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$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?
There are plenty of products in the audiophile industry that can match or exceed this in craziness level. I wouldn't be surprised to see a glorifying review of this in a hi-fi magazine.
If there's a market, somebody will exploit it.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long... I will type as fast as I can.
DO NOT USE THE CABLES!
We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out... oh, god, the screaming... the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!
WHY CAN'T I FORGET THE WORDS???
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
Do not use the cables!
Next cost plus contract I see, I will spec all the cables as these.
The contracts are the cost plus a profit margin.
The more we spend the more we make.
while my Killer brand NIC card stares back at me.
What actually matters isn't the fidelity of the sound, but the self-satisfaction you feel when you listen to it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You think they are crazy, but as along time audiophile I can till you we are just trolls who are spending or claiming to spend lots of money only to get attention. This conspiracy has been going on for to many decades now, but it's getting old so I'm exposing it here.
I'm just going listen to Simon and Garfunkel on my built in 386 era PC-speaker now.
The review linked at the bottom is right on the money. As the money goes up you get increased clarity. That much is obvious.
Even a deaf person should have the clarity to realise that fools and their money are more easily separated.
And any engineer or psychologist would agree that as the cost of snake oil reaches new heights more and more people become amazed at the stupidity of others.
These cables really do provide clarity.
... made by elves during full moon, just to plug them into your $15 NetGear switch to play your library of crappy encoded 128 kbps MP3 files and enjoy the sound of awesome...
The whole argument of those bullshit products is that... you cannot measure it, only a golden ear will be able to hear it. Well, that's one strong argument to sell snake oil.
While you could go to all kinds of stretches with analog signals, you'd say this argument will fall flat for anybody that even has a hint of knowledge about digital signals. But no, those people are still convinced by stuff like "timing issues" and "bit flips" will hurt the quality of your playback. They totally forget that Ethernet is one of the most buffered protocols out there and that there are buffers everywhere else in the system: In the NAS that's serving your files, the crappy switch you used to string it all together and in the playback device that's creating the analog signal too, most likely on several layers.
Ah, and by the way... It's great to have those silver lined, oxygen free super conductors in the wire between my systems, but euh... what happens to the signal once it enters one of those pesky devices? Won't I need conductors doped fairy dust in those devices too to close the magic loophole of audio perfection?
All those 1%ers need something to spend their money on.
...will be able to see the value of these cables. If you idea of fine dining is hotdogs and cheetos while watching Gilligan's island, then you won't be able to tell the difference. You might as well use your crappy coax cable with duct tape on it for your streaming audio!
But if you actually want to reduce the latency between your brain and pure audio bliss (and also have a higher TCP window size), then these cables are a *requirement*.
I am truly sad that I forgot the brand, but my favourite snake oil product in the audio industry was an RCA interconnect cable. It was unique compared to all the other cables. Rather than using some weird alloy hand picked by Hathor the goddess of music, they decided to eliminate the pesky metal altogether and replace it with .... optic fibre.
Yes gentlemen they did the impossible. They produced the first RCA cable which actually had a measurable performance impact on the sound. By modulating an LED on one end and picking it up with a photoresistor on the other the cable selling in the thousands of dollars introduced in the order of 0.2%THD to the signal, orders of magnitude worse than a cheap amplifier, and infinitely worse than any other cable which produces no measurable change at all.
I am really annoyed I forgot the brand of it, but believe it or not people actually bought into this shit and said it sounded amazing.
You may want to read up on Ethernet specifications.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Audio CD's use reed-solomon ECC, and it's the reason why a little speck of dust or small scratch doesn't affect the audio.
I believe silver wire ethernet cable will be better and super quality rj45 will contribute in some miniscule way to fewer error corrections on layer 1, bit $10k worth? Don't think so.
It's fairly easy to check. Do a ping, are packets lost? If not, this cable wouldn't lead to fewer error corrections.
These kind of audio products are like getting a diet coke at McDonalds.
Sure, its better than the regular one, but you really are at the wrong place if you are worried about your weight.
If you can get better audio from using these cables you are in a damn noisy environment and you can probably make these cables redundant with less than $100 by fixing whatever it is that creates the noise.
There's heaps of error correction on Audio CDs! 180 bits after every 408 bit frame.
And multipass really isn't needed. Tried this myself. Same CD, ripped twice gave identical files.
