A/V "Audiophile" Digital Cables - am I going crazy, or are they?

My favourite bit. As though the outrageous price and reliance upon the placebo effect weren't enough of a downside already.

 

It makes absolutely no sense.

I wonder if people physically hear something different because they think it should sound better? It's possible, in my understanding of hearing and the brain. We all know relaxing and concentrating on the music makes it sound so much better than it does when you're trying to work. Perhaps emotion can have an effect on perceived sound?

 

I know for studio monitors if you use unshielded cables it can make your monitors hiss, and depending on the length of them its can get quite loud. It normally vanishes once you start playing music but can get irritating.
Fortunately i only have a home studio setup so short cables are a must which also means fairly cheap cables
I also remember working a gig at an arena where one of the cables i was personally coiling was worth around £10,000 - at which point i was a lot more careful about how i coiled it.lol

 

Expensive analogue cables I can understand, because when they're very long (e.g. large gigs) they need to be exceptionally high quality.

Short digital cables though? Pff. I think we're all in agreement here!

 

On professional use you're paying for the physical quality as well. Quality connectors and cables cost money and can take a beating, but on digital stuff it just (after a certain point) doesn't make any difference.

 

Yeah i cant understand how a £20 hdmi cable differs froma £100 one personally.
I suppose if you hype something up enough people will buy without question

 

Most games being a good example.

 

http://www.whathifi.com/Review/Russ-Andrews-Signature-PowerKord-W350i/

Here is a £275 kettle lead that is 'worth every penny'

 

I wonder if any of you have taken the time to compare a Tesco Value HDMI cable to a £30 one from the Sony shop (moment of weakness on the latter while buying a bunch of other stuff)

I can confirm that even with a short cable if the quality isn't there on the shielding you do get regular dropouts & so far as I can make out some interference with other devices as well. Doesn't affect image quality per-se, but line noise makes it's mark in other ways, like device control integration, continuity. Not making this up, I've tried said cables, the cheapo ones are fine for hdmi upsizing dvd players, but not actually unreliable between the BD & TV.

 

There was a website (Tom's Hardware?) that compared $3 cables with ones that cost well over $100 and there was no discernible difference. The comparison was pretty damning.

EDIT: Part I Part II Summation Part III

 

Anyone know where they are based? I feel obliged to go there and give the person who wrote that garbage a good slap across the chops!

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk

 

http://www.russandrews.com/product....&customer_id=PAA1306020011399ZWRFNTJQXJZKRFQN

 

Ok what Hi Fi no longer have any credibility

 

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/home-entertainment/1282699/hdmi-investigated-are-expensive-cables-a-scam

Had a look around and heres a slightly more in depth look at high end digital cables. Makes for a good little read.

 

Not wishing to be shot down in flames, but yes, all cables in a music system make a difference. What you should look for is a cable that makes a music system sound better. I cant explain why cables change the sound, and our engineers struggle to explain why their direction makes a difference, but the simple fact us that they do.

However, there's a huge amount of rubbish and snake oil out there, so I do understand why it's all gotten a bit daft. If you're serious about audio performance find an independent specialist audio dealer and ask for a demonstration of different cables. The margin on these things are huge, typically over 60%, so bear in mind you're paying through the nose, but if you really like one over another and that justifies the cost, who's to say it's not good value?

As a point of reference, our best system retails at around £150,000, with standard mains leads and modest (£250) interconnects. If we substitute really expensive cables into the system the whole thing sounds worse. Lastly, cables cannot improve the sound of poor electronics; all any cable does is lose or corrupt signal. The best cables lose and corrupt less.

 

cleggmeister: I mistook this as a thread about all expensive cables being a rip off but realised its DIGITAL cables that are expensive being a rip off.
With audio it makes a huge difference but with digital its doesn't (unless you are talking about digital music cables)

 

Cheers Russ, fair point. The weird news for me was that different Ethernet cables affected the audio performance of some of our digital streaming products. How weird is that???!!! Our techies don't know for sure, they suspect that even Ethernet wires can pick up and transport RF noise into some components.

It freaks me out...

Edit: even more strange, the HDMI cable that came free with my Sky+ box caused a noticeable frame 'judder', a bit like running Crysis on an old PC. Replaced it with a van den hul (at cost price of £50 against an RRP of £150) and the motion is now super smooth.

This does annoy me as it makes my profession (music playback) seem like something you need a degree to enjoy. No wonder the specialist hifi industry is sweating just now...

 

Ethernet cables are 8 thin wires, 4 of them provide shielding and it's still possible to lose packets of data with bad wires which is why TCP/IP uses cheksums and will resend the data if things don't add up.

 

I suspect you had a dodgy cable there. The Sky+HD box we have downstairs is using its stock cable and it's perfect.

I will accept that the dirt-cheap cables often bundled with things may be more likely to break and therefore cause problems, but all working cables are equal in my opinion. I've never seen any evidence against this or head/read any convincing argument either.

It's very different in the analogue world of course, a £150k system is perfectly suited to £250+ interconnects.

Surely someone somewhere must have done some double-blind testing to prove the digital cable quality makes no difference? If not, we need to run an experiment! I'd also love to know if people have a different mental response to sounds that they want to sound better. Of course, this would require running a brain scan during the test...

 

I'd like to see a measured bit error rate rather than subjective testing to back up those claims.