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$340 Audiophile Ethernet Cable Tested
An anonymous reader writes: Ars Technica has posted a series of articles attempting to verify whether there's any difference between a $340 "audiophile" Ethernet cable and a $2.50 generic one. In addition to doing a quick teardown, they took the cables to Las Vegas and asked a bunch of test subjects to evaluate the cables in a blind test. Surprise, surprise: the expensive cables weren't any better. The subjects weren't even asked to say which one was better, just whether they could tell there was a difference. But for the sake of completeness, Ars also passed the cables through a battery of electrical tests. The expensive cable met specs — barely, in some cases — while the cheap one didn't. The cheap one passed data, but with a ton of noise. "And listeners still failed to hear any difference."
What is this data passing noise?
I am thinking $340 thousand to test it seems reasonable. After all, when I test a $3.40 cable, they easily spend 34 thousand to test it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They sold at least 2 of them now. I'm betting someone just won a bet.
$340 comment! Fuckers
In addition to doing a quick teardown, they took the cables to a city of people exhibiting bad judgement and asked a bunch of people drinking free booze to evaluate the cables...
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This comes up whenever audiophile cables are discussed, but it's worth repeating: don't buy the cheapest cable.
There may be no useful difference between a $10 cable and a $1000 cable, but very often there's a real difference between a $10 cable and a $1 cable. Even for digital data, really cheap cables often don't meet spec, and can cause frustrating intermittent problems. You don't need anything exotic to avoid that, just avoid the bottom tier.
An example from my living room: I use a 45 foot HDMI cable to plug my TV directly into my HTPC (for reasons of convenience that aren't that interesting). The spec calls for thicker-gauge wiring for HDMI cables over 30 feet (IIRC), and you'll quickly see the price jump between cables that meet that spec and cables that don't. Don't buy the cheapest junk possible, that's all it takes.
It used to be that Dayton Audio was the only "solidly built, not too expensive" brand I knew about for cables, but Amazon changed that - now there are a bunch of options, including some sort of Amazon store brand that seems to be fine.
It's worth paying a bit more for solidly-built cables that meet spec (and especially for Ethernet cables, for some guard on the cable that keeps the clip from snagging or breaking off it you need to pull it through a tangle). Anything beyond that is a bit silly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This might have made sense if the internet (well data transmission in general) wasn't essentially designed around potential failure to correctly transmit data. In all of my year of dealing with computers the only time I have ever tracked a problem down to a cable is when that cable had been chewed on by an animal. Good luck solving that with any amount of money or fancy cables.
The reason that the listeners could not hear a difference is not because the cables did not differ in quality, but because Ethernet is digital and has the capabilities of error correction and retransmit. The chip might have extra signal processing as well, to do noise reduction for example. In the test, these kind of characteristics were enough to fully compensate for the flaws of the crusty cable.
There's still many scenarios in which you can benefit from better EMI shielding and conductivity, even when talking about a digital application.
ETHERNET cable?
Oh come on.
The sad thing is, people will assume by this that people can't hear a difference between, say, speakers or playback devices. Way to just idiocrafy the world a tiny bit more, guys :P
Slashdot.. the only place to read news... the next day
I mean it's a digital signal! If it fails the crc on receiving the protocol asks to re-transmit. The transfer might be faster, but definitely not more lossy.
There is no ethernet cable in the world which is sufficiently bad, that there are enough retransmits for mere audio to stutter or stall.
The whole review is asinine.
In other news...... Buy our overpriced cables so you can listen to MP3s and pretend your really an audiophile. #thepowerofmarketing
...category from the seller (Cat 7 or Gaming Class RAM, JDM Type 2 Racing Intake), just walk away. Any tech person will know this cable is just a stupid waste of money. It's likely about a $8 to $10 cable, they don't need to sell very many to make a profit.
that audiophile either means "wealthy" or "sucker" or maybe both...
I get that you want the best possible sound... and in some cases the placebo effect may actually help you enjoy your music more... but are there really enough of these people to base a business on?
I suppose, if you don't have to do anything except throw some gold plating on a connector and you are already in the cable business.. why wouldn't you?
This reminds me of another product, I think I saw on /, a while back... it was just a little plastic riser that kept your cables elevated off the floor and separated from each other... the cost was something like $100 per "device"...