Get your special 'sound-optimising' storage here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
He may or may not be stupid but it's not in his interest to suggest anything other than that these things are effective.
[FUCK BETA]
Maybe 10k$ is a little bit over my budget, but trust me, I would pay a lot for an Ethernet cable whose connector has virtually unbreakable tabs.
There are two things called jitter here. When you're ripping a CD, sometimes audio reads will not give you the same block on the disc each time you ask for it. Older ripping programs had to read multiple times to correct that. Newer drives support "Accurate Stream", which makes this sort of jitter go away altogether.
CD transports do not have this problem. CD read jitter only happens if you're trying to read audio CDs at the block level, something they weren't really designed to do. A regular CD player will not do this.
The second type is transport clock jitter. The digital interface between CD transports and DACs doesn't have a separate clock. It's derived from the data itself. That process wasn't always perfect. In the mid 90's, the recovered clock was sloppy enough that bad ones were audible. Stereophile did a useful article measuring cd transport jitter during that era.
Nowadays the clocks and clock recovery circuits are so much better, I'm skeptical this is a real issue anymore. And most computer audio players buffer their data and then generate their own clock, which completely eliminates transport jitter.
For HDMI, the signal is all digital, but it gets weaker. As long as it is strong enough, it's fine. If it's too weak, the picture is gone.
So you have standards how much the connector on your computer is allowed to distort the signal, how much the receiver on your TV is allowed to distort it, and how much damage the cable is allowed to do. If all three are below the limit, you are guaranteed to be fine. If one or two are above the limit, you may be fine because the damage adds up - rubbish laptop with excellent cable and excellent TV can work.
If you run HDMI over long distances (40 metres to the TV in your garden shed), that's when you need a high quality cable where the loss per metre is low.
And while I cannot imagine anything that a $10,500 ethernet cable could do better than a normal, quality one, any cable has the capability to transmit both a digital signal, and all kinds of electrical noise. So while the digital signal is transmitted perfectly fine, that noise might for example sneak into an amplifier and become audible. There is snake oil, and there are quality and rubbish products.
This is also called "Placebo Effect".
"My first change is from Supra Cat-7+ to Audioquest Cinnamon playing a piece from Eric Satie, a performance by Alexandre Tharaud of Gnossienne No. 1. I immediately notice an increase in air and a wider stage with the Cinnamon. The recording room has grown and the playback is a little more fluid, more natural I would say."
Can someone please do a bit-wise compare between what is received just before the DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter)...? I doubt there are any missing bits using the 'cheaper' cable.
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
Just a note of perspective. It is easy to tag audiophiles as naive fools with too more money than sense.
But not all are like that.
I am quite interested in good rendering of favourite music, so are a few friends. We do indeed try out hifi gear, but that doesn't mean we all fall for this snake oil product.
By and large most people are used to the sound of multimedia speakers or mini systems. For a music lover, it is possible to get so much better results, and it does not need to cost crazy money on crazy products for a decent result.
So far I find speakers having the largest influence on the end reproduction quality. There is some difference between the electronics, but once you are beyond the bare basic level the differences are getting smaller. But speakers are worth spending money on if you are a music lover using a good quality music source.
Actually its pretty stupid to claim that its digital therefore the cable doesn't matter. In industrial environments I see properly installed cat 6 cables losing through put because they keep calculating bad ethernet CRC's. Obviously you would have to be dumb to buy this. For $10,000 you do so much more... like easily get 1gps+ wireless.
I can sell you cans of higly purified Himalayan air for reducing the harmonic distorsion introduced by the WiFi connection between your Ipad and your NAS. Results guaranteed or your money back!
There is no error correction on audio CD.
Yes there is. It uses a dual interleave Reed-Solomon code together with 8-14 modulation and three joining bits.
192 data bits are encoded in 588 bits on the CD.
Those 588 bits comprise:
24 bits sync word plus 3 merge bits. (27 bits)
33 EFM words of data of 14 bits plus 3 merge bits per word (561 bits)
The 33 bytes of data are:
24 bytes of audio (12x16 bit samples)
8 bytes of parity.
1 byte (8 bits) of subcode information.
