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Calling Shenanigans On Super SATA's Claimed Audio Qualities
nk497 writes "Veteran Hi-Fi journalist Malcolm Steward has pushed newfangled Super SATA cables via his blog as a way to improve the sound quality of music, saying: 'My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the "air" around instruments.' If that doesn't sound right to you, you're not alone. As PC Pro blogger Sasha Muller argues: 'How on earth can a SATA cable delivering 0s and 1s to their respective destination have any effect on those 0s and 1s? The answer is, it can't. Unless it's a magical one made of pixie shoes.' So maybe don't invest in Super SATA cables unless you have proof they're magical first."
If the delivered analog voltage always delivers the exact 100% same 1s and 0s, then it delivers 1s and 0s.
SATA cables can be grouped according to their transmission quality - class A SATA cables (the usual ones) deliver 100% quality; class B SATA cables deliver less than 100% quality, so they don't work and you throw them back at the shop for a replacement.
Any sufficiently advanced scam is indistinguishable from blind ignorance.
It's pretty obvious that these cables are a scam preying on people who care about their sound systems but who don't understand enough of the technical aspects to avoid buying overpriced crap. This Stewart fellow is probably getting paid to plug this cable on his blog, but it's possible that he's just an idiot.
For a humorous spin a related snake oil product, check out the Amazon reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. Many of the reviews are absolute comedy gems.
Audiophiles are just dead convinced there are all sorts of magic ways to improve your sound quality. Sometimes it is just pure, 100% made up bullshit like the "brilliant pebbles" thing. Other times there is a kernel of truth from long in the past that they over apply to everything.
With digital cable, that's the case. So S/PDIF is the major transport for digital audio. It is slowly being superseded by newer things but it was the big one forever and is still used a lot. Turns out S/PDIF isn't all that well designed with regards to having a solid clock signal. So what happened was back in the day (and still occasionally) you'd have devices that didn't reclock an incoming signal, they use the clock off of the wire. This meant they were sensitive to clock skew, which would happen if your cable wasn't tightly controlled to 75 ohms, in particular with a long distance. The kind of distortion caused by this is quite audible. S/PDIF has no real error correction, and no retransmit so any errors get played. Thus, for long runs (as you find in studios) good cable was needed, even for digital.
Obviously there are a lot of ways around this, the most common these days being just reclocking the signal you receive with an internal clock. Also better standards came about (like AES/EUB which runs over balanced cable). Doesn't matter, once and for all time people were convinced that cable quality mattered. It still crops up too, because you get audiophile devices that are poorly designed. They go for a "minimal component" design. So you'll have a DAC that doesn't reclock and thus is sensitive to clock skew.
Of course snake oil salesmen seized on this and started selling "high grade" cables that offered nothing.
Now of course when you get to SATA, none of this shit matters because it isn't a synchronous, no-retransmit system. If an error happens, the data will be resent. This is easy to do since everything is operating so much faster than the audio signal, and is further buffered by the system. If there are any errors on the wire, you never know, the system handles it behind the scenes. Also none of it affects the analogue audio signal, as it isn't clocked and converted until it hits the soundcard. Internal to the CPU, it is all just data.
Wine snobs usually have their opinions backed up by double-blind tests. The taste buds of good sommelier really can tell the type, vintage, and what kind of wood was used in the barrel that aged the wine. It was a blind test that proved that France wasn't the best in the world after all.
They might be snobs, but they do have some Scientific backing behind them. Audiophiles, not so much.
Not a typewriter
If your SATA cables are working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s your computer reads into memory is exactly the same as the sequence stored on the disk. You can't improve on that.
If you SATA cables aren't working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s will be different -- but as your quote pointed out, this would affect everything. The cable doesn't know whether it's transmitting a WAV, an MP3, a JPG, or an EXE. If your cables are corrupting data, your computer probably won't even boot!
But, as the quote also pointed out, there are systems in place to detect and correct errors. Even if your cables are corrupting data, it's extremely unlikely that your computer will think it's getting the correct data and proceed to play it. Instead, it will retry, and the symptoms you'll see are slow or stalled transfers (just like a bad network connection).
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Electrical hookup vs optical hookup isn't just digital vs digital.
Correct. High speed digital signals actual have a lot of analog related physical issues. The field is generally called (digital) Signal Integrity, and one of the better known experts is Dr. Howard Johnson.
You have to consider grounding effects too
If you mean shielding and/or signal termination, then yes.
If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.
Sorry, but mains hum should be rejected by as always being below the noise threshold in a well design digital system. That's one of the most widely cited reasons for usage of digital signal processing of what are naturally continuous analog signals (e.g. audio, RF (mostly), visible and non-visible light/radiation).
In a classic digital system, the logic levels have a wide margin sepearing the two digital states. Say in a 0-5V TTL logic, common from the 1970s to 1980s. As long as the digital signal says outside the "dead band" around 2.0V (from memory), while a digital bit is either 0.0V (or very close to it) or 5.0V (or very close to it), so the noise from the AC mains hum (50-60 Hz) will not distort the signal enough to swap logic levels.
If he has a really poorly designed motherboard and his old cables were really crappy(I.E had NO SHIELDING). The old SATA cables may have been injecting noise into the analog back end of the sound card.
Perhaps that's possible, but Steward is using those SATA cables on his NAS device, so the noise would also have to propagate across his network to the audio system.
On a side note, Steward is apparently making defamation claims against the folks discussing his blog:
http://www.hifiwigwam.com/showthread.php?44430-The-SATA-cable-thread
Super interesting Wikipedia article! You would think that if they were so good at it (the french judges) they could at least tell the difference between American and French grapes (even if they secretly found the American taste "Better")...
Actually, the snobs of both fields probably do have something in common: They enjoy spending money on things (Even if it's only for spending's sake)... Behold: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html, a study that demonstrated the ability of something to be better (read: more enjoyable) so long as (and solely if) it is more expensive. Maybe the Audio guys aren't so crazy after all... Just deluded by their medial orbitofrontal cortex!
Funny. But for future rants, copper-tin alloys are bronze. Brass is copper-zinc.
That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.
The skeptics make the claim that there's no way the expensive cables can affect the audio quality because the cables are digital. This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.
That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.
The skeptics make the claim that there's no way the expensive cables can affect the audio quality because the cables are digital. This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.
You should still do that experiment double-blind. Otherwise you're just playing into the unscientific thinking.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
James Rani's $1million speaker cable prize was never awarded...
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/04/1354224
"James Randi offered US$ 1 million to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables 'danceable,' Randi called it 'hilarious and preposterous.' He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, 'they would be paranormal.'