Well... whatever floats your boat...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I've had similar arguments with telco people. If the DIGITAL part of the system is not dropping (or delaying) packets then there is no problem with the DIGITAL part of the system.
Swapping cables that are not causing dropped/delayed packets for other cables that won't drop/delay packets is useless.
And testing the digital portion is very easy.
If you think you hear a difference, it is probably your imagination or the analog portion on either end.
You begin with a lecture to your Vegas audience of confirmed skeptics about the pseudoscience of high end digital audio cables ---- and afterwards claim with a straight face that confirmation bias didn't taint your so-called experiment.
The entire affair was inexcusable pop-science crap and wholly unworthy of Ars.
Ya gotta paint the use magic marker to color the plugs green (not the contacts) to get the effect! Fools.
Because that's what Apple will do. And they will SUCK IT UP!
Cat7 is very much a real thing... hard to say if it will ever catch on though. Basically it's just shielded individual pairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_11801#CAT7
The cheap cable may have had signalling noise on the line in some way. Improper shielding right next to an electric cable will do that. However, until the noise reaches a level that the error handling can't compensate you shouldn't notice it at all. The odds of you consistently passing Ethernet frames that pass the checksum so you'll hear the noise is unimaginable unless deliberately setup to do so. It's a simple checksum fail - resend frame. It'll cut down on your bandwidth with re-transmissions, but not on the quality. The fact that people don't hear the quality difference on WiFi is all the proof you need. The day my Ethernet line has more errors than my WiFi signal is the day I replace the cable.
The way that test was designed it would have taken a complete failure of a cable to make any difference. All of the data would have been going over TCP, which means that any packets lost due to noise would have been resent before the listener could have known any difference.
A better test would have been a device sending a UDP stream to a playback device - and even then it would not likely have made any real difference, as the number of errors would have to be fairly high before a listener could have heard the difference.
The really sad thing is that there are "audiophile" components that can make a difference. Cables, however tend to be on the low end of the spectrum on what kind of difference they can make (using crap cables will make a difference - though in most cases, as long as the cables are competently made, and good enough gauge for the purpose they are being put to, you are not going to notice the difference between the competent cable and a high priced cable) and digital cables are even further down the list.
I will say this - anyone who knows anything about Ethernet cables who buys a "directional" Ethernet cable deserves what they get,
It looks like there is some unaccounted for variance in their design: "The listeners would be asked which audio sample (electronica, male vocal, female vocal, or instrumental) they wanted to audition. The requested sample would then be played through one cable, then we'd swap and repeat per the test protocol."
They should have either made people listen to the same audio sample or made everyone listen to all the samples.
I've always wondered about people who buy these kind of cables. I mean, they're expensive cables, but what do they plug them into? Do they spend $340/$4000/$10000+ on a cable only to plug them into a cheap $15 D-Link switch?
I mean, what are the "audiophile" switches out there? Do they buy those $10,000 Cisco Catalyst switches? Or do they prefer HP ProCurve? Or do they just plug them in any old switch or whatever came with their $20 router?
It's just like power cables. You're telling me that the power, which came from a power station hundreds or thousands of miles away, travelling through copper wires, then coming into your house wired with regular Romex style house wiring, that some special cable used in the last 6 feet really matter? Or do they rewire their house with special audio quality wire? Do they buy special electrons from their power company? Or paid to have their house wired using the special cable? Are you telling me that after hundreds/thousands of miles, the last 6 feet really matter?
Should've used the $8000 one from amazon http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AK...
As long as bits are not irrecoverably lost, how is it going to sound any different?
Jitter, the relative timing of when bits arrive. Audiophile tests led to its having been identified as a measurable problem in S/PDIF installations, which led to use of a circular buffer to mitigate jitter. True, S/PDIF is connection-oriented, and networks using Ethernet are packet-switched with such a buffer being implemented in the network stack and in the application. TCP in particular retransmits packets corrupted by noise. But if the retransmitted packet doesn't arrive in time, emptying of the buffer causes an audible interruption. And if the buffer is enlarged to prevent this, this can affect perceived responsiveness in interactive applciations such as music production and video games.
Wouldn't a layer of forward error correction using a BCH code, as used in Compact Disc Digital Audio and QR code, help with real-time UDP streaming?