The merge bits allow the min/max separation of 1s to be maintained between EFM codewords and also allow the data to be DC free
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
The truth is that when digital data are modulated with some "dense" QAM scheme, then the amount of noise the cable introduces IS important. The 1s and 0s will get distorted if noise is too high. BUT, the other truth is that, all you have to do is buy a cable that is compliant conductivity-wise. All those fancy Monster cables are an ordinary cable, just upmakerd. And you should NEVER exceed the distances recommended by the standard. You should not build a 100m link even if it's consisted of monster cables. Better save the money for repeaters.
...a zero and a one arrive out of order.
I blame the cables.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I recently had to purchase a toslink cable, and all I could find was a goldplated one. GOLDPLATED fibre optic cable.
I mean.. wtf!
It doesn't even make plausible sense.
I dare you to demonstrate how that outdated piece of garbage is better than my Quantum Entanglement Cables, specifically designed to work on Quantum Computer Music NAS Systems. Imagine it, the sound gets distortionless, since the information travels through just TWO electrons* through the whole length of the cable!!!
*Note: even when the information uses just two quantum-entangled electrons, it also visits all of its quantum states, so you might end up listening to Abba when you selected Led Zeppelin...
When Chord announced their latest cables 1m ethernet cable (GB£850 is about US$1300) , and 1m RCA stereo cable (GB£1600 is US$2500), I emailed them asking for some technical details, as if I might be a buyer, but they didn't respond. They probably sensed I had a bullshit detector.
I had a discussion with their local Trading Standards, a government-run operation that exists to protect consumers, stating that their scientific claims were bogus, and the TS people said that since I hadn't bought the product, and they hadn't had complaints from other people who'd bought the product, and Chord could show them reviews praising their product, my complaint was invalid.
My working assumption is this: it's like the story of emperor's new clothes. When someone had paid a rediculously high price for cables and believed the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, they will resist any efforts to debunk it lest they appear a complete idiot. I think it's actually a mechanism in the brain, akin to some cultish religious beliefs and even fanboyism.
I spoke to a friend who is in ultra-high-end business about those cd transports and how can one sound better than the other (he's not stupid) and after a while we came to the conclusion (well I did anyway, he knew this) that it all boils down to jitter and real-time error correction.
Much of the time, the perceived improvements in high end audio electronics (not including speakers and other acoustic devices) boil down to volume differences, and the imagination of the listener, which is fueled by clever marketing and obsessive-compulsive worrying about imperfect audio.
Even nowdays if you wish to rip a cd that's as clean as possible you have to do multipass read with that german free software I forgot what it's called now.
Actually, if there are no problems with the disk or the drive, one can often just copy the audio tracks at full speed with no software error correction, and the result will be binary identical to that of the slow multipass read. The latter is at least still somewhat useful to confirm the lack of errors, although that could also be done with an online database of checksums. The last CD-ROM drive I had that definitely needed jitter correction was bought in the late 1990's.
I believe silver wire ethernet cable will be better and super quality rj45 will contribute in some miniscule way to fewer error corrections on layer 1, bit $10k worth? Don't think so.
If the cheap network cable cannot be used to transmit audio reliably, then it would also have issues with other types of data. The playback is also buffered (which it needs to be in any case, even in a hardware player, as the data is sent in packets), and as long as the buffer does not underrun, there should be no issues with the audio quality even if the occasional packet needs to be sent again because of errors. When the buffer does underrun, it causes skips, stutters, pops, and other obvious distortions in the audio, rather than subtle changes in the tonal balance, sound stage, or whatever. There could be dropped packets if the protocol used does not support re-sending them, but that produces similar audible effects to those of buffer underruns.
How come these companies don't get sued into oblivion for false advertising (claiming an impact on sound quality, unidirectional data transfer, 100Gbps compatibility). And why don't the reviewers get sued too for professional misconduct?
Jitter isn't caused by cables. Its caused by the devices either side.
Typically on switches or routers, where packets are received on two different interfaces, and need to be transmitted out a third. If two packets are received at the same time on the two ports, one of them must be queued while the other is being sent. This will introduce a small amount of jitter. This is magnified with a busier network, and is one of the things QoS tries to eliminate for certain traffic types (typically voice on enterprise/ISP networks).
The most a cable could really do is cause a packet to get mangled, and retransmitted. I suppose this could be viewed as introducing jitter, but its at a higher point up the stack at the application layer, rather than the network.
I find it amusing that the guy in this article completely glosses over the importance of the switches in his network. If he had any other traffic running over his network when performing his tests, they are pretty much invalid.
