By 'bold' I mean 'audacious'.
$300 too much for a 40cm digital interconnect?
- Thread starter ItemAudio
- Start date
By 'bold' I mean 'audacious'.
Mr Perceptive
Perceptive Member
Mark, it was my active speakers (Mackie's) at your place, and you took great delight on finding that although the IEC connector is quite enclosed you could insert a foo based mains cable with a dirty great big Wattgate type connector into it.
With regards to the first question, SATA cables, network cables and USB cables in my opinion make no difference, I'm regularly dealing with camera data rates in excess 80Mhz (thats 80Mbits per second, and sometimes in excess of 200Mbits per second) as opposed to a WAV file at redbook 44.1kbits per second, and no-manufacturer in my industry recommends fancy foo cables.
I say again a decent quality cable with decent terminations is all that you need.
The only reason for foo is to make money. One foo sale will result in many times the profit of a non-foo sale.
Shielded SATA cable can be done, measurements can be used to verify that the shielding actually works, but to what point? SATA cables usually connect a "noisy" HDD (which has its own source of electromagnetic interference, guess what?) with a "noisy" motherboard (SATA controller, CPU) - how much sense the cable makes at that point? Shielding against the insides of a computer case also makes no sense, consider computer fans, the great interference a higher-end graphic card can produce (if present), PSU for the computer itself, ...
Not that shielding / isolating digital signal carriers doesn't matter at all, galvanic isolation of the computer and an external DAC makes much more sense. Isolating the computer itself (as a black box) might also make sense. Shielded SATA cables inside a computer case - not that much sense.
Also, 5MB/s difference in the earlier-linked benchmark seems like a measurement deviation, HDD cache in modern drives is everything but a deterministic system (for an outside observer).
Overall - yes, it might help a tiny bit, about 10^-6 percent, which is just not enough to care. Those £5 difference between £1 and £6 cable can be spent in a much more meaningful way.
Does it really make sense to continue this thread?
Not that shielding / isolating digital signal carriers doesn't matter at all, galvanic isolation of the computer and an external DAC makes much more sense. Isolating the computer itself (as a black box) might also make sense. Shielded SATA cables inside a computer case - not that much sense.
Also, 5MB/s difference in the earlier-linked benchmark seems like a measurement deviation, HDD cache in modern drives is everything but a deterministic system (for an outside observer).
Overall - yes, it might help a tiny bit, about 10^-6 percent, which is just not enough to care. Those £5 difference between £1 and £6 cable can be spent in a much more meaningful way.
Does it really make sense to continue this thread?
Gotcha - Mackies . . .
Again, the objection here is about money. When money is no object (ie military applications, rich people's systems) it's a no-brainer that you use the best part available, even if the difference between it and a standard one is only revealed in extremis, or only 1% more, or more reliable, performance is gained. No-one resents paying a few quid more for the reassuringly better screwed together top-end Neutrik Speakon connector. It's just better.
Digital systems of all kinds do very well, very cheaply. But CAT7 does perform better than CAT5, better HDMI cables demonstrably reduce jitter, better SATA cables demonstrably transfer data faster - even multimode fiber optic cables have different insertion losses. Better is better.
Whether by itself a given cable makes a significant difference is not what I find interesting: the cumulative effect of many such improvements is telling.
When reducing acoustic noise, there isn't a linear progression from noisy to quiet: the last 10% is much more important than the first 90-100%. Same with a transport: excising the primary and ancillary stock SMPs gets you maybe half way there, but wrestling the system truly quiet involves getting intimate with every part of the PC.
You've drawn the roadmap but given up before starting!
That's exactly my point: as I said, there is no point putting a fancy SATA cable in a standard box. As you say, the HD is a much bigger problem: first, fix that (use a SATA-filtered SSD); second, deal with the CPU (underclock, undervolt, cool hard, add EM/RF absorption; third, don't use a high-end video card; fourth, don't use case or CPU fans. Prevent radiated noise bouncing around inside the case with absorptive lining, and for the same reason shield all internal DC cabling.
It's not even clever: it's plain, common-sense engineering.
That's just cheap! Really - not even a fiver for a connector latch that doesn't wobble? Do you hate your music?!
sq225917
Bit of this, bit of that
And then prove it makes a measurable difference at the output and if it does then prove that difference is audible under blind test.
You just just jump directly to GO and wasting £300 without proving any potential for perceivable improvement exists.
No one gives a fu_k about the money, it's the fact that the cable can make no difference and that bullshit feeds a pointless cycle of fear, uncertainty and doubt that undermines one's own experience and enjoyment.
You just just jump directly to GO and wasting £300 without proving any potential for perceivable improvement exists.
No one gives a fu_k about the money, it's the fact that the cable can make no difference and that bullshit feeds a pointless cycle of fear, uncertainty and doubt that undermines one's own experience and enjoyment.
Cereal Killer
432
Items not actually talking about using $300 SATA cables, that's just the 'hook' for the subject. The cables he uses are £6 (IIRC). If i needed one (Crucial include one with their SSD's, so i don't) I'd happily spend £6 if the plugs fit well and the length was exactly as i needed. Less than a pack of cigs, which literally goes up in smoke!
