$695 USB cable wins TAS's editors' choice award

But it that's exactly what you don't want: sharper corners means greater chance of getting snagged on the inside of the cable bends or against other bits.

What you really want is data that is all zeros... nice round, rubbery, flexible zeros, that can bounce off each other. That's impractical though.

Did you ever wonder why the zero has a line through it? That is to avoid a one going through the center and changing the parity and checksumming when bits get reordered.

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

Well that is going to make for more ringing on the line, better pick up some USB terminators for the other ports.

Kliment• 13 years ago

While this has absolutely nothing to do with audiophile bullshit, bit corner sharpness is a thing (it's not called that though) in high-speed digital signalling. Basically, each conductor pair has a certain degree of capacitance so making a transition from high to low or vice versa is not a discrete, instantaneous event but takes time. If your signal is changing rapidly enough that this transition time is in the same order of magnitude as the length of each bit, you get blurry bits, and unreadable signal. And in this case, better conductor layout, with less capacitance, does give you sharper bit corners! So yes, fact.

rayiner9• 13 years ago

Actually, yes: http://www.audioquest.com/resource_tools/downloads/whitepape...

tlrobinson3• 13 years ago

Can't tell if joke or not.

Have audiophiles gotten The Onion treatment yet? Seems like such low hanging fruit.

calinet63• 13 years ago

Repeatedly and exhaustively. This is old hat.

Really, "laugh at the audiophiles" is a fun game that comes along every so often, but nothing really changes and people stay irrational. This comes as no surprise to a few people and for some reason continues to surprise the vast majority.

Meanwhile, sane audiophiles make reasonable purchases and still manage to enjoy music immensely. There's a fine line between sane quality and insane irrationality.

paol3• 13 years ago

people stay irrational

In this case I take comfort that the irrationality is self-punishing. If you're that dumb, you deserve to be sold a $700 usb cable.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

well the old saying is, audiophiles listen to equipment, not music

jessaustin• 13 years ago

The comments on TFA seem to be taking it seriously. The linked "audioquest" manufacturer's site is too extensive to be a practical joke, though it's also quite slow.

masklinn7• 13 years ago

Can't tell if joke or not.

It's not. "Audiophiles" are generally off the deep end, the only serious (as in seriously committed to reality) community I've ever seen is on Hydrogenaudio's forums. And they're generally strongly disliked[0] by those roaming sites like TFA.

Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, the creator of Ogg and Vorbis and founder of Xiph, is also awesome. He's slowly but surely doing a series of videos + article support on digital media which is accessible to anybody and very interesting: http://xiph.org/video/

[0] due to stuff like http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=1144..., how dare they require ABX testing?

calinet63• 13 years ago

Reddit's /r/audiophile is improving and generally highly rational. Recommended (disclaimer: I'm a mod).

nine_k2• 13 years ago

Actually some people objectively (as in 'visible on MRT scans') enjoy certain things more if they know they are somewhat superior, even if the 'superior' thing is the very same thing as the control 'inferior', just labeled differently.

There are examples and references in "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

So the sellers of the $700 digital cable actually sell more enjoyable experience to certain (gullible) people, and do it exactly by putting an exorbitant price tag and raising hype around an otherwise ordinary USB cable. They are not in business of selling exact sound reproduction; they are selling exquisite experiences. And for an experience, emotional details are more important than the dull objectivity of spectrograms.

Imagine that you receive a pen as a gift from your loved one, nicely wrapped and solemnly handed. Compare it with an experience of owning the very same pen model which you hastily bought in a store for $10 because you needed something to jot with. The elevated joy of using the gifted pen is not in the pen, but in you and your experience, your memory. Same applies to audiophile equipment, collectible postal stamps, etc. The material thing just serves as a reminding token.

Dylan168075• 13 years ago

Imagine getting a handwrapped solemn gift that you later find out was dug out of the trash and spun into wrapping paper on an assembly line.