Yeah I never understood that, why try and recover the clock signal from the data stream? If I where designing it I would have my DAC monitor the stream to calculate what the clock signal is supposed to be then generate my own dam clock signal. Let's face it there is only a handful of possible clock signals.
For that audiophile approach I would then today use a chip scale caesium atomic clock for two orders of magnitude better accuracy than an oven controlled crystal oscillator to generate my internal clock signal.
Then again high end audio gear is all done wrong in my view. For starters anything not using a modern switch mode power supply operating at 120kHz+ is a piece of shit design by someone who is stuck in the past. Basically mains hum, what dam mains hum. Sure a 20kHz SMPS is a bad idea in audio kit, but the world has moved on and SMPS that operate well outside the audible range are common place today.
But if you use this cable, for every 4 pings you send, you'll get 5 responses!
You can do one of 2 things.
1. You can have a precision spin mechanism that ensures a constant transfer rate.
2. You can have a flimst plastic spin mechanism and a nice big data buffer.
Guess which one you're more likely to find in a cheap CD player.
A precise spin might help if you want to minimize buffering delays, but it's questionable.
CDs aren't precision-balanced, so there's only so far that you can go on the spin mechanism without using a relatively massive flywheel. Which will have a spin-up delay.
Once the buffer is loaded, the unloading process is controlled by a megahertz timing source, and I defy any audiophile to hear jitter in that.
Don't know much about how Ethernet works, do you?
First, shields are never, EVER terminated at both ends. Second, differential signaling does not mean interference cancels, it only means that common mode noise is lessened Third, not all Ethernet is electrically isolated at both ends (100 Base-CX, for example). Fourth, ground potential differences do matter, especially if they are large, as the typical isolation transformer used in Ethernet has only a 1500V 1-minute HIPOT rating. Lastly, not a single digital music system out there is unbuffered, and so there is plenty of time to allow for retransmissions and error correction, even in realtime systems. Ethernet, as it turns out, is so fast that redundancy, error correction, and latency correction can still be done in less time than it takes for a D/A converter to convert an Ethernet frame's worth of samples.
A letter in a hi-fi magazine (Hi-Fi News and Record Review, but I'm not 100% sure) years ago from someone who was upgrading his system.
He started by describing the upgrades to the cables and connectors. Then moved onto rewiring the amp with better quality conductors. Rewiring his house for a better electrical feed into the kit. He then described chasing his dream of perfect audio further by liaising with his local power company to get the substation upgraded. Finally (the punchline) was that he had written to the power generation company to change the isotope of uranium they used to get better bass.
Made me giggle.
I spoke to a friend who is in ultra-high-end business about those cd transports and how can one sound better than the other (he's not stupid) and after a while we came to the conclusion (well I did anyway, he knew this) that it all boils down to jitter and real-time error correction.
I continue to be baffled that people believe the timing of 1s-and-0s coming out of the CD drive are in any way relevant to the analog signal. Those 1s-and-0s are read out at vastly higher rate than the audio they represent and are buffered in memory between the CD device and the DAC. Data comes out of the CD somewhere between 1.2-30 Mbps. Let's say each "1" lasts about 60ns. "Jitter" in this signal of picoseconds or even nanoseconds is irrelevant to the data that ends up in the buffer.
The only relevant form of jitter is in the timing signal sent to the DAC itself. Analog devices has a nice study demonstrating that clock jitter of a picosecond or so (a full cycle at 1GHz) can produce signal distortions as large as -70 dB, once you get up to signals of 100 or so MHz. AD didn't even bother to check anything less than 1 MHz, because there's no possible influence. Since your ears are pretty well limited to 20 kHz or so (assuming you're 12 years old), and the actual information contained on the CD is limited to 25 kHz or so, "CD transports" are absolutely bogus.
My 0's were much more vibrant and the 1's, well, they were richer in tone. ;)
Don't be a hater before you try it...
you want to report someone, how about those folks selling cordless anti-static wrist straps, such as:
http://www.amazon.com/Static-D...
its almost funny (but its quite sad) to imagine lab people wearing these, thinking they are protected when its not doing a thing other than pinching their wrists and emtying out their pocketbooks.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I'd rather replace a cable than a motherboard or 10Gig NIC.