An upgrade from 96K MP3 to 112K Opus would probably provide substantial fidelity improvement to your CELTic music, as it's 2 codec generations later.
Fewer retransmits lets you push the buffer length lower for less audio latency. This can become important for real-time applications such as gaming and music production.
For fsck's sake people! The BEST analog to digital devices capture at 750 kilobytes per second, that's 32-bits at 192,000 samples per second. I'm sorry, but ten megabit per second Ethernet (that's almost twice the data rate of the audio stream each way) can easily carry that data even with 300ms latency. THE DEVICES ARE NOT PASSING ANALOG DATA ACROSS THE CABLE! Noise and jitter just means the packets get resent and your latency goes from a best case of sub-ten milliseconds over LAN runs, to maybe a couple hundred or so milliseconds. The only issue would be the latency, and unless you're using ten year old cables you pulled out of a dumpster behind a company doing a network refresh, I think you'll be ok with the lower-end cables for your digital audio transmission needs, especially at gigabit ethernet speeds.
Putzs!
P.S. I am an audiophile, but those that believe this magic-ethernet-cable snake oil are simply dupes with more money than sense. It takes all kinds to make the world go round, but do you really need to willfully feed those trying to exploit you economically for your ignorance? [yes, that was a rhetorical question] A fool and his money are easily parted.
Human sensitivity to sound is highly variable. There are some people with exceptionally good hearing that might be able to tell the difference. A subset of self-labelled audiophiles likely fits into this category. Testing 20 people out of a crowd will only rarely pick out someone in the top 1% of hearing ability. A more accurate test would be to only test those self-labelled audiophiles, and hope to get at least a few audio-sensitive types amongst the pompous assholes.
Not saying that there isn't a lot of bullshit in audiophile products, and it's important to make fun of them, but at least test them properly and rigorously using the people they are marketed to.
These can not be very good cables because they lack the direction arrow that the Belden audiophile Ethernet cables have (had?). This was so you would know which way to plug them in. Packets flow from hub/switch to the device.
And if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you.
It is orange and you will make your money back in picture postcard royalties.
The speed of TCP error correction on the laptop and router and laptop have a greater effect on the audio quality than the cables. Why? Less likelihood of drooped frames by the software when errors do occur. (Even the premium cable was out of spec.)
affect
These can not be very good cables because they lack the direction arrow that the Belden audiophile Ethernet cables have (had?). This was so you would know which way to plug them in. Packets flow from hub/switch to the device.
And if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. It is orange and you will make your money back in picture postcard royalties.
It's in the caption of the very first picture:
Audiophile-grade "Vodka" Ethernet cables, from AudioQuest. They even have directional indicators!
But, surprisingly for Ars, they missed the point of those directional indicators. The article on electrical testing hints at it:
Finally, the braided shield inside the cable drew some comments. "There is no continuity from the body of the one connector to the body of the other, indicating that the shield has not been terminated to one or both of the connector," noted Denke. "Our 6A uses an absorptive shield—that is, the cable is shielded but the shield is not terminated at either end. Alien crosstalk is the crosstalk which occurs between cables, as opposed to the internal crosstalk which occurs between the pairs in a cable. This may also be why there are unterminated shields on the Audioquest cable—I’m not really sure what the reason is there, though I had thought that the shields on Cat 7 were required to be tied to ground. It is also possible—I have no handy way to test—that they've tied the shield to one end only, though this would be highly nonstandard for network cabling." (emphasis added)
It's highly nonstandard for network cabling, but highly standard for audio cabling - it's called a telescoping shield and is used to prevent ground loops and audible (60 Hz) hum. Typically, you leave the shield connected at the low-impedance source, and disconnect it at the high-impedance load... as a result, the cable actually does have a directionality, but on the shield, rather than the signal lines. I can guarantee that's the intent with these cables and why they're marked with directional arrows, and it's pretty surprising that Ars and Denke missed it. Maybe they were stuck thinking "network" cable rather than "audio" cable.
That said, because these are network cables, that telescoping shield is irrelevant. You're not going to get ground hum into your amplifier from your network card, the way you would with a shield on an analog audio cable. They're simply not connected, and if they were, you'd have much bigger issues - like that hum causing all sorts of problems on your PCI bus. This is why network cable shields are typically connected at both ends: ground loops are irrelevant.