Memories are nice, but I want them to be mostly real.

tlrobinson3• 13 years ago

Sort of the placebo effect of the audiophile world.

Now, the question is do the people who buy $700 cables not knowing it's equivalent to a $10 cable get more enjoyment than the people who know they're equivalent and buy the $10 cable?

If so, that's somewhat sad for us educated people. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

logicallee• 13 years ago

There's this - http://machinadynamica.com/

mikeash9• 13 years ago

It's impossible to satirize audiophiles because the real thing is already so extreme that there's no room for fake humor on top of it.

Crito3• 13 years ago

It's possible, but you have to veer sharply off into the surreal. Things like claiming the cable ripped a hole through the fabric of space-time, Elvis popped through said hole, then personally endorsed the cable.

Satire is better when it has some air of plausibility, but as you said, audiophiles have already taken up all the material there.

masklinn7• 13 years ago

Demonstration: http://www.elitediffusion.com/catalog/product_info.php?produ...

The Ultima Signature Mat incorporates unique hand laid-up polarizing filaments creating tremendously rapid vibrational energy decay and a new ultra-thin metallic coating which dissipates static build-up in real-time while the disc is spinning.

Yes, you put that thing on your CD before you put said CD in the audio player, magic happens and sound is good. $250. According to "user tests"[0] it improves CD and SACD sound quality, fails to improve DVD image quality but succeeds in improving DVD audio quality.

[0] http://www.enjoythemusic.com/audiophileaudition/0705/margiol...

epsylon2• 13 years ago

They're a perfect example of Poe's law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

pslam3• 13 years ago

I still wonder why the people who design and sell these products aren't all in jail.

"Audiophile" nonsense is a prime example of how consumer protection laws don't work if you invoke any kind of pseudo-science in your marketing.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

I would say that the bullshit audiophile products are in a minority and there certainly are legit audiophile products.

WalterSear• 13 years ago

As a former professional recording engineer, I'd say the opposite.

FireBeyond• 13 years ago

My personal favorite: http://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/2012/05/485-volume-knob.ht...

DennisP• 13 years ago

A salesguy in an audio store once tried to sell a bunch of pseudoscience to a friend of mine. My friend said (truthfully), "Ok but I think you should know, I'm a grad student in physics." Salesguy didn't blink, just said "Oh, then you already know all this stuff!"

DanBC2• 13 years ago

In the UK companies carefully craft ads to comply with the advertising codes.

Certainly audiophile advert sniping is fun if you're bored and have the time available to do so.

baddox7• 13 years ago

I still wonder why the people who design and sell these products aren't all in jail.

Because it's not illegal, and it would be ridiculous for it to be illegal.

sp332• 13 years ago

Lying this badly about the product you're selling may be over the line into fraud.

pslam3• 13 years ago

The buyer is led to believe they are spending $695 on a device which will improve their audio quality. In fact, it will have absolutely no benefit whatsoever. They will feel ripped off for the extra $694.

The seller knows damn well their device does absolutely nothing to improve audio quality. They know they are profiting from deliberately misleading buyers. Every time this happens, they make almost $695 profit.

So, why is this not illegal?

mikeash9• 13 years ago

The thing is, there are real psychological effects that come from your beliefs. For example, it's well established that wine tastes better when you think it's more expensive. Likewise, audio really does sound better when you're using what you merely think is better equipment.

If you think about this stuff as changing the physical sound, it's completely bogus. If you think about it as changing the subjective experience of hearing the sound then it works for some people.

And that, to me, is a really interesting point: anybody who would buy this stuff is automatically in the category of people for whom it can actually work. Those of us who recognize that the "science" behind it is complete crap won't get any benefit from it, but we won't buy it either.

timje1• 13 years ago

Diamond USB has a relaxed quality that fosters deep musical involvement.

