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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."
This reminds me of the Slashdot story on several-thousand-dollar ethernet cables from Monster a few years back. *sigh*
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This will not stop best buy from have monster cable sata cables and a big time geek squad up sell when buy systems there.
Steward Says Super SATA Sound Swindles Some Suckers
Wait until he installs the pure ivory motherboard standoffs!
The transmission through the SATA cable is certainly unaffected, but close-by analog systems may receive interference from the SATA signal. On the other hand, if you have analog signals anywhere near SATA cables, you don't know what you're doing anyway, so the quality of the cable is really not the parameter to optimize.
I think you meant 'most people'.
Don't ignore the placebo effect in audio perception. Placebos have been proven to work, and it has also been shown that higher priced placebos are more effective.
You conjugation need work
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
The author now has this up:
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.
Which really means "I'm an ignorant, lying, idiot, and dont want people pointing that out on my blog, so I have closed commenting and deleted all comments, since they all pointed out my stupidity."
Ah well...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
It could succeed or fail to deliver the 0s and 1s with their souls intact.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
A normal SATA can only carry 0s and 1s, but Super SATA carries 0.0000s and 1.0000s. Thats 4 digits of precision beyond the bits that normal SATA can represent.
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.
Audiophiles frequently find differences where none exist...and in other news water is wet.
In this economy? Good luck.
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.
Since both are carrying digital data, how is one stream of digital data any better?
Electrical hookup vs optical hookup isn't just digital vs digital. You have to consider grounding effects too. 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.
optical has the advantage of isolation. IE both devices need not share a common ground. This is good as devices will have varying ground potential caused by transients such a digital switching which will ultimately cause noise in the signal when it's converted into analog. By using an optical interconnect you remove the noise source of the DVD player. So optical interconnects do have a point, although in practicality with good power supply and grounding scheme shouldn't be needed.
Me: You're absolutely right. But don't buy those crappy $90 cables. I've got a special stash of $150 cables I can let you have for $200.
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.
While I would not expect that the drive cables should affect the audio in any way, I have been in hardware development long enough that when a software person makes some strange claim like"the circuit changed and I didn't do anything" that often there is something behind it. In short, these things are complex. Not that the cable should not make any difference. Maybe in his motherboard, the terminations are not good and the EMI in the board is affecting the audio. This cable may be a better match. I am not saying this is the case, but do not write off these things just because they do not make sense. That said, the writer should also try to replicate on several platforms etc etc
All the same points were made, and shenanigans called.
There was a lot of interesting stuff said in the old discussion - a lot of it had to do with the fact that when people review this HiFi/Audio stuff - the testing is all very subjective, and is never done as a blind trial. Thus, one can boast the virtues of the $500 Ethernet cable - as they know they are listening through one - but one would never do a blind-sound test between a $500 and a $5 cable.
(Confirmation Bias) + (Rich Idiots) - (A Double Blind Trial) + (Reality) = Hilarity! I find that this is almost always true.
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.
The 0s are zeroier, and the 1s more one-ey!
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.
But that mains hum would have to enter *after* the digital->analog conversion, no? So the cable still wouldn't matter, unless you're saying that the cable itself is transferring hum from the dvd player to the analog amp.
The reason is that most optical cable you get is plastic, POF cable. It is great because it is flexible, durable, cheap, and can be made the size of the TOSlink opening. The problem is it is lossy as hell. Really poor transmission characteristics. Well this matters not at all when your DVD player sits on top of your receiver, as is so often the case. However if you have a setup where the devices are far apart, sometimes you discover that it doesn't work at all, or you get dropouts. You can, of course, replace it with real glass fiber but that is real expensive. Coax, on the other hand, works just great. A good 75ohm coax cable will go as far as you'd ever need in a home.
Also has the advantage that it uses the same kind of wire as video. Any 75ohm coax cable suitable for video is also suitable for S/PDIF.
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).
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I have some 700$ RCA cables you would love. A 1200$ toilet seat that I swear will make thinks "move" easier.
Just swipe your credit card here....
Dude, that's not a credit card reader. Stand up and pull your pants back up.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
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.
Your bad SATA cable has degraded your English... HELP HIM! ANYONE!! HELP
Poe’s law is in full force today... I can’t tell if you’re serious or being sarcastic.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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
Well, it's a darn good thing that you're the 93rd slashdotter to post the exact same comment. I might've missed it otherwise!
Take an EE course, then moderate.
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.
Looks like someone commented about how asinine that the premise these cables could matter to sound quality.
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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
Cables cannot cause clock skew, because again long term the cable would have to somehow create or delete samples and a cable just can't do that. Cables can cause jitter, but the effect is vastly overstated.
Not reclocking data is a better way to deal with skew than reclocking is. Because if you reclock you have to drop samples or resample to deal with the long-term drift between the input clock and the reproduction clock.
Jitter on the input data can show up if you go straight to a DAC. But you can redesign your DAC to avoid it.