I'm starting to wonder if all the loud music when I was younger damaged my ears. Every time I turn on the radio, everything sounds like shit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
ive always found the best way to differentiate audio hardware or software settings is a ceteris paribus situation with your own hardware and music youre deeply familiar with.
take the set up youve had for a long time and are very familiar with, get a song youve listened to 100s or 1000 of times (make sure its the same exact file!), then switch out the one piece of hardware or change a software setting and give it a go.
if it affects the song in a positive way, investigate with other familiar songs/music sources. for hardware, if the change is worth the money to you, then keep it, otherwise back it goes to the store/supplier.
using foreign hardware and unfamiliar music is not the best way IMO. though if its a $10 cable vs a $350 cable, listeners should be able to tell a difference regardless of hardware/music familiarity. ... then again my mom has trouble differentiating 720p from 4k...
I think I see the problem: They didn't allow any burn-in time for the cables before doing the listening test - they just plugged them in and started listening as if that was going to sound correct.
A real listening test needs at least of couple of weeks for the atoms in the cable to settle down after moving/bending it in any way.
No sig today...
Seriously, try actually reading the post you're replying to before you embarrass yourself taking out your ass.
You're 100% wrong in every sense of the word for exactly the reasons lgw pointed out before you even replied with your smug idiocy.
I too have multiple specific personal experiences with the failings of crappy digital (and of course also analog) cables, going back years. Crappy supposedly "CAT5e" cables that have issues even at 100BT, let alone 1Gb. Crappy HDMI cables (even though labeled as "high speed") that cause audio/video to intermittently drop out, sparkles, or DRM issues. Crappy MicroUSB cables with connectors that don't seat properly, that lose connection, or stop working alltogether after a few days of use because they are built from the thinnest, cheapest possible materials and put together with shoddy quality. They also won't charge your phone at a decent rate even when they do work. And if you're really lucky it might even heat up and melt due to an internal short. Remember that analog headphone wire that used to crackle and cut out when you wiggle it? Guess what often happens when you use a digital cable of the same quality? You think the zeros and ones just run down the wire and happily jump across the gaps, or what?!
Bottom line, as was already stated above: You don't need to buy "high end audiophile" level cables (though some of them really are built somewhat sturdier and look better if that's important to you, and they tend to have better QC), but you DO need to buy reasonably priced _quality_ cables that aren't total garbage. The crappy ones cause intermittent problems and make you to waste time troubleshooting instead of being productive or entertained, to save a measly $8.
Also, good luck figuring out which cable is the cheapest one that "works reliably." That's a total crock. Crappy cables often work just fine, for a while, then fail, or work perfectly at lower speeds and fail when run closer to max specs, or are more susceptible to interference and flake out randomly based on EMI/RFI changes. You don't need to buy the $45 one, but buying the $1-2 one is asking for problems. You might get lucky and never see a problem, or you might have difficult to diagnose issues and end up actually returning much more expensive electronics and equipment when the problem is actually that stupid $2 piece of crap cable!
Hopefully I don't need to stoop to a car analogy to get the point across...
They didn't mention it in the article, but the protocol by which the data is transferred over the cable is a crucial detail. Looking at the screenshots, it's likely that they were using the Microsoft SMB protocol to transfer the music files from the NAS to the laptop where they were then played. This protocol uses TCP under the hood which performs error detection and correction, thereby ensuring that any cable would provide the maximum level of quality providing it was not physically damaged.
Had the testers used the cables by sending analog audio data over them, I'm sure they would have noticed a difference.
They may have even heard a few static pops due to network collisions if they had spent even the minimum effort to develop an "audio over ethernet" protocol that was not performing any error correction, and would amplify the difference between the quality of the cables.
Using error correction to achieve 0% loss over cheap ethernet cables is cheating.
there's a little blue pill for that now tho
There is no ethernet cable in the world which is sufficiently bad, that there are enough retransmits for mere audio to stutter or stall.
I think you'll find that this very expensive cable has sufficiently poor quality that it will impact the reception of data.
There is an old joke in the audio industry.
* If you want to make a million, spend a million.