It's a parody.

selectodude• 13 years ago

That, and they have a $15 Belkin cable at the bottom.

tlrobinson3• 13 years ago

"ridiculously inexpensive"

sanoli6• 13 years ago

Sadly, it's not a parody. I have audiophile friends, they follow the site. It's (to them) serious stuff.

georgemcbay2• 13 years ago

Even better (or worse depending upon whether this is actually a parody or not.. sadly I don't think it is) is that they refer to the $15 Belkin cable as "ridiculously inexpensive". I feel like a chump when I'm forced to buy a a USB cable for more than a couple of bucks (usually because I need it right now and thus monoprice, et al aren't an option).

bdb• 13 years ago

Nope: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-75m-2-6-Cable/dp/B0...

danielrhodes• 13 years ago

From one of the reviews:

"The difference is that cables are forever. They get better with age while components will always need to be replaced do to wear or upgraded because of improvements in technology."

baddox7• 13 years ago

And an old one, at that.

masklinn7• 13 years ago

You wish: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/enklein-orion-relea...

The overall result is an extremely musical, vinyl like sound, even from CD resolutions. You don’t know what you are missing until you audition the Orion.

This is a "review" for a $5000m/m cable for digital (AES or SPDIF) interconnect.

madaxe_again• 13 years ago

For the cost, you could hire an orchestra to live in your basement. Of course, you'd need to wear electrum goggles and a visor of pure onyx for the best sound reception, because quantum mechanics.

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

Don't forget to burn them in by having them play 48 hours of noise

duffdevice• 13 years ago

Please, this is nonsense.

It has to be 12 hours of brown noise, followed by 12 hours of pink noise, followed by 24 hours of white noise.

Really, the amount of misinformation around here about basement orchestra break-in procedures is astounding.

decasteve• 13 years ago

For that price I would expect the cable to follow me around the house/office, like a snake, and respond to my telepathic commands about where to plug in.

thesis• 13 years ago

Personally I think you should start a kickstarter for that idea.

keithpeter2• 13 years ago

And of course, it would always plug in the right side up, first time

mschaef• 13 years ago

For that kind of thing, you need the Denon AKDL-1:

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/pr...

baddox7• 13 years ago

I would pay that much for a USB cable that, whenever you blindly reached behind your PC or monitor to plug it in, would always be oriented correctly with the plug. Think of all the time saved.

bryanlarsen• 13 years ago

Take a look at all of your USB cables. Check to make sure that the top side of each connector has the USB logo cut into it deeply enough that it's easily felt by your thumb, and that there's no such engraving on the back. Throw away any cables that don't meet this test. It then quickly becomes very easy to tell when you grab a connector whether your thumb is on the top or bottom, and it becomes second nature to always plug your cables in correctly.

The USB-IF should deny a USB license to every cable manufacturer who doesn't do this right.

VLM4• 13 years ago

The sad part is I'd love to buy a $30 cable thats indestructible cable shielding and jacket, plenum rated insulation (just because) perfect dimensions so it fits great, anti-corrosion plated, visual and tactile indication of which side is up (which I can do with a paint pen but for $30 I want it done for me). Oh and superflex so in my car at -20F like last week its still flexy. And of course totally waterproof or at least if it gets wet, once dried out it'll work perfectly and undamaged.

But no, all we're allowed in a supposedly free market is $3 DX junk, $3 DX junk marked up to $15 at the brick-mortar store, or $700 audiophool stuff.

nwh• 13 years ago

I've found some of that audiophool stuff on Aliexpress for the sort of prices you're talking. Of course for $600 a cable it's complete bullshit, but for $20 that sort of thing is quite nice to use.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/1M-2-RCA-to-2-RCA-Audio-Cable...

I've a big thing for cables with braided outsides, so the audiophool stuff fits the bill when it's priced sanely.

fuckpig• 13 years ago

The market is people; the market responds emotionally; .: the market often gets distinctive products in preference to functional ones.

If you can handle a death metal analogy, it's why more people listen to In Flames than Sacramentum.