The contrary - I like music, therefore I'd rather spent time listening to my presumably lowend setup (MDAC connected directly to a sandy bridge desktop computer with 750W PSU and GeForce GTX 570) than building or buying the setup you described. Though if people really buy it, then why not sell it, right?
Nice as an engineering feat (if doable), but I still miss the point - WHY would anybody want use that as a computer / music server? What's the point? It's not like it will help the CPU decode music any better or keep its original quality when transfering from a HDD when compared to cheap SATA cabling. The ouput of interest is still USB / SPDIF, which can be isolated much easier and at a lower cost. As for the computer itself producing EMI - shielding the box itself (ie. connecting it to ground) just seems like a much easier solution.
Thread's moved on a bit but I couldn't let this pass. One of the best ways to locate your music library is on one end of a network ethernet connection on your bog standard computer or NAS drive with a client on the other end buffering up the asynchronous TCP or UDP data - which is utterly and completely jitter and noise free because it's asynchronous - buffering it and clocking it to a DAC in a low noise environment. Oh wait - I've just described SBT.
SATA is robust and there is nothing that you can do to a SATA cable to affect audio quality short of flakey connectors or the cable so poor that is incapable of transmitting data correctly at the bus rate. But then your computer wouldn't boot. Anything that boots your computer will be indistinguishable audio-wise. All else is foo.
1. Acoustically silent is better.
2. Any ambitious transport isn't aimed at 'decoding music better': the goal is to do it less worse - ie, decoding data without creating power- and jitter-based artefacts.
The idea that DACs and amplifiers are so easily isolated or immune from such issues was with CDs, and especially is with PCs, a myth. It can be done, but it's hard to do, and involves additional, expensive and undesirable complexity in the design of the DAC. As John Westlake of Audiolab recently said on this forum, he's not heard a DAC that's truly transport-indifferent.
The goal is simply to make stuff better: it's crazy to deliberately introduce a contaminant to a system on the premise that you may be able to partially neutralise it downstream. Just don't introduce the contaminant. How can that be wrong?
Strong, empirical-sounding statement - but hard to prove. You seem to be short-cutting to the conclusion of an research program you're not participating in.
Cables for USB, SPDIF, ethernet, SATA: either all differ - or none do.
The 'only noughts and ones' riposte entirely fails to grasp the issues involved. Let's not be hasty is all.
sq225917
Bit of this, bit of that
All of the data specs so far exceed the bandwidth required by audio it's not worth talking about. So yes, there's no differences between competently built electrically sufficient cables that are passing digital audio- that's why none have ever been proved.
Jitter exists and is measurable, cables do not cause this and cannot fix it. All they can do is conduct noise along with the signal or not. That is not a connection issue, but a design issue within the component sending the data.
You talk about not jumping to conclusions but that is exactly what you are doing, where's your blind testing to prove that cables make a difference? Let's see your research program.
Jitter exists and is measurable, cables do not cause this and cannot fix it. All they can do is conduct noise along with the signal or not. That is not a connection issue, but a design issue within the component sending the data.
You talk about not jumping to conclusions but that is exactly what you are doing, where's your blind testing to prove that cables make a difference? Let's see your research program.
Teddy Ray
pfm Member
I am nervous now. My computer in 2002(AMD athlon with 2 gigs of ram) was surely under-speccd for the thousands of Gigs of audio that were recorded through it. surely there are all sorts of timing errors and stuff. I wonder why then when I mirror a copy of that file through 4 different machines(and a radar machine, an edirol r4, and maudio microtracker and a nagra ares) and then do a null test, they are identical?? I also wonder why these timing errors and whatnot did manifest themselves more profoundly?? I did use the cables that came with the motherboard! the PSU was a freebie included with the purchase too!! WTF was i thinking?
Audio is such a tiny, TINY load on resources that overspeccing computers for audio playback is terribly silly. item you create an answer for a problem that does not exist.
but audiophiles, especially older not computer savvy ones, surely slurp it down like so much ambrosia.
Audio is such a tiny, TINY load on resources that overspeccing computers for audio playback is terribly silly. item you create an answer for a problem that does not exist.
but audiophiles, especially older not computer savvy ones, surely slurp it down like so much ambrosia.
Robert
Tapehead
It's wrong because you have no grasp on the degree to which these so called contaminants impact sound quality.
The contaminants of which you speak do not require neutralisation further down the chain because they have no audible effect.
Mike42
Heard it all before...
Hey Item! Here come a couple of customers now.
Brilliant!
Space is the Place
pfm Member
Lets not confuse Steven who's passionate about his hobby and no doubt derives a massive amount of enjoyment from it, with someone that's selling stuff (or discussing selling stuff) people don't really need.
YNWOAN
100% Analogue
I think you are all being very unfair to the OP - it seems to me that the purpose of this thread is not to promote expensive foo cables (as such), but actually to create a 'lively' thread in which the OP can raise the forum profile of his business....job done 
.
I thought all the 'frothy' stuff at the beginning was fun - it's got a bit dull now.
.I thought all the 'frothy' stuff at the beginning was fun - it's got a bit dull now
.Space is the Place
pfm Member
'lively' thread in which the OP can raise the forum profile of his business....job done
Or...continue to erode his credibility to a fat digital zero? It's Working so far.