Works for crap such as Monster Cable, Bose, Beats, etc.
-- :-)
Married Audiophile Joke:
"When I die I hope my wife sells my speakers for what they're worth rather than what I told her I paid for them."
Those $4 jeans from Wal-Mart are GOOD ENOUGH damnit! Nobody should ever consider buying something that's actually well built with better quality materials and assembly, you're just throwing your money down the drain. What do you really need to cover your legs?
Buy the cheapest no-name tires available for your car, they're GOOD ENOUGH and they're all approved safe for road use and you'll just be stuck in traffic most of the time anyway. What do you really need for 65 MPH?
I get really sick of a*holes parroting the same "all cables are alike" or "it's just ones and zeros" with absolutely no understanding of any of the underlying technologies. All cables are NOT the same, nor are they all good enough. Some cables are embarrassingly overpriced, avoid those. Some cables are cheap crap, avoid those too. Most of what's in between is just fine, although for some special cases (extra long runs, critical infrastructure, etc) the expensive ones may actually make sense.
Your statements make zero sense. For example, by your logic, apparently only shielding matters in Ethernet cables. Obviously wire AWG doesn't matter, TPI doesn't matter, connector quality doesn't matter, plenum or not - doesn't matter, flooded or not doesn't matter, wire material doesn't matter, cable diameter doesn't matter, actual build quality and whether the cheap vendor is totally lying about their CAT5e or CAT6 spec? Doesn't matter. Only shielding matters. Right. I can tell you come from a true electrical engineering backgroud with extensive expertise in data communications and experience in cable manufacturing...
I'm going to both agree and disagree with you. Yes, everyone missed that this introduced noise making it to the analog side is the reason for the shielding they use. It's not about missing bits that will be retransmitted anyway.
But on a cheap DAC, I get all sorts of PCI bus noise going through my speakers. Have you never owned a cheap computer where moving a wired mouse produces noise through the speakers? Or gotten coil whine from a GPU to introduce noise to the speakers? Obviously an audiophile will own better equipment, but there's theoretically a chance of interference.
Of course the solution for that is just just use optical cable to your speakers to prevent any possible analog noise.
Have you ever looked at a typical RJ45? It is a plastic plug mating with a plastic socket.
There is no standardized way for a plug to pick up ground from the socket. There is no ground pin in the Ethernet RJ45 pinout. Neither side of the cable can possibly have a grounded shield.
You were right the first time. "Affect" as a noun is rarely used except in psychology.
I assume you were wearing your three wolf moon shirt?
Perhaps that was the cause of the speedup.
More testing is indicated.
Didn't say the transmission was perfect. I said it was good enough that it could afford to re-transmit a section of munged audio probably 100-1000 times before the playback routines were ready to play it. I foresee no non-defective cable being bad enough to fail every single one of those re-transmits so that the digital playback would stall or stutter.
Basing a test off of an "error condition" that basically is unattainable without a pair of scissors is stupid.
Category 7 and 7A are not recognized by TIA/EIA and are not real categories and are not used by any networking standards. TIA/EIA is currently defining a Cat 8 cable specification for use by 40Gbps being defined in 802.3bq
This is digital. Why the 'listening' test?* Transfer the data, determine whether what came out == what was sent? Wtf Ars?
* The answer is page views, I know.
While I have no experience testing Ethernet cable's capabilities for passing a digital signal, I can't state categorically that CAT6 cable makes very good and very inexpensive speaker cable. Even untrained ears can immediately hear the difference, note that the difference equates to "better sound" not just different sound. This has been a known fact for quite a while. I have not, though, tested different CAT6 cables. I am using Hitachi CAT6 Plus 4F-R/23.
They used the cheap $340 ethernet cable. They should have used the $10k one. Literally anyone can hear the difference with that one. i think its because it has electrolytes.
http://hothardware.com/news/10...
1. There is a difference between a "cable tester" and a "cable certifier". The former just does simple things like checking for opens, shorts, and crossovers. The latter, which was happily used in this article, actually measures what happens to a signal as it passes through the cable.
2. Many ethernet users think that because it's a data link, it's digital and therefore things like noise do not matter. This is ignorant and false. The moment the data is stuffed onto the wire it is an analog waveform. Noisy cables lead to data corruption (BERT - bit error rate testing is used to measure this) which requires data correction and/or packets to be re-sent which in-turn leads to lower network performance.