_Adam• 13 years ago

While our market may not be as free as I would like it to be, the lack of USB cable selection is separate from the issue of market freedom.

I like the cable you're describing. If you start selling them, I might buy one.

You might know this already, but I'll mention it anyways because I was looking at it recently: there exists something called "ultra flexible wire" that has a very high strand count compared to normal stranded wire. For example, standard 28 AWG wire has 7 strands of 36 AWG, but ultraflexible 28 AWG has 41 strands of 44 AWG. This makes it considerably more flexible.

http://www.daburn.com/2671ultraflexiblesub-miniaturewire-u/l...

USB/headphone cables made from this wire could be quite a compelling product.

VLM4• 13 years ago

A cousin of the superflex antenna wire the "trail radio" ham radio guys use, or "litz wire" which is handy for certain RF coil purposes WRT skin effect.

I would imagine ultra tiny diameter wire would suffer from strength issues and fatigue failure. Something like copper plated steel "copperweld" made into litz wire would be pretty awesome. OR would it? Gold plated into ultra fine diameter stainless steel insulated individually and braided into a LITZ wire.

Litz wire is not cheap, even the Chinese stuff is significant fraction of a buck per foot.

If you'd like to see a cable that costs $600 and is fairly priced the Pasternack company sells truly exotic aerospace microwave cables that are quite expensive. You know, to hook up the antenna on your space probe, that kind of thing. Built by hand, individually tested and swept on a network analyzer, that kind of thing. I buy .mil surplus stuff, made by them, from ebay (not new). And going the other way if you do broadcast engineering, $600 is a rounding error when installing a 100KW rated feedline for a TV station. $600 worth of high current service entrance cable for AC power is a depressingly short length. But $600 for a USB cable is impressive in a totally different way.

gus_massa• 13 years ago

Do you need your cable for digital or analogical signal? The digital signal can be corrected if there is no too much interference, for an analog signal the shielding can be more usefull.

VLM4• 13 years ago

From an electrical perspective it would merely squirt an amp or so around 5V to my charging cellphone in my car. It would do so in a physically indestructible, infinitely long lived and perfectly mechanically reliable manner in any imaginable environmental condition. Rather than value engineered so I have to buy a new one with each phone (roughly).

Most likely I'll get a wireless charger for the phone before I'm able to buy my "super cable". At that technological point, audiophiles will discover that taking a green magic marker and drawing a circle around the wireless charger unit makes the battery charge quicker...

baddox7• 13 years ago

But no, all we're allowed in a supposedly free market is...

What's more likely: that the lack of such a cable is the result of market disruption, or that there simply isn't a market for a cable like that?

neals• 13 years ago

You can all laugh, but I use these types of cables to copy data to my portable HD and I have never experienced any data loss since I started using them. So there.

rayiner9• 13 years ago

This is ridiculous, but its amusing to me that collisions between audiophiles and computer folks often unearth ignorance on both sides. E.g. The number of people who think that digital audio means that the signal on a spdif cable is always identical (ignoring clock recovery). Can you hear it? Who knows. But all cables are fundamentally analog.

Dylan168075• 13 years ago

It's a cable. It can't do anything weird to the data. If it gets through intact, it will be identical.

Factors like attenuation and shielding matter in certain circumstances, but not for a meter of USB.

rayiner9• 13 years ago

I'm not really talking about the cable, but the idea that digital interfaces like SPDIF/USB Audio/HDMI are "bit perfect." The digital phenomenon of bit perfection, as programmers see it, is a fiction created by buffering, retry, and error-correction. SPDIF doesn't do any of these, and USB Audio doesn't do all of these in all modes. SPDIF receivers (and depending on the mode, USB Audio receivers) will recover the clock signal from the input signal, and use that clock signal to drive a DAC. So it's not just the sequence of ones and zeros that is relevant (a digital phenomenon), but the timing of their appearance on the cable (an analog phenomenon). Variation from the ideal timing will cause a distorted clock to be recovered by the receiver, which will cause distortion in the analog signal produced by the DAC. Whether or not these distortions are audible, they are certainly measurable.

mikeash9• 13 years ago

Can you hear it? Who knows.

