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

A measured bit rate test can't tell you the difference between instruments or players, but every musician I know worth their horn can. Some things a number can't tell you.

But, expensive digital cables are a ripoff. As was said earlier, there's no "clearer 1 or 0" to be had.

 

I'd like to see how the guys at whatHiFi.com would answer quality questions when told that a system with an "audiophile" grade cable was running with a $5 cable, and one with the $5 cable was running with an expensive high end cable.

I would wager that they will say that the system that they *think* has a high end cable on, has a much better picture than the one they think has a low end cable. The brain is a powerful thing.... and I think they are fooling themselves

 

+1

 

It misses the fundamental point though, that digital systems have error-correction systems. Either the signal is perfect, or it fails catastrophically when there are more errors than data.

@cleggmeister: that might just be poor shielding on the cables conducting EMI and causing resonance in nearby analogue circuits. A cheaper £10 cable with decent shielding might have fixed those issues.


Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk

 

Good Lord, what rubbish! I guess that if they were political reviewers, they'd state that Gordon Brown was the best PM since Chrurchill, and he sold the UK gold reserves at exactly the right time.... comrade.....

 

As I said in an earlier post, there are measured bit tests. Gizmodo's, for example.
Part I Part II Part III Summation

 

Whilst I completely agree with the general point of this thread there is one thing that slightly more expensive cables can do better than super cheap ones - protection against viscious bunny attack.

Let me explain (before you all think I have gone nuts); my wife an I have two extremely curious house rabbits (one is a pure breed German lop whilst the other is a wild / lionhead cross breed), who revel in the total destruction of anything that gets in their way. Sooty, our lionhead cross, enjoys nothing more than to much down on some nice plastic cables (regardless if the equipment they are attached to is on or not.....). This means I can often turn on the TV only to have no signal from the HTPC as she has chewed through the HDMI cable again.

In this situation I have found the braided £20-30 cables offer much better longetivity than the cheap things from Asda / Tescos. The picture quality is better only in the sense that it takes her twice as long to chew through it.

Anyway I have gone off on a tangent long enough.....

 

Yes, all cables should come with a bunny rating

 

If only What Hifi could have taken a leaf out of your book. Certainly would have been a better read.

 

There is a difference between expensive and inexpensive cables. You won't notice it with short cables though. True, digital is 1s and 0s, but it's still a signal and it still has to get somewhere in one piece. The digital signal, just like an analogue one can still pick up interference. This is simple physics. No cable can make a picture better, only worse. Unless it has some wizard crystal implanted in it

Ok, story time.
My friend got a sub for his car. He had it installed by some "pro." I asked him why he used all these overpriced cables and wires, his response was "The oxygen free cables sound better." First I told him he was stupid, just cause. Next I explained how resistance works. Copper is Copper, most oxygen free speaker wires are complete bs. Once the ends are cut, the wire loses its oxygen free perks. Thick wire has less resistance than thin wire, my 12 gauge thhn wire can carry more amps and more watts than a thin "oxygen free wire"

Look beyond the brand, you will see there is a lot of engineering that goes into the monster brand, cheaper brands lack that. Wire twist ratios, conductor design and termination quality all effect total cable quality. Monster isn't just monoprice cable with super thick insulation.

 

Actually, Monster pretty much is overpriced cable with fancy shielding. I used to sell the stuff, you never could tell the difference between it and the store brand (which was actually decently well made.) Even on the monster demos, one side (the Monster side) plated HD and the other (competitor) actually played SD. I set up enough of those to know something was wrong. If you want great cables without the stupidfaced price tag (and a good read about patent trolling to boot) read up on Blue Jeans Cables. All the engineering you need without the ridiculous corporate malarky.

 

Oxygen free cables don't offer any advantage on day 1, but on day 365 they will sound the same as they originally did, that's why the process is applied in the first place. you're not just paying for the initial product but for the longevity of it as well.