3. The dirty little secret of the ethernet cabling industry is this: something like 90% of all the signal loss in an ethernet cable is not cause by the cable itself but rather by the connectors at the ends of the cable. The twisted-pair wires have consistent electrical characteristics all along their lengths, but when you get into the connectors, the twisted-pair arrangement necessarily breaks down, you get impedence mis-matches, etc. The RJ45 connector was selected for initial twisted pair ethernet because it was cheap, well-understood and readily-available, it's electrical characteristics were acceptable for 10Mbit service. By the time CAT7 was being discussed, everybody in the industry knew the connector was the primary problem and various vendors were trying new connector designs (all of which were bulky and expensive). Those interested can go off and study on their own.
I'm not defending a marketing breakthrough, which the insanely expensive cables in the article seem to be, but I did want to clarify some of the issues arising in many comments. Incidentally, I was involved in the early CAT7 work.
We know that it's heresy on /. to actually RTFA, but the Ars Technica article appears to be debunking a claim that wasn't actually made. Perhaps that article (and this one too) is clickbait.
Following the links provided leads to an article by an audiophile that claimed that HE heard a difference on HIS system using a normal and a 'premium' ~$79 network patch cable in a listening test (as well as the higher priced ones from the same manufacturer). There were no claims of digital bit errors, etc. that 95% of the comments above are pompously ridiculing.
At least one poster (above) pointed out that the issue at heart may be that noise picked up via the cheaper patch cable may be manifesting itself on the ANALOG signal after the DAC. It IS remotely possible that this might happen through capacitive / inductive coupling between circuit board traces on the motherboard etc. depending on his configuration / specific equipment. I didn't bother researching the audiophile's equipment setup. It is enough to say that his claim can't be dismissed out of hand (but it probably won't be easy for a third party to reproduce).
It should be noted that the Ars Technica debunking procedure doesn't run the test on the audiophile's system. Indeed, using a generic laptop with fair headphones in a noisy convention environment isn't a valid test. There is a reason computer engineers aren't known for developing high end analog audio equipment. Also, if the listeners can't hear the difference between A and B scenario's, there is little point in doing the X portion of an A/B/X test.
The claim made was not that the patch cables didn't deliver the correct bits on time in the correct order. The claim was that on a specific system, one audiophile claimed that he could hear a difference in the output of the SYSTEM. That environment is the only environment that could be used to test HIS claims. Little is gained in showing little to no difference between patch cables in a dissimilar system. It is the specific SYSTEM that apparently made some minor noise audible.
This is clickbait. And I'll wager that many of the critics of the audiophile have never heard audio on a decent system (any system sold in a big box store with distortion values with a significant digit before the decimal place or S/N ratio 80 doesn't count).
I was an audiophile, worrying about the last 0.00001% THD and IM and noise and everything else, until a transducer Engineer (read: a professional who designs microphones and speakers for a living) casually mentioned that the very best, cost-is-no-object, hand-assembled microphones and speakers distort at least several percent.
Each.
Which means that no matter how great the ELECTRONIC portion of your signal path, the beginning and end have distortion measured in numbers with nonzero digits to the left of the decimal point. Doesn't matter how clean your electronics or special magic cables or whatever are, they can't remove the distortion that's already there in the original signal (unless your source is purely electronic) nor prevent your speakers/headphones from adding even more right before you listen.
After that, I paid attention mostly to noise floors and ignored everything else. I keep a lot more of my money and I have a lot more self-respect because I know I'm not wasting said money imagining that I can hear something that I cannot.
It's your money, spend it how you like.
It's all in the special electrons. If you get the electrons right then everything else will follow! /Derp
W. C. Fields was right when he said there's a sucker born every minute and some of them throw their money away on fancy cable. So what?
I'll bet that most everyone here who dumps all over the fancy cables also has a crap audio system of their own, or thinks that they know what good sound is because they bounced for expensive headphones. Sorry guys, but listening to iTunes on headphones doesn't qualify you to declare your superiority about anything audiophile. A real audiophile isn't someone who lusts after $50,000 loudspeakers or buys the stupid cables we've been talking about.
