AudioQuest Diamond RJ/E Ethernet Cable: £6899
audiovisualonline.co.uk
audiovisualonline.co.uk
"We made some test once, and we changed the skin of the software, to a new color. Every people said the software sounded better with that new skin. Yet we changed absolutely nothing except the color."
I'm still wondering if some graphical configuration ( such as a bright color) wouldn't stimulate the brain more, making it more receptive in general, and to sound in particular, letting people "hear" better.
I think a difference just stimulates the brain, along the same lines of why supermarkets infuriatingly keep moving the products around so you can't just auto-pilot your shop.
In many contexts outside science, whether some sensory difference exists objectively or not may not be relevant at all as long as there is a perceivable difference in subjective experience.
I find that I have to shut my eyes or look away from the screen when toggling the modes to avoid biasing my perception of how the audio is changing. It's particularly bad because the visual changes are designed to evoke the effect it has on the sound.
1. just check this website: http://thume.ca/screentunes/ there is a large chance that your computer videocard and/or LCD will make a noise on that page
2. when the videocard makes such a noise, it can interfere with the PSU and thus affect the soundcard as well.
3. Thus, it's actually possible that changing a "high-frequency stripy" interface to a solid color will lower the noise-floor on the sound-card a bit.
The voltage across DAC-amp ground causes a DC offset seen by the amp (likely less than 1mV). The exact amount of voltage varies in time with CPU power consumption, producing AC that you hear.
You need to eliminate the ground connection between computer and DAC (toslink, USB optoisolator, etc.).
If the bass is reproduced poorly and sounds 'woolly' it will subjectively mess up the timing of the bass playing with respect to the rest of the music, as though the bass player is less skilful. Whereas listening to the same track with equipment that has tight, clear and dynamic bass can make the music sound more lively and subjectively 'faster', and it is more likely to make your foot tap.
Yeah, sure. But most of these comments are about cables carrying digital signals, a class of devices which only have two real operating modes: "working perfectly" and "catastrophic failure". Instead of respecting the principles of the physics and information encoding associated with this layout, though, we see outlandish claims of frequencies traveling at different speeds and damaging your multi-octave audio.
But when bits arrive is very important in audio, and whether or not the devices and cables in the chain before the DAC have introduced noise on the ground plane is also considered very important by some.
I can't see how an ethernet cable can affect timing, as the packets with the digital signal might even arrive out of order. The earthing of the ethernet cable might influence how much noise is introduced the ground plane though. It might explain why the Audioquest cables are directional, if their earthing arrangement is directional perhaps.
Isochronous USB has no error recovery (so if that packet arrives with a mangled checksum, you have a data dropout).
However, cables are the least of your worries; it's the driver stack (USB, ethernet, whatever) and the audio software feeding it that are the main sources of error. Unfortunately for Monster (et al) it is far harder for them to sell a $5,000 piece of software that does nothing than it is for them to sell a $5K piece of snake-oil-class hardware; the software is objectively analyzable without expensive tools, for instance.
The vendor claims that
1.'All audio cables are 'directional'
2.'When insulation is unbiased, it slows down parts of the signal differently, a big problem for very time-sensitive multi-octave audio.'
That's two verifiably untrue or misleading statements with reference to a data cable, putting all subjective sound-quality fluff aside.
Puts me in mind of the claims of homeopaths, etc.
https://www.gov.uk/marketing-advertising-law/regulations-tha...
http://www.cap.org.uk/Advertising-Codes/Non-Broadcast/CodeIt...
you know how nigerian scams are badly written and full of typos to avoid anyone with half a brain? well, audiophile scams put on a price tag like that for the same reason.
I have actually used this claim for less evil purposes in the past...
I spent my summers in high school working phone support for a university. This was back in the day when people brought desktop computers with them to school and plugged them into the wall with an ethernet cable... Many of the issues folks had getting connected could be solved by reseating the ethernet cable (either it was poorly seated in the first place, or the process of unplugging it and plugging it back in caused the NIC to reset some stuck bit of the driver). Unfortunately, it was quite common for folks to ignore your instructions to unplug the cable and plug it back in (as they are _sure_ that couldn't be the problem). I quickly picked up a habit of suggesting they may have accidentally gotten a 'unidirectional ethernet cable' and they should try swapping it end for end.
(I just made this joke in IRC too and somebody sent me this link http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_t... )
Maybe there is actually money to make off this!
Such a common sound path deserves only the best.
Ideally one should have a separate cable flowing the other way, too, so that ACKs aren't unduly delayed.