AES/EBU is a data format like S/PDIF. Either system can run over different forms of cable. AES/EBU is not an improved follow on to S/PDIF as you state. They were developed in parallel.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Maybe this cable actually does work better for him. The problem is that he accepted the situation as-is, and stopped there. If it were me, I'd be really suspicious and start looking for interference from components within the NAS. Also, what was his source material? John Cage's 4'33"? Is he really an audiophile? I thought those guys posted pages and pages of signal analysis and comparisons on their blogs.
I hope your response went something like: "I can take two piles of dog shit and slap a sticker for $30 on one and $90 on the other. Just because the other says it costs $90 doesn't make it a better pile of dog shit"
Unless the interference is happening after the D-A conversion...I have this issue with my desktop computer, which is why I switched to a USB headset, issue gone. Thos AC97 chips are terrible, I wish they would burn in hell and bring back discrete sound cards. I miss the decent sound cards you used to be able to get.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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.
Ya know, I'm in the live entertainment biz and folks that have come from the computer world don't have near the ground problems as the stereo jockies. We just put everything behind two UPS with an autoswitcher in the middle and never looked back. Of course all of our stuff is HD-SDI so it either works or it doesn't. Grounds loops don't matter when you are digital as that interference won't mean anything to the decoder which wouldn't ever have the opportunity to receive said interference as the interface controller will do the signal passing at which point all grounding effects disappear. This was a huge issue when cameras had analog outputs with BNC connectors. Now that it's SD or HD-SDI none of us have ever looked back.
The only time I run into grounding effects these days is on the other side of distro where I'm outputting SD distro for large projectors. Everytime it's been because their cables were way longer than they needed to be so there wasn't enough signal to reach the other side. These days more often than not, hum bars are caused by lighting which can be adjusted for in most cameras.
Of course the audio is done separately and we put it back together for our recordings. Audio has been digital for a long time too. The only analog part is the microphone who's cable will attach to an amplifier usually only a few feet away. Noise is calibrated during the sound check so it gets filtered and has negligible impact on quality. The wireless microphones goes to their receiver which is almost always digital out as well. They all got sick of those grounding issues especially since most stage performances have to more or less share the same ground.
"(T)hey are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors."
Just read that aloud and try not to laugh.
I personally love how you can buy a DVD player at Best Buy for under $100, and then when you need a HDMI cable to hook it up? Over $100. Why does the cable that just sits there cost more than the DVD player it connects, when the DVD player has moving parts, a laser, and a remote control?
3. Profit!
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This implies that there are single bit errors in digital cables. There are not. They necessarily have error correction built in. When talking about something like a SATA cable, even a single bit error in a transmission is capable of crashing a system and causing catastrophic data loss. Any system that's used for hard drives REQUIRES absolutely ZERO uncorrected data errors ever. The iSCSI protocol, which essentially channels hard drive data over an Ethernet connection, has an enormous amount of buffering and error correction built in for this reason. I could literally unplug my SAN for 10 seconds (maybe longer) and plug it back in, and get no data errors.
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Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Basically the system had a grounding issue, probably a ground loop. Those things are the bane of my existence when doing audio. The answer though isn't to try and shield a cable, since the noise may well be induced through the ground itself, the answer is to clear up the problem. It can involve isolation of some sort, like an isolation transformer or moving a DAC outside of the computer. It can also involve getting audio devices that don't use a separate safety ground. You can get amps, receivers, etc that only use two pins and that's why, the safety ground is a massive ground loop problem. Apparently you can build the device to still pass FC and UL standards and just use the positive and negative wires. Probably more complicated grounding system but it works.
At any rate the issue is with grounding, not with shielding.
Couldn't interference from the SATA communication interfere with analog components somewhere along the chain of hardware that converts "1s and 0s" to "sound waves colliding with my ear drum"?
I know that when I have headphones plugged into my computer, occasionally I'll get interference that seems to match up with disk usage.
How did it get in your pajamas?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Furthermore... if there is some gigantic RF source that’s screwing up the data crossing your SATA cable, you have worse things to worry about than something a fancy SATA cable will fix.
In fact, DON'T MOVE. Someone might have accidentally installed a 110 kilovolt power line directly through the room you're in, or, alternately, you might have set up your sound system around one of those. Very carefully look around around the room you're in, or around the tower you're at the top of, to see if you can see a six inch thick wire suspended by thirty-foot high pylons. THEY ARE NOT INSULATED, DO NOT TOUCH THEM, THEY WILL KILL YOU. Call emergency services if you can reach a phone. Otherwise, see if you can use them to transmit the audio signal.
Once you've discounted that, it's time to check for other problems.
For example, did you accidentally install your sound system inside a microwave oven? If so, simply do not use them both at the same time. Also, do not operate the microwave while you are inside it. (Also, don't operate your sound system when you're inside it, either. Also don't put either of those inside of you. Just stop putting things inside of things, okay?)
Another thing to check is if the sun gone supernova. You can check by seeing if everything's on fire. If so, RF is going to be a bitch for the next several hours, until the blast wave from the sun destroys the earth...we don't recommend trying to fix the cabling, and instead sitting and contemplating how you could have gone to six flags yesterday instead of spending the money on those cables.
Then check for dark matter and other dimensions. Some theories suggests that gravity might be able to cross dimensional barriers, which has bugger-all to do with any RF problems, but, frankly, you people who think digital signals degrade like that can't be swayed with facts.
Once you've eliminated all RF options, there are only a few possibilities left.
A major remaining cause of problems is if one part of your sound system traveling a significant portion of the speed of light compared to another part. Even if they were in the same frame of reference when you installed, they might not be anymore, so check. If so, time dilation will cause a frequency shift. Also, after several milliseconds, your entire system will be ripped apart as the cables no longer reach.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I doubt that interference from the SATA cable is an issue as some have suggested, since anyone half-serious about PC audio that’s using a PCI SoundBlaster should be slapped. It’s not expensive to get a decent, high-bitrate sound interface that operates via USB, FireWire, or a PCI interface that lets you put the analog guts halfway across the room from your noisy computer. Yes, PCs put out a bunch of EMI, but the CPU and video card are much worse culprits than an SATA cable ever could hope to be. I don’t claim to be an “audiophile” (for obvious reasons) but I do produce music and own a 10000 watt concert system, and have been paying attention for many years to what REALLY makes a difference in sound.
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.
Please, PLEASE use sarcasm tags. Or in the case you are serious, please castrate yourself so your defective genes will never spread.
You just don't get a crappy connections do you?
EVEN if error correction works as you describe (and it doesn't, you are thinking network error corrections) then a crappy cable would REMAIN crappy ALL the time and therefor the corrections would also fail and you would never get any data ever.
In networking, you can indeed request resending of lost data but this DOES NOT WORK if your connection is down. This simply reroutes around crappy connections by waiting until it is gone (this doesn't happen when the cable at the end point is bad) or by re-routing around it. Problems with your MODEM in the past when you noticed it go slow at times happend because of the ANALOGUE part of the connection, not the digital path.
Error correction in for instance CD's and memory (ECC) works by having more bits which tell the hardware what the bits should be arranged. One of the most basic is for an extra bit that indicated that the majority of other bits must be like. If that isn't correct, then there is something wrong. More complex ones can actually correct the mistakes. This isn't a resending of data, the data itself contains the error correction. The idea a HDMI requests for a resending of data is so insane, so stupid, so misguided that I think you heard something somewhere once and apply it to everything without understanding it.
The idea that bad digital cables can introduce digital errors is valid enough, but it would cause such massive errors that the signal would be completly unusable. A digital cable either works or doesn't work. When it works, it works perfectly. There is no such thing as a better digital signal. SATA cables are designed to spec, they transmit far more then just the data you requested, the command instructions are also send over it. If there was interference your HD would throw a hissy fit from having to do insane commands, most of which wouldn't even make any sense or even be commands at all. Digital audio/video itself has an oddity that a bit flip might still be valid audio/video. But if I start bit flipping in HD commands I endup talking gibberish.
Really mate, LEARN something about computers. What next, a bad light bulb in a morse code flasher might cause problems in the morse code? No. Either the light goes on and off as it should or it does not go on and off at all and then there is no morse code.
Stop trying to reason that you didn't get scammed with your monster cables.
Digital signals just don't work that way.
What next? MP3's stored on a cheap drive sound worse then ones on a proper SCSI drive? Personally I prefer the old time sound of MP3's stored on a floppy. It just sounds richer.
Digital is simple, it either works or it doesn't. There is no grey area with digital. Your MP3 player doesn't go "mmm, well this could be a 1 or a 0. oh well, I make it 0.5 and nobody will be the wiser."
But go right ahead, draw an arrow on your cable so the bits know how to flow (on a two way connection), just be prepared to be seen as a fool by everyone else. Crappy cables don't get sold. If they were crap they would be returned by anyone because even normal people can tell the difference between a cable that doesn't work and one that does.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So if I drop them on an altar, I will see if they are blessed, uncursed or cursed.
Beware!!! If they are cursed, you will be unable to remove them from your rig, once put in action.
If you have audio interference from system activity, it is far more likely to be cross-coupled down the power supplies than it is by radiation. Most really good audio cards have on-board regulators and decoupling, with in-line inductors in the power supplies as well as the usual shielding.
Hum can be caused by currents flowing in the cable grounds as well. Back in the good ol', we would make sure that the audio system components were grounded at one point (a 'star' earthing point) to avoid ground loops where audible signal currents could be induced. Not wishing to try to do the same with my PC and attached stuff, I isolate the PC from the amp by using a digital output (dirt cheap bit of old coax and a couple of phono connectors). Ta-da!
http://www.malcolmsteward.co.uk/?p=2495
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The SATA Cable Saga
Posted by Malcolm Steward on 8/20/10 Categorized as Audio
I have withdrawn the article that appears to have upset so many computer enthusiasts.
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etc. He claims that he received death threats. Some people have too much time on their hands, and/or take things way too far.
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.