The only "problem" a really shitty cable will cause for digital data is the maximum throughput will be slower due to error correction/detection re-sending lots of packets that didn't make it to the other end intact. This is what is meant when they say a comms protocol (such as tcp/ip) has "guaranteed packet delivery". At the file/audio-buffer level the packet was either faithfully copied across the cable or it wasn't. 1's and 0's do not suffer from "distortion", packets with flipped bit errors are either corrected using the EC bits, or dropped and resent. This is why no sound comes out if a CD is too badly scratched for the ECC to work, it's "all or nothing", there is no fuzzy middle ground.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And after all that, he planned to upgrade his speakers, from his current 4" titanium drivers to 6$. :)
For that price I'd expect at least 50 responses plus an instant torrent of a movie I didn't even know I want to watch. And a blowjob.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I can actually see the jewel encrusted, platinum shell and sapphire glass cellphone. It's something you can pull out at a party and flaunt in front of your billionaire friends and show off your penis replacement.
But how do you show off audio cables? By making people listen to them, stress that they're those 10 grand cables and want your friends to pretend they're worth it, which they undoubtedly will do to humor you while thinking you're the biggest idiot under the sun?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
See, this ethernet cable is super special in that instead of just passing every 0 or 1 verbatim, it also filters out those pesky qubits that don't seem to want to be in either state, ensuring that the only random audio chaos experienced by the end user comes from running their speaker wiring next to their power cabling, which is so random that it's almost always in the neighborhood of 60 hz.
It's really hard to tell whether you're sarcastic or moronic.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Werewolves. Gee, get your supernaturals sorted, I can't come to the rescue of you wannabes every single time!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Audioquest claims these cables are directional and an arrow on the connecter indicates the data flow from source to receiver."
lol
Active components:
Pioneer Elite receiver
Samsung television (LN46B650 IIRC)
Samsung blu-ray player
Pioneer tape deck (the last time I played a tape? Maybe 2003, but I keep it anyhow)
A couple of S-VHS VCRs (which I hook up only when I feel like watching some old movies I have only on VHS)
Speakers:
Klipsch Reference Series
The cables? For analog and digital coax line-level cables, cheap shielded monoprice cables
Speaker wire: fine-stranded OFC cable - ONLY because it is more flexible than zip cord
HDMI cables: cheap monoprice cables
Ethernet cables: Patch cables I made myself using a bulk spook of CAT5e and 8p8c (or RJ-45 if you prefer) connectors from Lowes
The truth about cables:
http://gizmodo.com/363154/audi...
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It's called straight-faced sarcasm and/or well done, traditional, trolling ;)
Space probes are actually a good example. With the right encoding, it's possible to get crystal clear photographs wirelessly from millions of miles away.
Doing so in real time is harder, but with enough bandwidth you can easily overcome the shortcomings of noise or loss in the transmission medium.
Yes, the Digital Audio chain people talk about jitter. But jitter is a property of the transmitter and receiver, not the cable; it's rather passive when it comes to bit timing over a serial link.
Allow me to state for one last time the obvious.
Ethernet is a digital protocol. In other words, what's being transmitted is a stream of 0s and 1. Discreet. There's no such thing as a lot of 0 that's almost a little bit of 1. Such a stream has one quite beneficial property: It's trivially easy to check whether it was transmitted correctly. Ethernet does that. Yes, that means that if you have a (really, REALLY) crappy cable that you'll get retransmissions. Which matters little considering the amount of data required to keep an audio stream steady and the speed of Ethernet retransmissions. What does matter, of course, is that the receiving end has a big enough buffer to cover for the retransmissions. But if that buffer wasn't big enough, it would not take an audiophile to notice the difference because, well, the audio would pretty much stop.
As for how USB cable quality matters, I did take a look around. But I doubt those were the results you got, so you might want to point us to some research that actually DOES find a difference in the sound quality properties of USB cables.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It probably does sound better for them paying so much. I mean if blue pills work better than white ones why not?
I'm starting to come around and instead of thinking about how dumb these people are seeing the marketing opportunity instead.
Well, the difference is that Apple would probably not want to tarnish their brand with something like this.
You can say about Apple what you want, but despite being overhyped and pricy beyond sense, there is usually some kind of value in their products. Probably not one that warrants the asking price (at least not for me), but you usually get something that is well engineered, nicely designed and usually of better quality than the 2.50 bucks Chinese counterpart from the rubbish bin.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Discontinued-Manufacturer/product-reviews/B000I1X6PM
Great cable, but too fast.
