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USB CABLE

chiily said:
How did you hear that? :p
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Craig Unger - American Kompromat. Actually it was the KGB initially. What better way to undermine your enemy than cultivate and facilitate the installation of an idiot. ( Reagan must have given them the idea ). They must have been talking to him since as it looks like he's going to run again.
 
sq225917 said:
@grey they claim an improvement in sound quality. Thing is that shaker is decades old, they only starting bullshitting about it once they started selling expensive cables
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I'd be interested to know if they offer any further explanation for this rather than 'because it does!'
There is of course the possibility (note the use of the word 'possibility' with no qualifying adjectives) that the NAIM shaker DOES improve SQ rather than simply serving to raise the blood-pressure of the absolutists.
 
chiily said:
Okay, so I had a skim and the issue appears to be noise, but no identification as to where the noise is coming from.

If I've missed the point, then my apologies.

I think your premise is that the combination of DAC and USB cable combine to generate detectable noise in the DAC's output. As was said earlier in the thread if the USB cable or DAC are not to spec then all bets are off. That wasn't measured in the review.

From Amir's review the noise would be audible and was measurable, he measured it. The discussion here is that the sound change hasn't been detected by such measurements yet the listener is saying that there is a change in the sound.

If the audible change is due to poor implementations of a cable's spec or DAC's spec then one should be looking for in spec products. Though, that would take the fun out of exploring the symbiosis of DAC and USB cables. :)

Hopefully I didn't miss your point.
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You got the gist of it. Basically, I don't think anyone claims that fancy usb cables change the music signal. Instead it's something about noise in general. I'm not the one making any such claims but I'd rather see the discussion stick to those claims rather than constantly being derailed by "bits are bits". It's incontestable that there's more to it than that: noise, jitter, etc.

Some DACs reject noise and jitter efficiently so we wouldn't expect cables to have an effect on them (hence my assertion that Amir's test if the Nordost cable was pointless). But in pursuit of their own hobby, some people prefer DACs which may be susceptible to these problems and cables may help here. That's their own choice based on their own preferences so I think it's ok for them to discuss it without being derailed every time.
 
logically they must be, then you buy a £1k cable in the ( highly unlikely ) belief/hope that the cable will somehow fix the dac?
I still favour the ‘ it was just my imagination running away with me’ option.
Keith
 
Purité Audio said:
logically they must be, then you buy a £1k cable in the ( highly unlikely ) belief/hope that the cable will somehow fix the dac?
I still favour the ‘ it was just my imagination running away with me’ option.
Keith
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You sell high-end (read 'expensive') DAC's
Do you have test results (either measured/AB or both) to show how much improvement in SQ you get for your money over less expensive DAC's?
Can you tell me in objective terms how much better a £5k Weiss DAC is than my £500 Cambridge DAC?
 
gustav_errata said:
"I tested the antibiotic on this known antibiotic-resistant strain. The antibiotic did nothing, therefore it doesn't work as advertised."
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The problem is that it *isn't* an antibiotic. That's just a fantasy.
Whilst there might be certain problems which poorly designed dacs might have, it is a fantasy that aftermarket usb cables have been *designed* to deal with these. Where is the evidence of the problem and the solution?
For example- how does having silver wire help if there is noise on the ground line?

And even if the cables were a properly engineered solution for *some probem* it would only be rational to use them if you knew that your dac had that problem.
So -as canvassed on another forum, if you have a problem with ground loops you don;t want a cable (unless it is an optical one); you want a device such as that built at modest expense by Topping which really works (and not the much lauded piece of junk that is the jitterbug).
Even then the problem will not likely afflict a dac with balanced output nor will it be likely to afflict you if you use a simple raspberry pi rather than a general purpose pc.
Ulimately this is just a slightly more sophisticated form of hand waving. It would make no sense just to dick around with random cables just in case you had a problem which they happened to solve.

This all puts me in mind of Dean martin's observation that he pitied teetotallers becasue when they get up in the morning , that's as good as they will feel all day. Do you want to take an unlicensed "antibiotic" made by a garden shed amateur pharmacologist every morning in the hope that you have a disease it might cure?
 
adamdea said:
The problem is that it *isn't* an antibiotic. That's just a fantasy.
Whilst there might be certain problems which poorly designed dacs might have, it is a fantasy that aftermarket usb cables have been *designed* to deal with these. Where is the evidence of the problem and the solution?
For example- how does having silver wire help if there is noise on the ground line?
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OK sorry, "I tested the proposed antibiotic on a known antibiotic-resistant strain. The proposed antibiotic did nothing in the experiment, therefore it doesn't work as advertised."

And I'll just leave this here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ents-of-wireworld-starlight-7-usb-cable.6599/
 
For those who dislike links Amirs conclusion is below, I note the non audible statement but it remains that there was a measured difference.

