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."

Comments

A fool and his money...

[koreaman]

This reminds me of the Slashdot story on several-thousand-dollar ethernet cables from Monster a few years back. *sigh*

Re:A fool and his money...

[Maxo-Texas]

I had a blind cab sav wine tasting with 6 wines ($3 to $62).

The person from the northeast placed them "correctly" except swapping the $20 and $30 wine.

The people from texas tended to prefer the $20 wine the "top" wine.

The worst wine was rated lowest by over half the people there.

The 3rd wine (price wise) had a peculiar "oak" gripping the sides of the tongue that people either liked or disliked but everyone could sense.

My comment on the $62 Hess was "this tastes the most like the 'ideal' of cab sav" but I preferred the Estancia cabsav. It was sweeter on the tongue (not from sugar either- it was a weird sweetness.)

Our blind trial provided strong evidence that we could sense differences between the wines but adjacent cost bands tended to blend together and everything over $20 was "just darn good". The $35 Robert Mondavi was not as well liked as the $20 Estancia generally.

I paired the wine with high quality steak. Some wines pair "magically" with the right foods. The wine tastes better and the food tastes better.

Re:A fool and his money...

[ElectricTurtle]

If your 'non-generic' tea doesn't taste better than your generic tea, you're doing it seriously wrong.

Re:A fool and his money...

[ElectricTurtle]

Spoken like somebody who has never had a good bottle, or maybe you just don't like wine. For my part I have had $8 bottles that I have loved, and $40 bottles which I wanted to love (when something is more expensive you do *want* to like it) but in fact hated. Point being, price doesn't correlate with taste, and I rarely buy anything I know any background for so there is no prejudice there.

If you don't like the taste of wine generally that's just your problem, but don't assume that it cannot be enjoyed for its taste by others.

Quite frankly I'm not at all surprised that rankings would change day to day even by the same people. Taste is very tied to mood. People tend not to want to eat the same thing all the time, even when it's something they like.

Re:A fool and his money...

[d3ac0n]

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.

Don't you know? In today's scientific world all you need to do is get enough people to agree with you and ANY skeptic is instantly labeled a "denier" and must be required to prove their case.

Of course, no rigorous proof is required of the claimant, only a panel of his like-minded peers to affirm that he is right, and that there is a "consensus".

Now stop being a Super SATA cable denier, fork over your money like a good little sheeple and sit quietly.

This will not stop best buy from have monster sata

[Joe The Dragon]

This will not stop best buy from have monster cable sata cables and a big time geek squad up sell when buy systems there.

I especially love the comment on his blog

[Tridus]

Where the comments section would be, we get this instead: "I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own. "

Or in other words: "I have absolutely no fucking clue what I'm talking about and really don't like being corrected."

Re:This will not stop best buy from have monster s

[MozeeToby]

Actually phone conversation I've had (multiple times in face):

Me: Hello?
Him: Hey what HDMI cable should I buy?
Me: The cheapest ones you can find?
Him: Really? Because they have some for $30 and some for $90, aren't the $90 ones better?
Me: Where are you?
Him: Best Buy, they have the good stuff.
Me: Just turn around and leave, buy them off the internet for $5, or at least go to Target or Walmart.
Him: But they have some for $90 here, they wouldn't charge more if they weren't better.

etc. etc. etc.

Maths

[Swarley]

(Confirmation Bias) + (Rich Idiots) - (A Double Blind Trial) + (Reality) = Hilarity! I find that this is almost always true.

/. discussions about stupid things...

[stagg]

There seem to be a lot of /. discussions about obviously stupid things. The comment thread fills up with people competing for the Score 5 (funny) comments. What's the point here, other than ego stroking and karma boosting? Inflated senses of superiority? Now before anyone answers, I've got some Super SATA stock to liquidate.

Re:Digital?

[Chris Burke]

Since when does a SATA cable deliver 1s and 0s? It delivers an analog voltage, that happens to be determined as a 1 or 0 by noise thresholds. They could be making a better cable, the problem is once you meet the noise margins for this digital interpretation all extra improvement are for nothing.

That's what an electrical/computer engineer, when actually doing their job and not just trying to show off to non-engineers, calls "digital". Every digital electric circuit is an analog voltage that happens to be determined to be a 1 or 0 as long as it is within a threshold. That's what it means to be a (binary) digital circuit. It's why it's advantageous, because you either meet the threshold or you don't. And when it doesn't happen, we call that "failing". Heck, thanks to the nature of digital signaling, you can even use error correction codes, tolerate some amount of failure, and still recover 100% of the data.

So as long as you presume that "SATA cable" has an implied "functional" modifier, then it's fair to say it's delivering 1s and 0s.

Re:HA HA HA HA:

[MozeeToby]

I Put it through the BS to English translator and I got this

I have disabled Comments on this post so that people who believe everything I tell them do not have to read remarks made by a large number of scientifically and technically literate individuals who cannot tolerate people lying to and defrauding their customers.

Re:Maybe, just maybe

[Dahamma]

Reading TFA, he replaced the *SATA* cables on a *NAS*, which then sent the audio files over Ethernet to his network. I think it's pretty safe to write it off as an ignorant misunderstanding of digital electronics (by him, not you - you are just giving him WAAY too much credit :)

Lighten up Francis.

[jamrock]

There seem to be a lot of /. discussions about obviously stupid things.

The subject may be "obviously stupid" to you, but perhaps others have interesting things to add. I've already read some informative and insightful comments in this thread about audio/video cables, interference, hum, etc., which I would not have learned had I decided that the discussion was too "obviously stupid" to follow.

The comment thread fills up with people competing for the Score 5 (funny) comments. What's the point here, other than ego stroking and karma boosting?

"Competing"? Why do you think it's a competition? Maybe an amusing thought just popped into their head and they decided to share it. Obviously some people enjoyed them or they wouldn't have been moderated "Funny". You seriously need to get over yourself.

MOD PARENT UP

[Cowclops]

I've been saying for years that there is a new kind of wrong-headedness that people in today's society apply to factual matters - that if they don't understand the reasoning behind a factual statement, then they just claim its a matter of opinion. I think this is overcompensation for when we were taught in 2nd grade that sometimes facts are actually opinions. Well, the less intelligent among us have extended that to mean "sometimes things you don't understand and make factually incorrect statements about are 'just opinions'

Everyone is welcome to an opinion, but certain matters aren't a matter of taste. Example:

"Red is better than green." This is an opinion because you could like red or green or whatever color with essentially no justification and nobody questions you on it, because its purely a matter of taste.

"The color red has a wavelength of around 300nm" would be a factually incorrect statement, not a matter of opinion. Red has a wavelength thats more like 550-650nm or something like that... I wanna say 300nm is violet or ultraviolet. (I might be wrong on that one, but it still illustrates the point). Some people never learned the difference between "A factually untrue statement" and "an opinion." And 'magical cables make sound better!' is a factually untrue statement, not an opinion. It just takes more verification than the average jerk audiophile can be bothered with.

Disclaimer: My expertise is audio design/engineering, so the above comments may be tainted with objective fact.