Joe
pfm Member
I think the date on it ( 2005:01:01 ) indicates that his camera id malfunctioning too.
$300 too much for a 40cm digital interconnect?
- Thread starter ItemAudio
- Start date
I think the date on it ( 2005:01:01 ) indicates that his camera id malfunctioning too.
mindlagoon
pfm Member
This multi-user thread has come full circle. Must be due to one of Item's "intermod loops".
sonddek
Trade: SUPATRAC
I recall that item has recommended upgrading to CAT7, not CAT6. Very important. CAT7 delivers much zingier bits. You can smell the diff.
I've met Mark and he is a very nice guy. He has done a lot of informative lens tests too. But I'm afraid he has strayed into territory he doesn't understand when it comes to his efforts to viral market rip-off upstream bitfoo.
Do you seriously think I'm stupid enough to believe that there are customers for $300 SATA cables among the PFM readership?! I know exactly where those guys hang out, and if I sold PPA cables - which I don't - I would want to let them know on their home turf, not here.
I candidly confessed the purpose of the thread in post 141.
sonddek
Trade: SUPATRAC
So you should have posted the thread in classifieds where it would rightly be treated as the advertisement for upstream foo which it is.
It's dead entertaining to watch the collective effort to mock, undermine, caricature, and distort what is a pretty simple and obviously valid message. As the Frenchie says: reduction ad absurdam.
Richard: you well know I never said use of CAT7 is 'very important'. Again, for the record, CAT7 is in every way better than CAT5. That's why it exists. It's not expensive. And if we want to build a very low noise transport, considering all aspects of its electrical behaviour, the a higher bandwidth, double shielded data cable, with properly shielded metal connectors cannot be a bad thing. End comment.
Richard: you well know I never said use of CAT7 is 'very important'. Again, for the record, CAT7 is in every way better than CAT5. That's why it exists. It's not expensive. And if we want to build a very low noise transport, considering all aspects of its electrical behaviour, the a higher bandwidth, double shielded data cable, with properly shielded metal connectors cannot be a bad thing. End comment.
Alan Brown
Registered LUser
Lighten up you lot! This has been an entertaining read, both sides, funny yet at times, and informative. Marks motives were always clear, his tongue firmly in cheek. It's just the sort of light hearted thread an audio forum needs, a nice, side-tracking distraction to waste some time.
As for the fearless crusaders who have unflinchingly unmasked conspiracy, exposed corruption and ignorance and cleaned up the grubby ghetto of computer audio....
As for the fearless crusaders who have unflinchingly unmasked conspiracy, exposed corruption and ignorance and cleaned up the grubby ghetto of computer audio....
Obviously, because of their upstream location SATA and Ethernet cables are not going to matter as much as factors closer to the master clock, but as part of the local playback environment, they can't be ignored.
Again, individually, these minor factors are not significant in isolation. In toto, they are.
Imagine trying to quiet a room of 100 people talking at once. If you ask one person to shut up, is the room any quieter? Materially, no. The noise floor created by all that intermodulation is chaotic. In fact, you could silence five or ten partygoers to negligible effect. But you are nonetheless removing noise. If you keep on removing noise, you approach the point where silencing ten people halves the hubbub. Keep going, and it becomes very evident when a single voice is silenced. When only one person is left, shutting up one person makes a 100% difference.
From experience, this is how it works: the net effect of many individually negligible improvements in this direction add up to something significant. So, no, if you only want car that goes from A to B, and are not going to follow a pursuit of excellence all the way through your system, it would be mad to spend that kind of money on a transport component.
A background in IT or a day job as an analyst won't help you - I was working at a C++ programming company in 1987 - hasn't helped a bit. I know enough to know there's a lot I don't know. There are so many practical issues involved: unforseeable latency effects of SSD and SATA drivers, unpredictable interactions between USB chipsets and proprietary DAC drivers, unpublished data from manufacturers re: motherboard grounding, uncertainty over OS behaviour, IRQs, player software, addressing, etc, etc. If you haven't been up to your ears in all that - monitoring interacton between a wide range of computers and a wide range of external clocks and converters, you don't know what you're talking about.
Again, individually, these minor factors are not significant in isolation. In toto, they are.
Imagine trying to quiet a room of 100 people talking at once. If you ask one person to shut up, is the room any quieter? Materially, no. The noise floor created by all that intermodulation is chaotic. In fact, you could silence five or ten partygoers to negligible effect. But you are nonetheless removing noise. If you keep on removing noise, you approach the point where silencing ten people halves the hubbub. Keep going, and it becomes very evident when a single voice is silenced. When only one person is left, shutting up one person makes a 100% difference.