Transmission of music data at rates faster than the speed of light seemed convenient, until I realized I was hearing the music before I actually wanted to play it. Apparently Denon forgot how accustomed most of us are to unidirectional time and the general laws of physics. I tried to get used to this effect but hearing songs play before I even realized I was in the mood for them just really screwed up my preconceptions of choice and free will. I'm still having a major existential hangover.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Yeah I never understood that, why try and recover the clock signal from the data stream? If I where designing it I would have my DAC monitor the stream to calculate what the clock signal is supposed to be then generate my own dam clock signal.
My guess is:
If you recover the clock from the stream, you just need to roughly control the motor (CD) RPM and stream what you read. If you run your own clock you need a buffer and you then either need to dynamically tweak the motor speed based on how fast the buffer is filling/draining, or you need to read the CD a bit too fast and stop/resume every so often. Clock recovery sounds much simpler to me.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Heh, good point. People are quick to boast "naanaananaa, didn't fall for this scam, I'm so smart" about these cables. But Apple bakes the snake oil in a bit more discretely and nerds are happy to pay the extra stardust price.
The company's Amazon store is full of such nonsense. My favorites are the $8,594.75 3.5mm to RCA cable, and the $6,899.75 power cable.
Total rubbish and a false dichotomy as well.
I'd like to see the results of a double-blind experiment in which a bunch of "people who truly appreciate high quality" were tasked with differentiating a $500 Ethernet cable from a $10,000 Ethernet cable. With some decent mid range stereo equipment and all else being equal, you would not be able to tell the difference.
I think the knowledge of how much you spent on your equipment probably makes a marginal contribution to your audio bliss, despite the fact that it has no effect on the actual signal quality.
Are they danceable cables? At 2750$ per meter.
http://www.positive-feedback.c...
.
They did a listening test comparing a $300 Pioneer receiver with two $10,000 "audiophile" mono tube amplifiers.
At the beginning of the test, the listeners knew which device they were listening to and, predictably, the Pioneer receiver was painful to listen to, destroying the music.The mono amps were all that is wonderful in listening.
Then the identities were masked and the listening test was done again. Most of the listeners could not tell the two apart, guessing incorrectly about half the time.
A sad commentary on the industry when an audiophile club cannot even tell a $300 receiver from $20,000 of audiophile amplification.
Is it better than a wire coat hanger
http://www.zdnet.com/article/c...
For that price I'd expect at least 50 responses plus an instant torrent of a movie I didn't even know I want to watch. And a blowjob.
Just don't forget your mouthwash.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So that helps.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
But how do you show off audio cables?
You post to slashdot that how!
DACs that re-clocked were popular in the late 90's. Then the falling prices of computer hardware eventually made buffering inexpensive enough to use instead. The original interface for CD transports to DACs came out in 1983. Parts of that design were based on what was economically feasible in consumer electronics then.
A lot of high-end audio gear aims toward a simpler is better design ideal, which is what excludes switching power supplies. My main concerns are with longevity. I have amplifiers here going back to the 60's that are still functional and serviceable. I haven't seen any switching power supplies that I think I'll be able to repair usefully decades from now.
> Basically mains hum, what dam mains hum.
The 60 cycle shows up modulating the "switching" frequencies on many modern, inexpensive power fupplies. If one looks at the noise on the lines carelessly, one will see the relatively high frequency ripple as just that, modest noise, that one ignores. Lock a really good oscilloscope to the local power supply as a trigger, however, filter out the high frequencies, and you'll see a 60 cycle hum on _everything_ that comes out of most modern supplies, including the ground line. And the high frequency switching noise from the rest of the building also tends to pass right through most filtering systems: they're really not built to stop things like ground bounce.
It doesn't matter for most uses, but I spent a fascinating day a few years ago with a scientist doing low level research, and the 60 cycle was coupling to _everything_, including the ground lines. He eventually had to to to isolated battery supplies, and run everything off of a motor generator to keep out the ground bounce.
Why would jitter matter when you're ripping a CD? It could conceivably matter when you're listening to a CD, but ripping is not a real-time process. It's like downloading a file from the Internet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Apparently DICE/slashdot still has enough readers to take down a linked site. Who knew?
Hey, guys --
I bought a couple of these cables to go from my PC to a switch then from the switch to the NAS.
Now I'm scared that that the ports on my switch, NAS, and motherboard are not up to snuff since my MP3s still sound like crap.