10mbit ethernet uses one wire pair in each direction at a low frequency.
100mbit ethernet uses one wire pair in each direction at a high frequency.
1gbit ethernet uses all four pairs simultaneously in both directions at the same[1] frequency as 100mbit. Which is why wolfgke mentions problems when the different pairs aren't the same length.
[1] Mostly. It's complicated.
There is a bell curve of purchasing mentality - from a minority who buy solely based on what's cheapest, through varying degrees of cost/benefit tradeoff, through to a minority who will tend toward whatever is most expensive. It often pays to offer something to that latter group.
This video explains the Swedish concept of "vasking", essentially throwing expensive liquids down the drain to demonstrate how little their price tags matter to you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uhEpMJ3n_wU (it's also hilarious)
Making stuff that people use exclusively to show off is such a great business that the only reason everyone's not trying to do it must be some misguided faith in humanity.
Or an inability to keep a straight face through an entire sales pitch. I doubt the effect works if the sales person or market copy actively mocks the buyers' intelligence.
There's a great book called The Millionaire Next Door, where they look at the spending habits of millionaires. One of the things that stuck out was the fact that a lot of these people have "boring" jobs that don't have "face" to keep. No one really cares about what the owner of a janitorial company or a welding supplier looks like, so there's no pressure for him or her to have the Right House or the Right Car or the Right country club memberships. In contrast, the book notes a couple of doctors and lawyers who are really active in their professions' social scenes and are living paycheck-to-paycheck despite earning far more.
Personally, I like my Shittic (beat-up Civic that is missing half the paint). Every month that it keeps running is another month that I don't have to make a car payment. My girlfriend winces every time she sees it, though...
This must also be the reason why this kind of manufacturing is prominent in Italy, where any faith in humanity is long gone.
I mean, only the very rich can voluntarily pay 95% of their income in taxes! Nobody else can do that! Go ahead and try to beat me!
The more you believe paying taxes is a 'waste of money' the better it works!
It does have an extremely high bandwidth at 100 gbps (gigabits) but unless you have a audio file that requires 10 gigabytes per second then it is completely useless (Uncompressed audio is at most a few hundred kbps).
Also the pure silver and other features would not make a difference to sound quality.
So I would say go buy a $5 Ethernet cable as the audio is digital and the receiver will either get the packet or not, the cable can't damage the sound quality unless it's analog.
Please don't believe even this (technically sounding) claim! You cannot specify the "bandwidth" of a cable, so even if they'd write 2Tbit/10km it would be just as made up as what they are writing now.
What you can do is to specify physical parameters, such as attenuation at specific (most interesting: high) frequencies, distortion and reflection caused by impedance mismatches at the connectors. Then maybe it will meet the requirements to transport Ethernet accodring to the standard, and under the conditions specified therein (1000Base-T, IEEE 802.3ab), carrying 1 GBit/second over up to 100 meters.
100 GBit Ethernet, for what it's worth, is currently planned to go through these kind of connectors: https://www.google.de/search?q=cxp+connector&tbm=isch
And while the cable being sold might be well shielded enough, and using a dielectric that allows it to exceed the attenuation requirement of Gigabit Ethernet by huge amounts, 100 GBit/s is so far off the scale that I'm pretty convinced that with current technology this is completely unattainable, even under best laboratory conditions.
My problem is with the dishonesty that often comes with it. There are some companies that are not crooks but mostly it feels like an area full of scams.
But those companies don't advertise their bags as having more "stuff holding power" as the average purse. Or "unparalleled foot retention and lifting capability".
This kind of thing is extreme, but it's no different to any other positional good.
And it is full of crooks.
I know someone who made a fortune from 'special' cables.
Did they know they were scamming people? Of course they did.
Asking otherwise would be like saying, "Oh, I don't mind all that water; it's the wetness that often comes with it that I mind..."
The difference in the way the customers treated me was astounding, I was exactly the same person in the same clothes with the same knowledge but they valued my skills more just because they were paying more.
Something I learned from startups is that PR is an underestimated force. Could this be for PR?
Edit: just found a £2,199 mp3 player: http://www.audiovisualonline.co.uk/product/8288/astell-amp-k...
Though the biggest gap in the market would appear to be in TV brackets, where the highest-end option, at a mere £599, doesn't even claim to have sound-augmenting properties
On these leads, electrons are flowing a little bit in one direction and then as the polarity of the source shifts, a little bit in the other. The whole idea of having a "direction" in a cable is just...