There's no "who knows" about it. The change in output due to changes to the signal on the cable is well understood.

The reason this sort of thing is considered to be ridiculous is not because the signal on the cable can't change. As you say, it's all analog at the bottom. However, with a digital system, any change is either corrected in the receiver or shows up as a massive error. That is to say, you never get subtle errors. You either get perfect data transmission, or you get a horrible glitch that even the most tone deaf person can hear.

rayiner9• 13 years ago

Digital interconnects generally do not have error correction. Signal degradation with digital interconnects generally shows a cliff effect, but it's a myth that you get either a perfect picture or no picture. At some point the receiver loses lock, but before that you get a gradual escalation in bit errors that may or may not be obvious: http://www.audioquest.com/resource_tools/downloads/whitepape... (see page 6).

And with audio, errors caused by digital transmission, mainly clock jitter, can be quite subtle: introducing low-amplitude unwanted signals into the analog reconstruction.

deltaqueue• 13 years ago

I love that this is still alive and well in 2014.

Psychoacoustics are still very much apart of the audiophile world; although, the internet has helped reduce the hype to some degree. People believe whatever they perceive and aren't inherently objective.

A/B tests do crop up from time to time in various audio / video communities (AVS and some car audio forums hold some pretty objective events) but science doesn't always provide an answer people want to accept.

bch• 13 years ago

Psychoacoustics are still very much apart of the audiophile world

Psychoacoustics[1] is the study of how people interpret sound -- things like loudness, limits of perception, how localization works...

I think what you're talking about would better be described as placeboacoustics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics

masklinn7• 13 years ago

A/B tests

FWIW the standard of audio and video is double-blind ABX[0] sessions, not merely A/B (and ABC/HR[1] for "fine-grained" comparisons)

AVS and some car audio forums hold some pretty objective events

HydrogenAudio's community is (or was when I still visited) all about objective testing.

[0] http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=ABX

[1] http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=ABC/HR

OneOneOneOne• 13 years ago

In 2012 I attended an A/B blind test for speaker cables... https://sites.google.com/site/audiosocietyofminnesota/Home/a...

It was interesting that there was a preference for the higher priced cables. It is too bad that I did not save my votes to see if my poorly trained ears matched what the others preferred. It is hard to say if there is justifiable benefit in spending big money for cables but I would say it is worth spending a little bit more than the cost of lamp cord based on this test.

With the digital cables to me it seems like a high data rate, low error rate and decent buffering system is all that is necessary for good sound. Given the data rates required for audio (even SACD is in the low MiB/s range) a cheap USB cable should do the trick.

epaladin• 13 years ago

It makes sense if there was an audible difference with speaker cables, particularly if the amps were high power and the cables represented a range of gauges. Trying to power a line array with 22 gauge speaker wire isn't going to work very well.

The stuff in that article makes monster cable look like a bargain.

Tloewald3• 13 years ago

Speaker cables are analog so they're going to have some impact on sound, and the study mentions a measurable difference in capacitance (the highest capacitance cables ranked best, the lowest worst — although the middle two are flipped).

kyleblarson• 13 years ago

I'm picking up strong readings on my douchiness radar.

sanoli6• 13 years ago

Link to audiophile-cable vs coat-hanger-used-as-audio-cable blind test:

http://consumerist.com/2008/03/03/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-g...

elipsey2• 13 years ago

thanks for that, i lolled :)

eponeponepon2• 13 years ago

Strewth. What exactly do these people think they're getting for their money? And how do their beliefs proliferate? Is it like religion, where the guy who misinforms you doesn't believe he's misinforming you? Or crack-pushing, where the guy knows he's doing wrong?