A list of their clients must be worth a lot. It's people who would pay a fortune for every inch of anything you can put in their houses.
Care to give some examples of such Apple products?
Btw. I prefer to be considered a geek, not a nerd.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I think I've posted this before when this subject comes up, but if you have a free hour or two, spend some time here. Amusing and depressing at the same time. http://pwbelectronics.co.uk/pr...
Ethernet may transmit digital information, but it is not a digital signal on the wire.
The phy is an A/D converter, and sends your digital bits down the wire with oscillators.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Don't you know that every single 0 or 1 that traverses that cable gets a full body massage with a happy ending? Your bits arrive smiling, so of course it sounds better!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I rather like their DragonFly USB DAC/amp. Granted, I didn't pay anywhere near $250+ for it, but for the ~$75 I got it for, it's nice, sounds good and is portable. My other choices for use with my work provided laptop were the usual Schiit stack and Monoprice desktop amp (11567), but the DragonFly won out on simplicity.
Farting around doing FFTs on radio telescope data at university, I saw big chunky peaks at multiple of 50Hz (it being the UK) - mixed in with peaks from the pulsar being observed. Mains hum gets everywhere!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Riiii-ight. Well, I do like my music bits and bytes nice and shiny and orderly.
Except I don't know how good these things could possibly be. I mean, they aren't even gold plated! Didn't we learn from NASA: everything headed for outer space must be gold plated?
They _are_ speccing these cables for the ISS, aren't they?
that depends entirely on how the usb audio device was built anyways.
and you can do bit-perfect tests to show if you're spouting bullshit anyhow.
and you can check the devices for retransmits.
it's just bullshit and since audiophiles can't double-blind test them it's just more and more bullshit. the fucking 1k+ ethernet cables for audio idiots have fucking direction symbols on them.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Droll, funny sarcastic.
Sheeple killed the "died-in-the-wool audiophile".
Take your measly coax and get off my lawn. This here is real audio cable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
There are perfectly good shielded ethernet cables that only cost twice as much (e.g. $4 instead of $2).
You also need to gold plate that caesium atomic clock.
last time i saw a study of it, which was decades ago, an average cd in good condition used a lot of error correction. i believe the production process generates enough bad dots or whatever that only robust error correction makes the technology useful.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
that's why i liked token ring.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You think filthy 1s and 0s are bad, you should see a dirty number 2.
Or are you smart enough to sell it?
For the party afterwards?
(for the reference, see here. SFW, but a music video)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In that case the protocols are shit and need to be replaced.
Should be HEAPS cheaper than burning through 10k for a cable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Otherwise we wont need Error detection and correction! Each Ethernet frame carries a CRC-32 checksum. Frames received with incorrect checksums are discarded by the receiver hardware.
http://i.imgur.com/Bm2njAA.jpg
clock jitter of a picosecond or so (a full cycle at 1GHz)
Umm no a full cycle at 1GHz is a nanosecond not a picosecond.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I dare you to demonstrate how that outdated piece of garbage is better than my Quantum Entanglement Cables, specifically designed to work on Quantum Computer Music NAS Systems. Imagine it, the sound gets distortionless, since the information travels through just TWO electrons* through the whole length of the cable!!! *Note: even when the information uses just two quantum-entangled electrons, it also visits all of its quantum states, so you might end up listening to Abba when you selected Led Zeppelin...
Or, for that matter, an alternative universe's Abba covering Led Zeppelin...
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
You might think I'm moronic, but when you find out that I bought platinum plated DDR, you will change your ultra high-fidelity tune :)
No. No jitter can be introduced in the cable.
Serial L1 encoding protocols are specifically designed to keep the frequency of the signal constant, no matter the bit pattern being transmitted. This helps avoid DC offset screwing up the receiver, and maintains proper PLL timing. There will always be the same number of + to - transitions over all but the tiniest span of time.
As far as noise goes? That can certainly lead to data loss, but not jitter. The PLL-driven clock will always look for the signal at the appropriate times, unless, of course, the cable does not meet the relevant standard and stuff is getting lost.
Once a cable DOES meet the relevant standard, it doesn't matter if it's some 15-cent thing put together in a soot-filled Chinese sweatshop or some solid-gold, silver-plated, hand-assembled-by-Bob-Metcalfe-Himself bazillion dollar wonder. Cat 6 is Cat 6. End of story.
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