A real audiophile is someone who builds his own power amps or loudspeakers. A real audiophile gets some microphones and goes out recording music at live events, brings it home and gets a faithful recreation on the home system. A real audiophile is someone who combines a love for music and a love for getting their hand "dirty" with the engineering of sound reproduction. That has little to do with stupid cables or excessively expensive gear of any kind.
If you want to experience startlingly realistic audio reproduction and not have to take out a 2nd mortgage on your home, check out the DIY designs at Linkwitz Labs.
So I shoot someone in a video game, and I hear it one second later. Or the video and audio in a movie are out of sync by a second. Is either acceptable, and if not, what's the workaround?
The one I don't get is why s/he still bothers with posting anonymously.
What's next? Earth isn't flat?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
You should consider the possibility that electrical engineers who regularly use the term "ground loop" just might understand the concept better than you do.
Run two identical wires down to your "green wire buried in the dirt".
Run some current along one of the wires.
Observe the voltages at the near end of each line. You'll find that the line carrying current is no longer at "zero volts" relative to the line not carrying current. That's because those ground lines are not perfect conductors.
sorry mr mob in vegas We Still didnt get the message we wont get the message and we are going to Post you six ways to sunday until you untie your own fuckin gordian.
that's enough. All it takes now is a few secret deals with high-fidelity audio manufacturers to intentionally degrade performance of their equipment when electric noise is detectable (even if it can be compensated for). The argument will then automatically become that you can't hear the difference because you are not using top-quality equipment in the 1st place. And then the manufacturers of the cables will be able to peddle it to everyone buying top-quality audio devices just because the devices will seem to need them. I am actually curious (no, I have not read the article) whether the cheap cables can still sustain the required rates. In other words, can they still sustain 1Gbps transmission between 1Gbps eth cards? Cat5e definitely CANNOT. It will top out at around 350-400Mbps. If these cheap cat6 cables have too much noise they can't guarantee 1Gbps. It may not matter to those using them with household devices, but it definitely matters to people have quality of service contracts which require them to pay when they can't supply a promised level of performance.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
There is no ethernet cable in the world which is sufficiently bad, that there are enough retransmits for mere audio to stutter or stall.
Oh? Why not? Most people will be able to hear 1/50th of a millisecond of missing data. Regardless of bandwidth, if your transmission drop requires a round-trip re-request of data, the latency of the connection can delay the arrival of the data past the point where it is needed to be played.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Digital audio has no "sound". It is where it becomes analogue and what happens after that that matters. Assuming no data errors, the only way anything in the digital chain affects the sound quality is by the interference and jitter it induces on the DAC and analogue components. This can be quite noticeable (and measurable), if you've ever heard the background mush from a cheap MP3 player or some mother board sound outputs through headphones, but a decent DAC would be well isolated and the clock would be at the DAC, and preferably be the audio master clock and not just phase-locked to something.
Seriously, you have no clue how TCP/IP works. Case in point: TCP has absolutely no error correction. At all. Your statement is complete and utter BS.
TCP has retransmission, but for that to be needed over a single cable hop, the cable needs to be close to complete failure. It basically does not happen. Basically all bit-errors are introduces by broken Ethernet cards and switches. A lot of the drops are caused by overloads and are intentional drops under software/firmware control.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A good server room will have decent isolation, and should be tested periodically. Many professionals use boom boxes, but some need more confidence in their isolation tests. When turned all the way up and idle, depending on which direction the amp and/or instrument is facing or type and quality and quality of implementation of electronics used, you'll get different levels of hum and harmonics from amps in the server room. Its all sufficiently below the noise floor in practice not to matter, but easily detectable, again, when a live audio channel is active and idle, until feedback overtakes it. You shouldn't hear fans during instrument performance. \::/_
If there's a more gullible group of people on this planet than audiophiles, I've never met them. I suspect it's the same on other planets as well.
I mean, who else would pay $400 for a wooden knob that supposedly makes the sound better? Or colored pebbles in a jar that (again, supposedly) "purify the tonal balance" of the room the music is played in?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I'm not. Selling an expensive POS for something that is at it's very nature subjective only proves it's just for bragging rights.
