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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!
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.
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.
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.
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
(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 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.
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
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.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
He's improved it. Now he's taken his entire site offline. It now simply reads
Error establishing a database connection
Oh wait, that was us.
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
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.
Maybe it was also meant to be purchased and used in a "low oxygen" environment. I'm sure the sound is much better when there isn't so much oxygen permeating your brain and impeding the high quality sound particles, etc.
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!
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.