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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."
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."
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
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.
"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.
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.