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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I have always wanted to ask this but never found the right place to do so.

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.

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Poor quality or really long connections can cause jitter, especially since in most consumer stuff the clock is sent with the signal. That jitter can cause differences in the signal out from the d/a. That said, the difference is less than minuscule, and time and time again people post double blind tests that prove even people who consider themselves trained audiophiles can't tell the difference. Same goes for analog - in practice the cable doesn't make an audible difference, no matter what you use (see below)

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

the whole jitter thing is nonsense in the context of something like an Ethernet cable since only the data is being sent, the packets only have to arrive 'fast enough', the timing doesn't matter.

Yeah sorry - should have said that above applies to digital audio streamed over a wire and decoded directly (spdif, aes, etc)

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.

Yeah I remember reading an article a few years back about hdmi cables. They tested a load of different ones and found they found no difference between the expensive 'gold' ones vs the cheapest of the cheap hdmi cables.

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!

I can't remember a title and link to it, but not long ago there was an article about people demanding lossless encoding and how it doesn't make sense because it's almost impossible to tell the difference.

Same here, I guess. There are rich people who believe they have a very special taste and can afford it :)

Note that most hi-fi setups use an analog audio cable to transport the signal to the speakers.

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