Slashdot Mirror
$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.
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.
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.
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.
If there's a market, somebody will exploit it.
The reason this expensive cable exists is to market the "mid-range" ethernet cables, which are around $200-400.
Maybe 10k$ 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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.