Slashdot Mirror
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."
And high-end digital cables are continued proof of this! I'm perfectly happy to pay $5 extra for a better cable so it won't actually break on me, or has a handy elbow bend in the connector, or whatnot (OK, maybe a bit more for a really long cable). Beyond that it's pure fraud.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Wine snobs are pretty darn close. Especially French wine snobs..
The California wine industry would be a shell of what it is now, if some enterprising brit didn't convince them to try a tasting without looking at the labels
Even after they tried to force him to supremeness the results...
From the wikipedia article you just linked to...
Indeed, the organizer of the competition, Steven Spurrier, said, "The results of a blind tasting cannot be predicted and will not even be reproduced the next day by the same panel tasting the same wines."[4] In one case it was reported that a "side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers."[5][6]
Not much good in blind tests if there is no repeatability.
Kinda like some tests of psychic powers out there, or homeopathy.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
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.
Unfortunately, this isn't the whole picture.
Its pretty much certain that the data passed by the cable is identical. But its not certain that that the electromagnetic field created by pushing the signal through the cable is not interfering with a nearby analog component, introducing noise or hum. A better shielded digital cable might well actually make a noticeable impact.
For example, I used to work on a computer that where I could hear a low level buzz from the speakers when the hard drive was working. Maybe a shielded cable would have made a difference... or repositioning the hard drive relative to the other components. Or maybe it was grounding issue or something... I didn't investigate it; it wasn't my computer.
I particularly love his comment that the cables actually improved the naturalness in "the music’s rhythmical progression".
In other words, the cable isn't just changing the timbre of the notes; mellowing the harsh electronic edges, reducing noise levels, and other mumbo-jumbo these things are usually claimed to do. It is actually changing the timing of the music, in other words editing the music as it flies down the cable! If I put one of these on my hard drive I could expect to find fewer typos in my code.