VLM4• 13 years ago

If you were asking seriously, the best analogy I can think of for audiophile / consumer electronics is the car biz, its merely the traditional conflict between marketing and engineering.

I recently bought a really nicely engineered car, I researched the history of the engine development and last decade of its production, its awesome, long term reliability, the power train is awesome but the rest of the car is pretty good too. But marketing advertisements claimed it came with not one but two attractively dressed hot young women, donuts, and a park pass. Trying to analyze how they thought those three items will excite every member of the general public is amusing. Anyway I think one department may have been lying to me / ripped me off.

eponeponepon2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I was absolutely asking seriously :)

It's easy enough to see how someone who doesn't understand the basic science could be taken in by some of the claims made for these cables - what I can't make my mind up on is whether the people selling them know and understand that they're lying.

(edit: to be clear, I'm as sure as I can be that the people producing the things must know that they're liars)

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I want the painted on 'shield pattern' on the cable which keeps outside interference out of the cable :-)

I had an friend who made up some 'artisan' Ethernet cables on a whim, they had arrows indicating the direction of enhanced data flow, so you plugged the arrows facing "in" to your client, and "out" for your server. There were some cables that had been balanced for both in and out packets but they were twice as expensive.

patrickg_zill• 13 years ago

It is hilarious ... a friend of mine builds high end, custom, all-digital (Class D) amplifiers. Basically, if you want a good review, you have to give the reviewer a free unit.

mark-r3• 13 years ago

My favorite part is where the $275 USB cable is described as "mid-priced".

I subscribed to The Absolute Sound for many years, and found it to be useful in many respects. If you're going to put together a sound system that sounds anywhere close to realistic you need to be open minded and insanely dedicated. In this case though it seems clear they've gone off the deep end.

diceless• 13 years ago

Poked around their site, it's definitely caters to the rich who are dumb and think a 600 dollar usb cable will make their digital sound files sound better on their 60K speakers driven by their 100K amp. I've seen references to a $300 dollar power cable that they think is a steal. The site is real, just ludicrous.

jes• 13 years ago

I remember mercury filled speaker cables being discussed briefly in the 80s. [1]

Hypothetical review of such cables:

"This wire lends a liquid transparency to strings. The fluid quality of horns has to be heard to be believed. There is a silvery quality to the brass, with no sign of the hard-edged, coppery sound normally associated with speaker cable...."

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/sci.physics/Ba...

Crito3• 13 years ago

Hmm, at what point does a wire become a hose?

Also, I am in love with that superconducting cable idea. You could make a fortune with the razor-blade model selling audiophiles "special" LN2 on a subscription basis.

lelf• 13 years ago

Classic http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/pr...

martingoodson• 13 years ago

Seems like the whole industry can be explained by the Asch paradigm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments)

olssonm• 13 years ago

Ha... Now, they could at least tell us how their tests were done.

Something tells me that they could se the price tag and brand while they were testing them.

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

It's nice when you can have a self-aware laugh occasionally.

This is clearly self-parody from a publication that I gather is serious about audio hardware, right up to the edge of woo-woo imperceptible stuff, but probably not over that line.

A lineup of digital interconnects, which by definition are either perfect or have obvious signal dropouts, combined with language like "neutral without sounding bleached, dynamic without sounding piercing, detailed without sounding analytical" is a comical amplification on what I'm guessing is their usual review style.

This is The Absolute Sound's equivalent to the fake HN frontpage that makes the rounds now and then.

[edit]

Evidently, I was too quick to give them the benefit of the doubt. It seems most of the defense around audiophile-grade digital cables is that they "reduce jitter" (which somehow then translates to noticeable changes in different areas of the audible spectrum that can be described in wine-spectator terms) – does anyone have a good link or explanation on this principle?

masklinn7• 13 years ago

Erm… here's a normal TAS article: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/transparent-referen...

This is an RCA coax cable for ~$3000 a meter. The article is not about laughing at such a silly idea.

