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$695 USB cable wins TAS's editors' choice award
- mpweiher 13y agoIf this is parody...then it's golden!
- yoodenvranx 13y agoNo, unfortunately it is not a parody! There is so much bullshit going on... It's really really sad. Do some research on jplay for example: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=92856 http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=9285...
- alexhawdon 13y agoBetter cables == sharper corners on your bits. Fact. ;)
- mpweiher 13y agoThey enhance your Word documents! Really!
- btgeekboy 13y agoSupport for Excel documents is coming in a future version. Upgrade pricing will be available!
- thwarted 13y agoBut 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.
- sliverstorm 13y agoWell that is going to make for more ringing on the line, better pick up some USB terminators for the other ports.
- Kliment 13y agoWhile 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.
- rayiner 13y agoActually, yes: http://www.audioquest.com/resource_tools/downloads/whitepapers/HDMI_eyepattern_BER_and_cliffeffect_rev_1_00.pdf http://www.audioquest.com/resource_tools/downloads/whitepape...
- tlrobinson 13y agoCan't tell if joke or not. Have audiophiles gotten The Onion treatment yet? Seems like such low hanging fruit.
- calinet6 13y agoRepeatedly 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.
- paol 13y 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.
- kordless 13y agoI don't know about them being dumb. It's a choice, and if you have the money to spend on it, and it's important to you, why not?
- acchow 13y ago> It's a choice, and if you have the money to spend on it, and it's important to you, why not? You're thinking of diamonds, but we're talking about tarot cards.
- kordless 13y agoDiamonds are just as worthless.
- freehunter 13y ago
- pslam 13y agoI 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- adamnemecek 13y agoI would say that the bullshit audiophile products are in a minority and there certainly are legit audiophile products.
- WalterSear 13y agoAs a former professional recording engineer, I'd say the opposite.
- TillE 13y agoEh, there's plenty of cheap garbage that you really want to avoid, at least in the world of analog cables. I've used so many instrument cables that don't make good contact. At some point I wound up just soldering Neutrik connectors on to good quality bulk cable. The advantage Monster has is that their stuff is reliably good and widely available, even if it is obscenely overpriced.
- ashmud 13y agoRe: Monster. I haven't bought any of their stuff in years, but IME their interconnects were fine, but speaker cables not so much. I ended up terminating the speaker cables myself after the connectors on the originals and on the replaced (by Monster) cables fell off.
- clarky07 13y agoyes, but we are talking about digital cables. big difference.
- timje1 13y agoDiamond USB has a relaxed quality that fosters deep musical involvement. It's a parody.
- baddox 13y agoAnd an old one, at that.
- selectodude 13y agoThat, and they have a $15 Belkin cable at the bottom.
- tlrobinson 13y ago"ridiculously inexpensive"
- sanoli 13y agoSadly, it's not a parody. I have audiophile friends, they follow the site. It's (to them) serious stuff.
- keithpeter 13y agoSuggestion: buy a friend one of those 'record your song in a day' experiences. Get them into a commercial recording studio, and sit with the person who does the final mastering... ...unless of course they only buy direct to disc vinyl analogue recordings, or 96KHz sampled 24bit digital ones! PS: One of my retirement ideas is to knock up monoblock 'boozehound' amplifier based on 6j5/6v6 and locally wound 'special' output transformers...
- masklinn 13y ago> 96KHz sampled 24bit digital ones! Surely you mean 192KHz! No, really: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
- 13y ago
- madaxe_again 13y agoFor 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 13y agoDon't forget to burn them in by having them play 48 hours of noise
- duffdevice 13y agoPlease, 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 13y agoFor 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 13y agoPersonally I think you should start a kickstarter for that idea.
- keithpeter 13y agoAnd of course, it would always plug in the right side up, first time
- mschaef 13y agoFor that kind of thing, you need the Denon AKDL-1: http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/product-reviews/B000I1X6PM/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1 http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/pr...
- baddox 13y agoI 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bryanlarsen 13y agoTake 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.
- VLM 13y agoThe 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 13y agoI'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-Male-to-Male-Shielding-Design-ROHS-Standard-Free/498808302.html 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 13y agoThe 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 13y agoWhile 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/lstyle15681692.aspx http://www.daburn.com/2671ultraflexiblesub-miniaturewire-u/l... USB/headphone cables made from this wire could be quite a compelling product.