At one time we really had analog equipment "all the way down", so it kind of made sense to minimise distortion and loss in every individual link. Nowadays, we use digital systems where the music information is conveyed as "symbols". In this realm, a lot of the concepts from analog systems (or even the "pipe" system mentioned above) just makes no sense.
It is true that the digital information is still run over analog cables, in this case I assume we are talking about an Ethernet layer, but it has very little resemblance with the idea of a loudspeaker cable as information is packaged and translated in various ways before actually appearing on the cable.
Do you remember that funny marker pen that you could use to paint the edge of CDs to minimise effects of laser light running back and forth in the CD. That was a try att connecting a common understanding of the turntable with the new CD medium -- the idea of having a pickup that could be disturbed. I wonder onto what common understanding the idea of these cables are trying to connect, the water pipe idea is visual and easily taken but jumps a generation or two of reality.
I choose to see this as a taxation of... less gifted but wondrously more wealthy people. Actually a tax that kind of makes sense.
Why, in the world of Digital Audio with ones and zeros, would any cable, be it silver or gold or what ever super conducting cores make any difference to sound quality?
Yes it would properly make 0.0001% ( Wild Guess Only ) speed difference due to better conductivity and less Error correction. But if everything gets decoded at the Chip level, then the cable should in theory makes absolutely NO difference in sound quality what so ever.
Please correct me if i am wrong.
Same here, I guess. There are rich people who believe they have a very special taste and can afford it :)
Its just a hangover from the old days - the big electronics stores still get to sell mom & dad a £20-30 cable when in reality could pick up one, just as good, for £2 on amazon!
Short answer: cables don't matter
The famous audioholics coat hanger test: http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/speakers-when-i...
Also a great watch: http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
You can always use a $6k rubidium clock http://www.antelopeaudio.com/en/products/10m-atomic-clock if you really want to make sure your bits are synchronized. It's good enough for wu-tang!
For buffered data being sent and decoded, like via ethernet, the bits are the same on both ends, so I'm not sure what effect you would even make up to say it could change the output.
From memory the oxides, sulfides, and chlorides all have to be worried about but they tend to be mushy semiconductors and any wiping action in the connector will 1) destroy the connector plating in 10-20 uses at typical plating / finish reqs 2) wipe itself clean giving a lovely perfect silver to silver contact until it wears out.
Another interesting aspect is this engineer from Tyco went to great lengths to claim they can commercially ship lower electrical and thermal resistance SILVER connectors than GOLD connectors as a complete connector system. Its not the bulk conductivity of Ag vs Au that matter, its that every gold plate has an underlying nickel plate or whatever, and some discussion of the deformation of silver being a benefit so you get higher contact area leading to higher conductivity.
Then again this whitepaper is around a decade old and gold prices haven't exactly dropped back to $230/oz since then, meanwhile Tyco and everyone else still ships mostly tinplate and goldplate IC sockets and I don't recall ever seeing silverplate IC sockets in any mouser/digikey product list. So maybe there's other problems with silver plated electrical contacts in the real world. It has the odor of a mid 00s marketing doc in its (remembered) claims that by mid 10s no one will ever use tinplate / goldplate in connector design. Well, we can see how that turned out, but maybe the 20s.
It made some impression on me a decade ago WRT thinking about RF connectors, .mil / aerospace will pay anything of course for higher performance so it gave me something to think about, if they really can deliver then we can expect gold to disappear from military aircraft radars and stuff like that. Although nothing seems to have materialized on this topic since then.
http://www.te.com/documentation/whitepapers/pdf/Ag_use_conne...
http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/speakers-when-i...
Scroll to the 2nd from the bottom paragraph staring with "We gathered up ...".
I asked them a question on their website to see if that's true.
Of course there will be absolutely no difference with a 5 € Ethernet cable.
Most interesting is that expensive analogical cables are as much as useless. During a blind tests listeners are unable to tell which cable is the "expensive" one.
http://www.audiovisualonline.co.uk/product/7119/wireworld-pl...
It only supports HDMI 1.4 though, so you are limited to 30fps at 4k :(
The best part about that cable is that someone took the time to determine which direction it sounds best, and the cable is marked to make it straightforward to attach it in the best direction!
Nope, they just marked an arrow on it and said they took the time to determine which direction is best.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/04/25/amazon.price.algorith...
What's more, these ethernet cables work better passing data in one direction than the other. Here's me using ordinary, non-directional cables, like a sucker :(
Naturally this has no basis in any reality, but that doesn't prevent anyone from believing it.