever is making the disc. Your speed argument is ridiculous. It doesn't matter how fast the player is. If the clip is to play for 30 seconds, it plays for 30 seconds. If your argument were true, then the movie would play too fast! Oppos have a code you can enter to make them region free. It is possible they have one to skip clips marked unskippable.

New Product

[Anonymous Coward]

You could probably package a drive tray mechanism and whatnot mated to a drill motor then state that prior to playback a disk symmetry and vibration check will be run prior to playback. if a loud noise is heard, your dvd/blueray disk was found to be faulty and as such destroyed in the interest of sound/video quality. Maybe put some cheap uc/ancient pc motherboards on the inside so it isn't completely bare.

no doubt, some people would buy it and destroy every disk they own on it.

What is the point of "high-end" with digital?

[llZENll]

I could understand the point of high end hardware, or at least have a shred of belief that it actually _might_ be better when things were all analog, but as soon as it goes digital what is the point? A $90 bluray player is going to output THE EXACT SAME audio and video bits as a $5000 bluray player. People spend way too much time and money on things they _think_ are better, rather than things they _know_ are better, I guess its a lot easier to do the former though than finding trusted sources of reviews who do blind testing.

Re:What is the point of "high-end" with digital?

[pomakis]

A $90 bluray player is going to output THE EXACT SAME audio and video bits as a $5000 bluray player.

That's not quite true, though. A lot goes on in a Blu-Ray player between decoding the raw H.264 stream an pumping an HDMI video signal to the TV. There's the matter of handling all of the many nuances of turning an interlaced signal into a progressive signal, for example. Some players do this sort of thing way better than others, and the resulting difference in video quality is definitely noticeable. Then there's the matter of converting between different framerates. It may sound like a trivial task, but a lot of the low-end players do a quick-and-dirty job of it, resulting in lower-quality video. I'm not sure about audio. I suspect similar differentiating factors are at work there, too. That being said, paying $5000 for a Blu-Ray player is a bit ridiculous. Avoid the $90 Walmart specials, sure, but the average $400 Blu-Ray player or a PS3 will give you audio and video that you'd be pretty hard-pressed to distinguish from the best.

Re:What is the point of "high-end" with digital?

[chrispitude]

Ahh, but Blu-ray figured this out already. Digital output is all the same? Easy, just make the player operating system so inefficient and slow that people pay extra to play an inserted movie in less than a minute!

Re:What is the point of "high-end" with digital?

[Jeremy Erwin]

I have both an oppo 971H dvd player and a samsung bdp1600 bluray player. On DVDs, the Oppo produces a noticeably better picture than the samsung. It's particularly good at deinterlacing, though to be fair, I sold off my DVD of Outland, which used to be my torture test for video filters.

The Oppo bluray player is $499, which might explain why I've made do with the Samsung.

Re:What is the point of "high-end" with digital?

[ahabswhale]

Too bad you have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, if two different players generate the exact same data, it will be sent over bit for bit the same. However, the data sent from the players is NEVER THE SAME. They all have different methods for generating that data which is why there are lots of differences between blu-ray players. What is fair to say is that the price of the player doesn't necessarily equate to the best picture. The Oppo BDP-83 is $500 but performs as well as many $2 - 3k players. However, Oppo is a bit of an oddball in that regard and they have a crazy good reputation for high quality at a fair price. There are people who actually test this sort of thing and report what artifacting tests pass and fail between different blu-ray players. If they all generated the same data, they would all pass and fail the exact same tests. What is also fair to say is that, for many people, they don't give a shit since it's still a lot better than what a SD DVD player is going to produce regardless of whether it's the shittiest blu-ray player on the planet.

Re:As a 49 year old feminist grandmother

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, hello, Straw Man! I haven't seen you in awhile.

It's more than just an Ethernet cable!

[dimension6]

Yes, but does your cable provide quantum tunneling, a local global warming solution, dimensional rift preventability, or cure cancer? The Denon's 168 5-star reviews give me enough reason to pay this extra quality.

Not all audiophiles are stupid ya know?

[freaker_TuC]

Some do buy with their brains instead of with their wallets ...

When buying something, I do look towards quality, functionality and price; in that particular order; not to the weight or size or knobs of the product unless it's a functional/quality thing..

You almost make us appear like blondes with 2 braincells! Try to think less general.

The public doesn't understand digital

[aussersterne]

at all. And you can't explain it to them. Despite the fact that I am the guy that they all turn to for computer help and their knowledge, and a reasonably prolific author of technology reference books at that, I have serious trouble convincing my family (nuclear and extended) that there is no difference between the photos their little Canon digicam stores on a $5 Chinese SD card versus a $60 card of the same capacity from the photography store.

"I can definitely tell the difference," they say, "the colors are brighter and the pictures are sharper and they just look more real and vibrant. You may know a lot but you don't know everything."

Attempts at technical explanations for why this is simply not possible cause eyes to glaze over and fights to start.

Same thing with blank DVD media. Rather than the $20 spindle, I have family that members buy the $10 apiece blanks because "if I'm going to send out family movies for Christmas, I want them to look as good as possible."

The world that most people live in is an analog world. Technology people see the world as a container for many abstract systems of constraint-based interaction of which "analog" and "digital" data processing are two, but for the regular folk, analog is REALITY and there is NOTHING ELSE; they can't even conceive of the properties of digital so it can't be explained to them. It's like asking a person who's been blind from birth to understand colors, visual scale, and horizon.

Re:The public doesn't understand digital

[cdrguru]

The two examples you mention do have differences, but not the sort you are describing.

The cheap SD card is almost certainly going to be slower and likely has significantly less robust handling of bad cells. So the card takes longer to save a picture and will "wear out" sooner. If you aren't shooting pictures in a demanding environment, it doesn't matter. And by "demanding environment" think of a child's birthday party, not anything fancier.

The DVDs are going to record the same data, but the cheaper ones will likely as not be unreadable sooner because of using cheaper dyes. The dye stability is what optical media is all about, and you don't get that with cheap knockoffs of well-known dyes that are patented, licensed and very protected by their manufacturers.

Not news...

[Critical_]

This is not news. Many of us in the A/V community over at AVS Forums knew about this a very long time ago. This is why it is important to research a product before purchasing it.

It was the early 1990's

[kilodelta]

And in my office we had a combination of Macintosh LC II's, and LC III's and LC IV's.

In one office someone got upgraded to an LC IV which made their office mate jealous because she only had an LC II. We didn't have the money to buy more of the newer machines but since they all used the same case/covers I had an idea. I took the cover from my LC IV and swapped it with her LC II cover. She was so happy with her new machine.

Re:It was the early 1990's

[NJRoadfan]

I took the cover from my LC IV and swapped it with her LC II cover. She was so happy with her new machine.

There was no "LC IV", there was the LC III+, and then the LC 475 (which was actually a re-badged Quadra 605). Apple was the king of badge engineering in the 90s. Plenty of the "high end and expensive" Quadras and Centris machines were rebranded as cheaper Performas, sometimes with the same exact hardware specs.

Re:It was the early 1990's

[kilodelta]

Thank you, yes they were LC 475's.

Motion vectors

[tepples]

I doubt the codec is any different between models.

I can see where a decoder might use the motion vectors from the MPEG data to improve rescaling the video or changing the frame rate (e.g. from 24 Hz film to 60 Hz video).

Simple fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a clear case of fraud, but because it was perpetrated by a corporation there will be no legal consequences.

"High end" computers

[Animats]

It's amusing that we don't have "high end" computers for multimedia use. Features might include:

• No firmware runs in System Management Mode, stealing cycles from the main CPU.
• No paging.
• Operating system is tested and certified for interrupt response under 1us, 100% of the time. (Hard real-time operating systems like QNX can do this. Linux and Windows still have excessive interrupt lockout times; I think Linux is now below 1ms if you don't have any crappy drivers installed, but 1us is a long way off.)
• Support for "sporadic scheduling", where the OS guarantees, say, 20% of the CPU every 1ms to a task that requests it. This allows playing multimedia with no breaks while doing something else. If you try to open too many multimedia windows, the scheduling request is rejected, because you're out of capacity.
• Disk access prioritization, so that CPU priority affects disk access priority. (QNX has this).
• All solid state disks.

These are the kind of specs you see in hard real time systems that have to run both time-critical and non-time-critical code. "Multimedia PCs" ought to have specs like that, but they don't. So you still get pausing and stuttering if something else interferes with playback.

A typical test in the real time world is to hook up a square wave generator to an input pin and a digital oscilloscope to an output pin. You then run a program which is waiting for interrupts triggered by the input pin, and when the user process triggered by the interrupt gets control, it turns on the output pin. You load up the CPU with other, lower-priority tasks. You watch the results on a storage 'scope, timing the time from input to output. You expect all the spikes to be below the promised time threshold. If there are any outliers, users get annoyed, file bug reports, and it gets fixed. This is how you get rid of "jitter" at the OS level.

Sad, Lexicon used to make great stuff

[jdb8167]

I used to work for them in the early 90's. They made really amazing surround sound processors. It is kind of sad that Lexicon has fallen this far.

You do for HD sound

[Sycraft-fu]

S/PDIF only carries Dolby Digital or DTS signals. It won't carry the new Dolby True HD or DTS Master Audio signals. They are too high bandwidth. Now, to what extent does that matter? That is up for debate. In many cases, not at all because many Blu-ray discs don't have those formats, they only have standard Dolby Digital. Even if they do there is some debate as to if you can hear the difference or not.

However, if you want to receive those signals, you need to use HDMI. S/PDIF won't do it.

OT Amendation Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[dpigott]

"Mother of" is a bit of a hack phrase, but if she is a "mother of" she has a right to be mother of FORTRAN as well since she was so heavily involved in getting the higher-ups at UNIVAC to accept symbolic compilers, and so heavily pushed for this kind of formula translation approach to coding.

She was a force behind both the A and B compilers at UNIVAC starting in 1951. The A series compilers were mathematical and led the ARITH-MATIC and MATH-MATIC and were a tributary to FORTRAN while the B series led to FLOW-MATIC which was one of the ancestors of COBOL. (Both were based ultimately on Mauchly's ideas for the ENIAC, filtered by Schmidt et al. in SHORTCODE)

The reason why the DoD put her in authority for the COBOL project was that she had already garnered an impressive reputation on compiler development. Since for a lot of slashdotters COBOL appears to be a constant object of ridicule, it's important to remember how wide her accomplishments were.

Whats wrong with that? Monster does worse

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with that markup? Monster Cable takes $1 worth of wire and connectors and puts it in a package with a $50 price tag on it. Their 50x markup is way more than that 7x markup.

Is anyone actually shocked...

[hazydave]

.... that an "audiophile" product is simply the same old regular consumer product in a fancy box. I guarantee this happens all the time, and at least many of the self-professed audiophiles don't have a clue. Just like the "coathanger speaker wire" test of a year or two ago.

About the only news here is that the THX people were involved, and apparently certified a player that didn't meet their own specifications. That should be big news.

High end is a fraud ...

[Anonymous Coward]

See this ABX test :

http://www.matrixhifi.com/contenedor_ppec_eng.htm

Highlander THX, nuff said

[elrous0]

Any DVD enthusiast who remembers the notorious first release of the "THX certified" Highlander DVD can attest to the fact that a THX label means jack-squat to anyone but a complete sucker.

ok, I'll bite

[onyxruby]

I'm one of those people that does have a hearing range greater than 25kHz. I don't know how high because my hearing range extends beyond the testing capabilities of my local ear specialist testing chamber. The army also tested me as fairly exceeding 25kHz so I've got multiple hearing tests that are in agreement. Supposedly this makes me one of the people that this cable would be useful too.

That being said, in the real world when your hearing does extend to that range, the length of a cable like that is the least of my worries. Of greater concern is the high pitch whine many electronics make and other background noise. Unless you can create a chamber (such as a hearing test chamber) that isolates out all real world noise, and have electronics that don't generate a high pitch whine, things like the phase difference of a cable are moot.

In short I'm agreeing with you in calling this cable bunk, as even if you do have that hearing range it would utterly useless outside of a studio environment. Certainly a cable like that would make no difference in audio quality. If they really want to appeal to people with that kind of hearing range they'll make sure they're electronic equipment doesn't create it's own high pitch whine.