I'm actually surprised that for a forum where contributors so regularly debate over the best thermal paste or have in the past argued over round v ribbon IDE cables (it's not just about the device performance, but the external effect on airflow & shielding, right?) are questioning this so deeply. Speaking from a musician's perspective with basic analog cabling, if the shielding on a guitar cable can have such a drastic effect, surely the same rules apply in the digital domain? just because there is handshaking going on to make sure the bits add up does not mean that all is well. consider the bandwidth effect on ethernet as a prime example - it might not be obvious that a cable is too long when it's 1 device to 1 device, but when you have a load of them then log onto a router (if you have a decent one that takes stats) & take a count of packet collisions, dropped packets @ so on you start to see a different story.
<edit> having been involved in a larger study on application performance issues in an enterprise level application, I have some insight into this.

Yes, there's a sweet spot like all things, but if there are folk out there prepared to spend a grand on an extreme edition i7, why should that same classification of customer be considered an idiot for spending more than a tenner on a digital cable?

 

Digital is digital whether it comes through a £100 lead or a £10 lead. The minor benefits (if any) of a higher quality lead just wouldn't be noticeable by most - or needed.

 

Digital is digital, you are right, but digital is a signal and it can still suffer degradation over distance. When I say degrade, I mean loss of 1s or 0s. The 1s and 0s are electric pulses, they suffer voltage drop over conductors and interference from other conductors.
The only time you'll notice it is in long distance runs.

 

If it was optical then if the lead is in good condition there should be no degredation whatsoever, I guess interference can creep in with non optical leads.

 

I figure the digital cable debate is settled (as long as they're competently built and shielded, they're fine), so I'll just give my opinion on analog signal..

I don't have the money to mess around with cables, but even if you do IMO it should be the absolute last part of your system that you should upgrade. You'll get more obvious benefits by upgrading everything other than the cables (if they're anywhere above 'falling apart' level, anyway).

I wouldn't even bother with the cheapest cables offered by Best Buy, Walmart, etc. Monoprice all the way.

 

I know, which is why most people wouldn't need the expensive cables.

 

It does kind of depend on the gear you connect them to. The recording industry figured out a long while back that unless you use a single common clock source for ALL ADC and DAC converters right from the inputs, through all effects and mixing right through to the burner that writes the CD, you get jitter in the conversion that can alter the final analogue signal that goes to the amp/speakers.

So, if the bit rate varies, there can be a real change in the final signal. Our hearing system (ears and brain) is able to detect differences between the timing of a sound arriving at each ear on the order of a nanosecond. So, unless you're doing it the professional way, which is also VERY expensive, making sure all the converters are running in precise lockstep, within a nanosecond or less, there could be artifacts in the sound.

Another source o distortion are analogue noise picked up be a digital cable finding it's way into a converter and affecting (however slightly) that audio signals the come out the other end. One way this happens is via interference with the power supply slightly changing the operation of other parts of the circuit. While good audio systems are ALMOST immune to power noise, no circuit can be absolutely immune.

It's just like saying a thick plank won't bend under a small load. Any engineer knows this is not true. It is not possible to make a plank (or I-beam...) that is absolutely rigid. Every beam bends under even the smallest load. It might not affect the system you're building, but it's never precisely zero.

Now unless you have some serious audio gear connected by the cables and spend a lot of time optimizing every last thing and a lot of time listening to it you'll never hear it, but the serious high end gear really is getting to this level. Before you completely dismiss these as bogus, perhaps have a listen to some top-tier gear ($10,000 - $200,000 per component that is) set up properly and see what is possible these days. You might be surprised.

The other thing to remember is that this is the sort of system the people buying them are using. Given a system price of $100,000 or more a few thousand for cables is nothing. The other point is that at that level people are looking for absolute perfection. The last 1% improvement might cost 200% in price, but if perfection is the goal, and you can afford it, why not.

 

Really?

 

I may be missing something here, but aren't all digital signals recreated to be perfect before hitting the DAC circuitry? Even if there is a little bit of noise, it gets removed at this stage. If theres enough noise to change a level, it will be very noticeable, but its very rare.