From experience, this is how it works: the net effect of many individually negligible improvements in this direction add up to something significant. So, no, if you only want car that goes from A to B, and are not going to follow a pursuit of excellence all the way through your system, it would be mad to spend that kind of money on a transport component.
A background in IT or a day job as an analyst won't help you - I was working at a C++ programming company in 1987 - hasn't helped a bit. I know enough to know there's a lot I don't know. There are so many practical issues involved: unforseeable latency effects of SSD and SATA drivers, unpredictable interactions between USB chipsets and proprietary DAC drivers, unpublished data from manufacturers re: motherboard grounding, uncertainty over OS behaviour, IRQs, player software, addressing, etc, etc. If you haven't been up to your ears in all that - monitoring interacton between a wide range of computers and a wide range of external clocks and converters, you don't know what you're talking about.
No disrespect intended to turntablists. We have such a digital/analog division right here in the business, and in certain respects Gary's Spoked LP12 frankly knock spots of any digital source I can muster under £2k. But my attention switches from one to zero at all these old-school vinyl threads. What can I say, I'm a binary chap.
Sorry. item's threads are about marketing and gobbledegook. This one is no exception.Lighten up you lot! This has been an entertaining read, both sides, funny yet at times, and informative. Marks motives were always clear, his tongue firmly in cheek. It's just the sort of light hearted thread an audio forum needs, a nice, side-tracking distraction to waste some time.
As for the fearless crusaders who have unflinchingly unmasked conspiracy, exposed corruption and ignorance and cleaned up the grubby ghetto of computer audio....
Arrant nonsense, and such arrogance! Because you didn't (and still don't) understand doesn't mean others cannot.
But, pray do tell, what benefit do you think there is for all your posts or contributions here? Do you get new customers, or is it so you can talk to the cognoscenti (sic) in your shops laughing and deriding pfm members for their clear failure to understand what you and your customers hear? Science, as I'm sure you say, doesn't prove everything.
What do you think pfm is worth as a revenue source for your shop?
Still
he said his naim was ralph
Jingoism: it's not big & it's not clever.
mindlagoon
pfm Member
Inappropriate nomenclature - that's not intermodulation, it's just lots of noise sources adding up and raising the noise floor. Intermodulation arises from multiple signals in non-linearities. A whole different tin of worms.
Barrymagrec
pfm Member
I read the title as 300 pounds for a 40cm cable and thought how outrageous but re- reading as dollars, well, fair enough...
Peter Stockwell
Back for more ...
Is it fair to say that, as a source of an spdif data stream, a computer is always perfect, or not ?
Definitely good enough for HiFi, which is way more tolerant that most data comm apps.
Louballoo
I'm not sure if SPDIF has some synchronization mechanism (like USB does), but if not (likely), then "yes", assuming the software is done correctly, ie. real-time system, that guarantees latencies below a certain point (say, 50-100μs for a userspace application - music player), as opposed to "normal" operating systems, which achieve about 1-5ms during idle, much more during load.
That is - on common PC hardware.
Again - I'm no hardware designer (John, Dominik or someone like that might have a better answer), but the only "always perfect" solution here is USB, .. ehrm .. "asynchronous USB".
If SPDIF has no means of source<->destination synchronization and the clocks are not synchronized as well, then there's a real possibility of a clock speed mismatch. I believe that's called jitter. Even if there was destination-side buffering, faster source clock would fill the buffer completely and the destination would have to start dropping data. Similarly, if the source clock was slower, the buffer would soon be empty, with no data to play.
That's not the issue with USB, where the destination can temporarily stop the source from sending more data (through URB), so the buffer can be kept under control. Similarly, when the data get corrupted during the transfer (USB checksums data), it can be re-transmitted again and added to the buffer, without you noticing it. It (in theory) always results in a "bit-perfect" 1:1 reproduction, with playback correctly clocked by the destination's exact clock. The source here is merely a data storage, not an active sender, like it's in the case of SPDIF.
Note that I'm not saying "asynchronous USB" is easy to implement in hardware, AFAIK some manufacturers do it wrong (incorrect crystal sync with buffer ?).
While SPDIF works perfectly only when the source and destination have clocks synchronized, USB can work perfectly even on a common PC hardware, running a common OS, because of the buffer.
PS: If SPDIF can actually be destination-controlled and thus buffered and I got that part wrong, then please disregard it.
Peter Stockwell
Back for more ...
Definitely good enough, it is. But what of noise, for instance when I ran a squeezebox classic connected to a dac, the dac maker told me to run the optical connection, because of what I understood to be ground plane noise. Wouldn't there be similar mechanisms operating when connecting a computer via USB to a dac?