- neals 13y agoYou 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.
- rayiner 13y agoThis 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.
- Dylan16807 13y agoIt'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.
- rayiner 13y agoI'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.
- Dylan16807 13y agoUnless your cable is broken, there will be no retrying or high level error correction going on. And buffering will be independent of the cable chosen. A passive cable can't change timing. The only question is whether the signal gets through in an intact form and can be locked onto. Any kind of difference you can have from working-cable construction is completely overshadowed by things like cable length.
- deltaqueue 13y agoI 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.
- OneOneOneOne 13y agoIn 2012 I attended an A/B blind test for speaker cables... https://sites.google.com/site/audiosocietyofminnesota/Home/april-2012-speaker-cable-listening-test 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 13y agoIt 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.
- secstate 13y agoNo, but you can do some pretty straightforward electrical engineering math to determine that 22-guage speaker wire will fail in that case. Show me the physics and math that show failure with a USB cable. One of the major issues here is that USB is like the AK47 of the interconnect world, designed to work it some pretty terrible places. So when you experience jitter, it not actually the GD cable, it's most likely one of the devices on either side using a shitty controller and not handling data loss gracefully. Audio is so subjective anyway. You'll never win an argument with these people. You just have walk past them and try not to laugh. It's the same as the issue on wines. Doesn't matter how many double-blind tastings you do, some assholes will just sleep better knowing they're not drinking shit I made in my bathtub, even if it tastes the same a Bogle sauvignon blanc.
- kyleblarson 13y agoI'm picking up strong readings on my douchiness radar.
- sanoli 13y agoLink to audiophile-cable vs coat-hanger-used-as-audio-cable blind test: http://consumerist.com/2008/03/03/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables/ http://consumerist.com/2008/03/03/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-g...
- elipsey 13y agothanks for that, i lolled :)
- eponeponepon 13y agoStrewth. 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?
- VLM 13y agoIf 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.
- eponeponepon 13y agoYeah, 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoIt 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-r 13y agoMy 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 13y agoPoked 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 13y agoI 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/BaPccdHhJ1k https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/sci.physics/Ba...
- Crito 13y agoHmm, 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lelf 13y agoClassic http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/product-reviews/B000I1X6PM/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1 http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/pr...
- martingoodson 13y agoSeems like the whole industry can be explained by the Asch paradigm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments)
- olssonm 13y agoHa... 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 13y agoIt'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?
- masklinn 13y agoErm… here's a normal TAS article: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/transparent-reference-xl-digital-link/ 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-fire-ii-release/ http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/enklein-prairie-fir... Or these $5000/m pieces of wonder: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/enklein-orion-release/ 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-absolute-dream-speaker-cable-interconnect-and-power-cords/?page=5 http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/crystal-cable-absol... [0] for a mere $350/m for instance http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/nordost-releases-first-american-made-high-speed-hdmi-cable/ http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/nordost-releases-fi...
- brigade 13y ago
- DanBC 13y agoHas 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 13y agoI'm into it. Want to start a business?
- sanoli 13y agoI'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.
- Crito 13y agoMake 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?
- mikeash 13y agoPandering 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.
- elipsey 13y agoI 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 13y agoWhat's the difference between an audiophile and a musicophile? "An audiophile uses music to listen to stereos."
- gorrillamcd 13y agoI 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-apple-ipod-ipad-cable-black-gray/4759942.p?id=1218523201475&skuId=4759942 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/audioquest-diamond-16-4-usb-a-to...
- Tloewald 13y agoIn 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 13y agoI'm still not sure if I was reading something like The Onion.
- Marazan 13y agoThe 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.
- Marazan 13y agoI found my favourite http://www.avguide.com/forums/blind-listening-tests-are-flawed-editorial?page=1 http://www.avguide.com/forums/blind-listening-tests-are-flaw...
- sanoli 13y agoThe thing is, they will always say that the device doing the A/B switching will interfere in the signal path.
- izzydata 13y agoI wonder if there is a correlation between religious people and audiophiles.
- cpher 13y agoBack 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.
- sanoli 13y agoAudiophiles 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.
- epsylon 13y agoThe 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.