Unless TAS is actually The Onion of the audio world, I don't think the editor's choice linked here is self-parody or self-aware.

Here's an other one, $1700/m: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/enklein-prairie-fir...

Or these $5000/m pieces of wonder: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/enklein-orion-relea...

Please note that all three of these cables are intended for digital interconnection (AES or SPDIF), not analog. These "reviews" are not uncommon, and yes you'll get the same stuff for HDMI[0]. You'll also get recommendations for $7200 speaker power chords: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/crystal-cable-absol...

[0] for a mere $350/m for instance http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/nordost-releases-fi...

brigade• 13 years ago

You say it's clearly parody, but they post breathlessly positive reviews for cables on a regular basis. So unless you're suggesting that the entire site is an extended parody...

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/?categories=30

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/?categories=32

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/?categories=33

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/?categories=34

moocowduckquack3• 13 years ago

This isn't a parody.

For another example:

One of the best value rooms in Munich featured Marten Django L loudspeakers at €6900/pair, Nagra electronics, and the surprisingly affordable Purist Audio Genesis Series cables including a $300 interconnect, $375 speaker cable, and $250 Vesta power cord.

from here - http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/a-quartet-of-new-ca...

Here is that power cord on sale - https://www.thecableco.com/Product/Vesta

eigenvector• 13 years ago

Oh my god that is a premium $275 15A wall plug. There's just too much wrong with this. I don't know where to start. Electrical engineer brain. Is. Exploding.

batbomb• 13 years ago

An amazon reviewer reviewed this cable on his blog:

http://donaldscarinci.com/digital-cables-make-little-differe...

He says the difference is "subtle".

tptacek• 13 years ago

Since everyone who will ever buy a $600 USB cable is totally price insensitive when it comes to audio equipment, this review is "mission accomplished" for any company selling those cables. "Subtle" is at least something. Expensive speaker cables are a Veblen good, but nobody wants to knowing plow money into Veblen goods; they need to believe there is some return on the investment.

rayiner9• 13 years ago

Jitter is definitely a real phenomenon: http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/diginterf1_e.html. It's easy to forget that these "digital interconnects" are all fundamentally analog. Whether you can hear the distortion created by jitter or not is an entirely separate issue.

paol3• 13 years ago

That may be true, but this is a USB cable and (IIRC) USB is packet-based. There is no way that clock jitter can influence the final result.

(edit: upvoted for the informative link, in any case)

mark-r3• 13 years ago

This was much more important in the early days of CD players, when there was no buffering between the signal and the D/A converter. The timing of the signal could definitely influence the timing of the conversion, which would change the waveform in a subtle way that could be audible.

tinco• 13 years ago

The idea of jitter is simple, due to noise on your clock signals there's bits that get flipped. When the circuit on the other end is dumb that means a little distortion which reduces the 'clarity' of the sound you hear.

The solution is obvious, buffer, error correct and reclock your data before you turn it to analog again. Expensive USB dacs do this.

People thinking digital can be forgetful of the fact that with a regular USB connection, 8% loss on the channel is no problem because corrupt data is simply resent. Audio has a realtime constraint. Another problem with defending based on jitter is that jitter is pretty hard to measure, you need expensive specific measuring hardware.

Anyway, this explains why shielding can be important for audio USB cables. It does not explain why the cables are over $15. A reasonable explanation could be that the demand for very high quality cables is so low that it's unfeasible to sell them for less than $100.

But, if the world of audiophiles was really so rational. Then these reviews would go like this: This $10 cable is nice, but it sounds muddy. This $100 cable is nicer, it has more clarity. This $1000 cable is really good, the sound is very clear.

There would be only 1 sonical property, the clarity, lack of which would be caused by jitter. But, that's not the case. The reviewers describe the cables as if at a wine tastery where every wine has different ingredients and qualities.

I have no explanation for that, but the implication of malice.

moocowduckquack3• 13 years ago

How can jitter on a cable be hard to measure if it is actual bits being flipped?