Conclusions
There is some goodness in this wireworld cable that reduces mains hum and buzz. I can't explain that without some electrical analysis which I am too lazy to perform at the moment. So technically we paid more, and we got more.

Now before subjectivists start to celebrate, as I clearly noted, none of those mains components are remotely audible (or you would hear them with generic cables and we don't). And at any rate, no improvements were made whatsoever in actual distortion products. In the case of D50, we actually made things worse a bit.

I guess it is good to find things that we think are totally waste of money, actually produce some measurable improvement. For $100, I wouldn't make fun of anyone buying one of these unless they started to say it made things sound better.

Open to discussions on what we are seeing and where, if anywhere, to go from here.
 
index.php

Hmm "Symmetricon design improves clarity and image precision".
 
Frizzy said:
Jeez, I have been in hospital for almost two weeks and this thread can’t even decide which philosophers had the best hifi.
My current usb cable costs a fraction of some I’ve owned and tried, should price expectation bias have negated my choice?
As a quick addendum why do some usb cables (most it seems) sound worse used wrong? Way round ie B 2 A connector. Took ages to find one that was happily reversible (fidata) almost had Atlas make a custom cable after designer explained difficulties. Science was way above my intellectual pay grade.
Is used on melco ripper to improve quality of rips (I can hear teeth grinding) and it worked brilliantly.
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I hope it wasn't because of this thread that you ended up in hospital? Frizzy, mate...its only a cable thread! It's just silly hifi...hope you get better soon....
 
gustav_errata said:
OK sorry, "I tested the proposed antibiotic on a known antibiotic-resistant strain. The proposed antibiotic did nothing in the experiment, therefore it doesn't work as advertised."
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But what is the bacterium that this cable ("antibiotic") is supposed to cure? Read the wireworld guff and it is not designed or marketed to reduced mains products at inaudible levels to slightly lower levels.
It promises higher transfer speeds and all sorts.
And if your problem really is mains products in the dac output, would this be the way to solve it?
 
adamdea said:
The problem is that it *isn't* an antibiotic. That's just a fantasy.
Whilst there might be certain problems which poorly designed dacs might have, it is a fantasy that aftermarket usb cables have been *designed* to deal with these. Where is the evidence of the problem and the solution?
For example- how does having silver wire help if there is noise on the ground line?

And even if the cables were a properly engineered solution for *some probem* it would only be rational to use them if you knew that your dac had that problem.
So -as canvassed on another forum, if you have a problem with ground loops you don;t want a cable (unless it is an optical one); you want a device such as that built at modest expense by Topping which really works (and not the much lauded piece of junk that is the jitterbug).
Even then the problem will not likely afflict a dac with balanced output nor will it be likely to afflict you if you use a simple raspberry pi rather than a general purpose pc.
Ulimately this is just a slightly more sophisticated form of hand waving. It would make no sense just to dick around with random cables just in case you had a problem which they happened to solve.

This all puts me in mind of Dean martin's observation that he pitied teetotallers becasue when they get up in the morning , that's as good as they will feel all day. Do you want to take an unlicensed "antibiotic" made by a garden shed amateur pharmacologist every morning in the hope that you have a disease it might cure?
Click to expand...
I have a Topping dac and yes it works..but i have other dacs which work too but sound better..using same usb cable.
I like the Dean Martin quote...its quite dark isn't it..in order to feel better you need a drink! All I need is my ukulele..cheerful strumming..no booze involved
 
adamdea said:
But what is the bacterium that this cable ("antibiotic") is supposed to cure? Read the wireworld guff and it is not designed or marketed to reduced mains products at inaudible levels to slightly lower levels.
It promises higher transfer speeds and all sorts.
And if your problem really is mains products in the dac output, would this be the way to solve it?
Click to expand...

You are over-fitting the analogy. My point was simply that if you want to identify the effects that a cable might have on noise, as Amir explicitly stated in his concluding remarks of the Nordost cable, you don't use a DAC that is known to effectively reject noise. Just as if you are testing the effectiveness of an antibiotic and you performed the tests on a known antibiotic-resistant strain, you would be rejected by the editors without even being sent out for peer review. The analogy is in the big picture, not drawing direct comparisons between the antibiotic and the cable and the bacterium and the DAC. FWIW, you originally quoted a repeat of the analogy, which I originally made much earlier in the thread with more explanation but I can't be bothered to find it to link it directly.

Edit for clarity: the overall point is that the ASR review of the Nordost USB cable is a waste of the server resources that it takes to store and serve it over the internet because it is 100% uninformative.

If the problem is noise in the DAC, and someone's DAC is indeed susceptible to this and they have their own reasons for not wanting to switch DACs, then they are free to explore and discuss whatever ways to treat it that they want, even if that includes expensive cables. Who am I to judge, with my £200 Cambridge Audio DAC and £6 USB cable?
 
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