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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."
It seems like a pretty good buy to me. Those Monster cables have prevented any Monsters from infesting my home audio equipment. My anti-shark rock is working well in the living room, too.
If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them.
Steward Says Super SATA Sound Swindles Some Suckers
Wait until he installs the pure ivory motherboard standoffs!
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.
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.
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...
Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable 2 used from $2,499.98 1 refurbished from $999.99 Read the reviews.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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!
Wine snobs usually have their opinions backed up by double-blind tests. The taste buds of good sommelier really can tell the type, vintage, and what kind of wood was used in the barrel that aged the wine. It was a blind test that proved that France wasn't the best in the world after all.
They might be snobs, but they do have some Scientific backing behind them. Audiophiles, not so much.
Not a typewriter
Those Denon cables look great, but there's some severe problems with them, mainly because they're so good, the transmission rate exceeds lightspeed. Check out this review from Amazon.com:
Even worse, you might experience much worse effects with these cables. This review is very ominous:
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
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
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"'
Funny. But for future rants, copper-tin alloys are bronze. Brass is copper-zinc.
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.
James Rani's $1million speaker cable prize was never awarded...
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/04/1354224
"James Randi offered US$ 1 million to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables 'danceable,' Randi called it 'hilarious and preposterous.' He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, 'they would be paranormal.'
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.