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Has anyone on HN been tempted to pander to the audiophile crowd?

Making some simple one metre long cables would be cheap enough, even using exotic materials, and the markup is huge.

jumbled• 13 years ago

I'm into it. Want to start a business?

sanoli6• 13 years ago

I'd go with maglev cables. Have some sort of base or track on the floor that would keep the cables levitated. Less strain on the metals inside. A clearer path to your audio purity.

Crito3• 13 years ago

Make it heavy too. Heavy things seem like they are higher quality. You might be able to get away with weighting the connector ends with lead or something.

You'd have to justify it, so... maybe say the lead shields the cable from cosmic ray strikes?

mikeash9• 13 years ago

Pandering to audiophiles, conspiracy theorists, homeopathy users, and similar is a constant temptation that I ward off by thinking about how I'd probably feel bad about doing it after a while.

elipsey2• 13 years ago

I guess it must be a joke.... Ha.

This reminds of some guys I knew in the 90's when CD burners were newer that swore that the gold cdr's sounded better then the blue ones. I tried to tell them how digital audio works, but it didn't help. One of them decided the gold ones had a lower error rate. Conclusion in search of a mechanism/hypothesis.

If 16 gauge lamp cord was good enough for Paul Klipsch, then it's good enough for me.

raganwald• 13 years ago

What's the difference between an audiophile and a musicophile?

"An audiophile uses music to listen to stereos."

gorrillamcd• 13 years ago

I decided to check the prices on those cables and was surprised to find that some are even more expensive. For example, an AudioQuest "Diamond" USB to iPod cable runs $1,495! Here's the link: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/audioquest-diamond-16-4-usb-a-to...

Tloewald3• 13 years ago

In a slightly related story, our CMS team believes that there's a problem unique to PNG files that prevents them from being stored in alfresco.

nathan_f77• 13 years ago

I'm still not sure if I was reading something like The Onion.

Marazan2• 13 years ago

The best example of this kind of crazy thinking is the massive volume of articles you'll get from the audiophile community about how Blind AB audio test are flawed because when they do the test blinded they can't hear the difference between the expensive and the cheap components but when they do the test unblinded they can instantly hear the difference.

It's funny every time.

Marazan2• 13 years ago

I found my favourite

http://www.avguide.com/forums/blind-listening-tests-are-flaw...

sanoli6• 13 years ago

The thing is, they will always say that the device doing the A/B switching will interfere in the signal path.

izzydata• 13 years ago

I wonder if there is a correlation between religious people and audiophiles.

cpher• 13 years ago

Back before I was married, in 1999 or so, I fell for the "premium" cable ruse. I spent $150+ on some component video cables for my Sony XBR high-end, CRT TV (this was pre-HDTV). I didn't believe in the audiophile stuff (they were crazy), but video quality could certainly be distinguished by an "amateur."

One month ago, my Comcast DVR's HDMI port failed, and I had to dig out my old component video cables for my 7-year-old plasma TV. They worked perfectly, after 15 years. But the quality is no different than the $2 Amazon-branded HDMI cables. My lesson: 1) premium audio cables are bullshit; 2) premium video cables are bullshit too.

sanoli6• 13 years ago

Audiophiles should just say they buy these for the aesthetics. Then nobody can mock, er, I mean, argue with their buying choices. Some of the stuff does look good.

epsylon2• 13 years ago

The top rated comment and its subsequent discussion are golden:

I am a retired sound engineer who spent a lifetime in major sound studios and I can state categorically that there wasn't a one cable in all those recording studios that cost more than a dollar or so per foot. Keep in mind that I'm talking about recording studios that cost in the millions and where the search for the right sound is an obsession. A cable's only function is to carry what goes in one end out to the other. To talk about the sound altering effects of cable is heresy. They can't and they don't. It's marketing hype.

$695 USB cable wins TAS's editors' choice award

Related Stories