$10K Ethernet Cable Claims Audio Fidelity, If You're Stupid Enough To Buy It

MojoKid writes: There are few markets that are quite as loaded-up with "snake oil" products as the audio/video arena. You may have immediately thought of "Monster" cables as one of the most infamous offenders. But believe it or not, there are some vendors that push the envelope so far that Monster's $100 HDMI cables sound like a bargain by comparison. Take AudioQuest's high-end Ethernet cable, for example. Called "Diamond," AudioQuest is promising the world with this $10,500 Ethernet cable. If you, for some reason, believe that an Ethernet cable is completely irrelevant for audio, guess again. In addition to promises about the purity and smoothness of the silver conductors, and their custom "Noise-Dissipation System," they say," "Another upgrade with Diamond is a complete plug redesign, opting for an ultra-performance RJ45 connector made from silver with tabs that are virtually unbreakable. The plug comes with added strain relief and firmly lock into place ensuring no critical data is lost." Unfortunately, in this case, there's the issue of digital data being, well... digital. But hey, a 1 or a 0 could arrive at its destination so much cleaner, right?

Comments

Re:Come on...

[TheGratefulNet]

I'm not going to defend expensive cables, but ...

bits are NOT bits when it comes to clocking and jitter. if there is a separate clock and data, then data won't matter when it arrives, the clock sets the trigger edge.

otoh, spdif audio (for example) is self clocking and the timing of the bits DO matter since the being of the d/a conversion begins right after the last bit in the left-right payload. the timing of that last bit causes a 'big operation' to occur and that's when the data gets pushed out as a left and right analog value. repeat that every wordclock times (44.1k or whatever your rate is) and now maybe you can see that WHEN the bits arrive matters. it directly correlates to how evenly the samples are squirted out as analog voltages.

another tidbit for you: you can have all the lousy timing you want when you go from digital to digital to digital. copy that 'file' 1000x, serially, using spdif. all bits get there and the files compare. now, do one final step: convert that series of bits to a series of analog voltage. that final step NOW matters and its the only step that matters when the d/a conversion happens. all the other serial streams (even if fed realtime one into the other, finally with the last one going into a DAC) don't matter wrt its timing.

now, one more thing to talk about: reclocking and buffering. most dacs have receiver chips that have a fifo and they clock into the buffer and then reclock out using a precise local clock. this reconstructs the clock and reduces jitter; but you still need SOME very good clock to determine when the push out analog values. that precise timing either happens locally or it happens from the upstream source (could be the usb layer on the pc doing the timing/clocking).