I'm sure that there are a few Audiophiles that will screech that X makes Y sound better, or X is better for data transfer. However, no amount of empirical data can change the immutable fact that "sound quality" is a subjective observation. What one person thinks is "sounding great" might not for another.
Sure, there is some general agreement that an audio track that sounds clear is way different than one that sounds like a jack hammer got at it and tossed into a blender. Again though, there is going to never be a consensus with people that hear the same audio file but the only difference is something extremely trivial (and ridiculously expensive).
Unlike Unshielded Twist Pair (UTP) which uses an RJ45 style connector with a plastic body, shielded twisted pair (STP) uses an RJ45 style connector with a metal body that connects to the cable shield.
The ground loop formed by using ethernet over shielded twisted pair is not irrelevant if it corrupts the chassis ground which is also the shielded side of any singled ended signals like RCA audio. It would be very unlikely to affect the ethernet but it could sure screw up sensitive single ended signals.
RAM has latencies that make overclocking possible by upping the speed of the ram past it's normal rating to match the OC of the cpu, so yah, gaming class RAM is legitimate if it has lower CAS latencies.
the company that sells these say that the arrows are determined by testing the cables to determine which end to put the arrow on from the basis of best audio quality, this would denote that it is not from some special shielding or construction but pure bullshit.
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* You vainly TRIED to 'cut me down' & showed YOU ARE PURE 'BS' chump - you can't cut the mustard in coding, & You're a LIMITED little menial techie @ best/most, moron troll that you are... lol!
(Hot air GALORE outta gweihir the menial but when the chips are on the table & he's challenged to do better than I did? The little bitch troll gweihir RAN, lol...)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* See my subject above, gweihir? Your fantasy is that you actually KNOW & UNDERSTAND computing...
Too bad your evasions after trolling me & attempting + failing @ 'cutting me down' only BACKFIRED ON YOU - after all:
YOU RAN, BEYOTCH & CAN'T LIVE UP TO A COMPLETELY FAIR CHALLENGE!
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS seeing a bullshit artist mere talk TROLLING done zero loser like you has the NERVE to state what you did - especially after you RAN in that link above, gweihir... lol!
(You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more...)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS seeing a bullshit artist mere talk TROLLING done zero loser like you has the NERVE to state what you did - especially after you RAN in that link above, gweihir... lol!
(You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more - a MERE TECHIE MENIAL!)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS seeing a bullshit artist mere talk TROLLING done zero loser like you has the NERVE to state what you did - especially after you RAN in that link above, gweihir... lol!
(You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more - a MERE TECHIE MENIAL @ best/most)
IF anyone is STUPID? It's you.
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more - a MERE TECHIE MENIAL @ best/most!
MINUS CODERS LIKE MYSELF THAT CREATE THE TOOLS YOU MENIAL MONKEY TECHS & NETWORK ADMINS MERELY USE? You're helpless... lol!
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS seeing a bullshit artist mere talk TROLLING done zero loser like you has the NERVE to state what you did - especially after you RAN in that link above, gweihir... lol!
(You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more - a MERE TECHIE MENIAL @ best/most)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS seeing a bullshit artist mere talk TROLLING done zero loser like you has the NERVE to state what you did - especially after you RAN in that link above, gweihir... lol!
You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more - a MERE TECHIE MENIAL @ best/most!
(FACT: Minus coders like myself, you TECHIE or NETWORK ADMIN MENIALS ARE HELPLESS - just as you've SHOWN yourself to be in that link above!)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS seeing a bullshit artist mere talk TROLLING done zero loser like you has the NERVE to state what you did - especially after you RAN in that link above, gweihir... lol!
You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more - a MERE TECHIE MENIAL @ best/most!
(FACT: Minus coders like myself, you TECHIE or NETWORK ADMIN MENIALS ARE HELPLESS - just as you've SHOWN yourself to be in that link above!)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS seeing a bullshit artist mere talk TROLLING done zero loser like you has the NERVE to state what you did - especially after you RAN in that link above, gweihir... lol!
You don't HAVE the ability to code & the link above evidences it - you're a bullshit blowhard, nothing more - a MERE TECHIE MENIAL @ best/most!
(FACT: Minus coders like myself, you TECHIE or NETWORK ADMIN MENIALS ARE HELPLESS - just as you've SHOWN yourself to be in that link above!)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk