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Networking Music Technology

$10K Ethernet Cable Claims Audio Fidelity, If You're Stupid Enough To Buy It 418

Posted by Soulskill from the imaginary-audio-quality-is-more-valuable-than-a-car dept.
MojoKid writes: There are few markets that are quite as loaded-up with "snake oil" products as the audio/video arena. You may have immediately thought of "Monster" cables as one of the most infamous offenders. But believe it or not, there are some vendors that push the envelope so far that Monster's $100 HDMI cables sound like a bargain by comparison. Take AudioQuest's high-end Ethernet cable, for example. Called "Diamond," AudioQuest is promising the world with this $10,500 Ethernet cable. If you, for some reason, believe that an Ethernet cable is completely irrelevant for audio, guess again. In addition to promises about the purity and smoothness of the silver conductors, and their custom "Noise-Dissipation System," they say," "Another upgrade with Diamond is a complete plug redesign, opting for an ultra-performance RJ45 connector made from silver with tabs that are virtually unbreakable. The plug comes with added strain relief and firmly lock into place ensuring no critical data is lost." Unfortunately, in this case, there's the issue of digital data being, well... digital. But hey, a 1 or a 0 could arrive at its destination so much cleaner, right?
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$10K Ethernet Cable Claims Audio Fidelity, If You're Stupid Enough To Buy It More

$10K Ethernet Cable Claims Audio Fidelity, If You're Stupid Enough To Buy It

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  • Audiophile market (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sivaraj ( 34067 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:17AM (#49024305)

    There are plenty of products in the audiophile industry that can match or exceed this in craziness level. I wouldn't be surprised to see a glorifying review of this in a hi-fi magazine.

    • They are just trolls with lots of money (Score:5, Interesting)

      by emj ( 15659 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:26AM (#49024345) Journal

      You think they are crazy, but as along time audiophile I can till you we are just trolls who are spending or claiming to spend lots of money only to get attention. This conspiracy has been going on for to many decades now, but it's getting old so I'm exposing it here.

      I'm just going listen to Simon and Garfunkel on my built in 386 era PC-speaker now.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by LaurenCates ( 3410445 )

        If I had mod points, I'd mod you "troll".

        (Meta-level satire, am I doing it right?)

      • Re:They are just trolls with lots of money (Score:5, Funny)

        by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @07:40AM (#49024769)

        I have those speakers. The sound from them is so much "warmer" than from modern offerings.

      • Re:They are just trolls with lots of money (Score:5, Interesting)

        by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @10:11AM (#49025783) Homepage Journal
        Well, while there is a LOT of snake oil out there, there is still *some* truth in that you get what you pay for....

        A pair of desktop speakers, by LabTec, isn't going to sound nearly so good as my Klipschorn Speakers [klipsch.com] that I have in my living room. I have them connected to a pair of SE Tube amps from a small online company Decware. I've had them quite awhile and I love the sound of them. To each his own, I like the tube distortion, but I have ever since I was 12yrs and heard a pair of K-horns in an audio store running off a McIntosh tube amp system.

        But I digress. The thing is...those cheap earbuds on an iPod aren't going to sound as nice as my Shure higher end earbuds.....at some point, you do get what you pay for. But one always has to be wary of what's being offered, and do their research, and test things in person.

        That all being said, there are some fun DIY things you can do. I found lots of links years back, on taking multiple strands of Cat-6 cable, and braiding it in various fashions into speaker cable. I did my own variant, and I have to say, I liked the way it sounded...in fact, I still have it on my main front speakers (the khorns).

        So, if you do enjoy GOOD fidelity in your audio, often you do have to pay a bit, but not always.

        Sadly, so many kids today seem to see their music as disposable, and many have never HEARD what a good sound system can sound like...and only know white, cheap earbuds...or worse...the thudding of "Beats" headphones, that so far I've yet to find a tweeter installed.

        But that's a different soapbox to get on altogether.

        • Re: They are just trolls with lots of money (Score:5, Interesting)

          by asliarun ( 636603 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @12:15AM (#49026863)

          You bring up some good points in your post. But I have to disagree on one thing. Good quality music reproduction is today more accessible than ever. There was a time when you had to get horn speakers or at least speakers as big as cabinets, class A amplification -solid state or tubes, and a really hard to setup vinyl turntable. Then there was room treatment, speaker placement, and all those shenanigans.

          Not saying this is still not relevant. But today, you can get a decent pair of headphones (sennheiser, audio technical, akg, grado, fostex/MrSpeakers, etc), a decent DAC and amp (Schiit, Audio GD, etc), and good quality source and good quality digital (hi res or even redbook) - all at even a college dorm budget, and similarly compact.

          I remember the days of the walkman and audio cassettes, and for sure, the progress has been dramatic. The only irony being that the single most important piece - the quality of mastering and quality of recording - has largely gone for a toss. Today, it is all about loudness wars and auto tune. But that is a different matter.

          When people pursuing any hobby go beyond a certain expense level, they make purchasing decisions for most things other than money. Why is there no Slashdot argument about people paying $3 million for a vintage Ferrari or a Jag? Is there any basis to that price! Is the buyer, no matter how much an auto enthusiast, ever going to take his or her vintage Jag for a really rough spin that could risk damaging the car?

          Maybe the analogy is not accurate. Fair enough. But a lot of audiophiles with really high end systems do find a difference in sound even with trivial component swaps. They will even claim that placement of certain objects in the room alters the sound.

          But before dismissing them as twats, it might be worth thinking about how idiosyncratic and bizarre other people are who are equally immersed in their hobby or pursuit. The guy who is cooling his Intel CPU in liquid nitro to get the last bit of over clock - really, what practical purpose did he serve? And he probably spent a bunch of money on his rig too.

          The strangest thing of all is that music is one of those strange beasts that changes quality with every trivial change in component, room, source, you name it. That is what gets audiophiles hooked. Maybe and probably it is psychoacoustics. But if you can hear the difference, it is there, right?

          Now how much tweaking and money you want to throw at this pursuit, that is a very subjective thing. But dissing it and ridiculing it is also wrong. It is only one of the many things that continue to fascinate us as a species. And music is indeed very very special to most of us. We just don't pay enough attention to this sense.

    • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Informative)

      by ryan.onsrc ( 1321531 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:28AM (#49024355) Homepage

      ask an ye shall recieve: http://www.the-ear.net/review-... [the-ear.net]

      • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Funny)

        by RichardDeVries ( 961583 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:52AM (#49024431) Journal

        Unbelievable. From TFR:

        So do Ethernet cables have their own sound? This is no longer a question but a statement. The cable between switches is less important than the ones connected to the end points (NAS and/or streaming device), but a decent type like the AudioQuest Carbon is certainly worth the price in high end systems.

        • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @07:39AM (#49024765)

          Translation: I blew a metric fuckton of money on that shit, and you now expect me to admit I can't hear any difference? They'd immediately kick me out of the audiophile jerk circle if I did, for I'd be just one of those "mundanes" that cannot appreciate perfect audio quality.

        • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TheDarkMaster ( 1292526 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @08:13AM (#49024957)
          Well, a company that charges ten thousand US dollars for a network cable may easily pay very good money to have favorable "reviews" and "professional physicists" endorsing the "magical properties" of the product. As a non-American I am surprised as you Americans allow criminals freely sell products that are clearly scams like this.

          • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Insightful)

            by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @08:27AM (#49025041) Homepage

            As a non-American I am surprised as you Americans allow criminals freely sell products that are clearly scams like this.

            As an American, I can say I'm glad the government *doesn't* stop this kind of activity. A functioning society requires its citizens to be at least marginally responsible for their own conduct. If they're stupid enough to be taken in by this crap, they deserve what they get. We neither need nor want a "nanny state" looking over our shoulder all the time, telling us what we can and cannot buy.

        • Fun Reading (Score:4, Funny)

          by Dr. Evil ( 3501 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @08:16AM (#49024969)

          "Audioquest claims these cables are directional and an arrow on the connecter indicates the data flow from source to receiver."

          lol

      • Come on... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Roy van Rijn ( 919696 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @06:10AM (#49024507) Homepage
        From the article:

        "My first change is from Supra Cat-7+ to Audioquest Cinnamon playing a piece from Eric Satie, a performance by Alexandre Tharaud of Gnossienne No. 1. I immediately notice an increase in air and a wider stage with the Cinnamon. The recording room has grown and the playback is a little more fluid, more natural I would say."

        Can someone please do a bit-wise compare between what is received just before the DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter)...? I doubt there are any missing bits using the 'cheaper' cable.

        • Re:Come on... (Score:5, Funny)

          by rogoshen1 ( 2922505 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @06:25AM (#49024527)

          Philistine, you do know that electrons have a spin don't you? The article doesn't quantify the quantum reasoning for well organized quanta, but I assure you, if you have electrons tumbling through a cable all willy-nilly, the frequency response will be fuzzier at the peaks (due to the random distribution of electrons, IE +- 50% directional tonality.)

          Do you even audiophile bro?

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

            I wish I was stoned right now.

            I would be fucking off to the origin-of-the-universe discussion over there.

            Next you'll be crapping on about wire bend radius and how a sudden change in direction affects signal latency in a double twisted pair...

            • I don't think this is the cable I'm thinking of, but I have seen an rj45 '8 wire' cable that was expensive. and while its not worth the price, there IS something to this. hear me out.

              ethernet at gig-e speeds does not use equal length strands. it does this so that you get more of a 'variety' (for lack of better non-tech words) of frequencies and you can better cancel out the common-mode noise radiation if you don't make all the wire pairs (pairs are different but each wire in the pair is the same length)

              • Re:Come on... (Score:5, Informative)

                by msauve ( 701917 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @08:32AM (#49025073)

                ethernet at gig-e speeds does not use equal length strands. it does this so that you get more of a 'variety' (for lack of better non-tech words) of frequencies and you can better cancel out the common-mode noise radiation if you don't make all the wire pairs (pairs are different but each wire in the pair is the same length) the same.

                You know just enough to be dangerous. You're also wrong. Each pair in a Cat 6 cable has a different rate of twist. That's done to reduce crosstalk between the pairs. I often use short (<10 M) Cat 5 patch cables for temporary 1G connections without issue, Cat 6 becomes more important when you're bundling cables together and using longer lengths (100 M max). Regardless, any errors which occur can be recognized and recorded, so any difference between cables could be easily and objectively quantified - no need for subjective "the soundstage immediately opened up" BS.

                The length of different pairs due to the difference in twists is insignificantly different.

                You then go on to confuse matters by comparing 1G Ethernet to HDMI to I2S, three completely different things, with different signalling at different rates. 1G Ethernet runs at a clock rate of 125 MHz, encoding 8 bits per baud. HDMI 1.3 has a maximum clock rate of 340 MHz, making transmission line length more critical.

                I2S [archive.org] does NOT have 3 clocks as you claim. It has a single clock, a word select signal (used to indicate whether left or right channel info is currently being sent, sometimes called the "word clock," even though it changes synchronously with the bit clock), and a data signal. Used for standard CD audio, it has a clock rate of less than 1.5 MHz. Even with newer "high definition" audio formats, the clock rate is still significantly less than either 1G Ethernet or HDMI. It tops out around 12 MHz for 32 bit stereo at 192 KHz. For more channels, additional data lines are added. But, transmission line length is not as critical as for either Ethernet or HDMI, which run at 10x+ the speed of I2S. 1/2 cycle of a 12 MHz clock is almost 50 feet long on a wire. A length difference of fractions of an inch simply doesn't matter.

          • Re:Come on... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @07:41AM (#49024771)

            Electrons have spin, allright. But the story has WAY, WAY more.

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 )

          I'm not going to defend expensive cables, but ...

          bits are NOT bits when it comes to clocking and jitter. if there is a separate clock and data, then data won't matter when it arrives, the clock sets the trigger edge.

          otoh, spdif audio (for example) is self clocking and the timing of the bits DO matter since the being of the d/a conversion begins right after the last bit in the left-right payload. the timing of that last bit causes a 'big operation' to occur and that's when the data gets pushed out as a lef

          • Let's pretend for a moment that this is about a spdif instead of an ethernet cable...

            Timing may matter, but it's something I'd rather trust to a sensible logic and a big enough buffer to cover the "rough" times rather than spending a fortune on a cable that can't even sensibly promise this, let alone compensate for other hiccups (which a buffered jitter correction can).

            And yes, the final DAC matters. But again, I'd rather put my money on a sensible logic than magic cables.

    • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:37AM (#49024385)

      Actually no, on the Ethernet side of things this is the most expensive cable.

      Sure there are more expensive audio cables, but they at least make claims which sound believable for the true idiot, but ethernet is a packet transfer system with error correction. There's simply no amount of fancy words to describe how technologically a cable could be the difference.

      In the audio chain people talk about sound waves affected by the cable.
      In the digital audio chain people talk about jitter, temporally accurate rising and falling pulses, and transmission lines.
      In the power supply side people talk about shielding and noise from the power grid.

      But this is a system which inherently transfers data from one side to the other, checks it along the way, and then stores it on the far side in preparation for being played. There's only so much garbage to be made up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Chrisq ( 894406 )

        Actually no, on the Ethernet side of things this is the most expensive cable.

        I'll sell you a more expensive one (bog standard ethernet cable and tin of gold spray paint at the ready)!

      • But this is a system which inherently transfers data from one side to the other, checks it along the way, and then stores it on the far side in preparation for being played.

        Yes, that's all nice . . . but can it check the quality of the music, and improve it along the way, if the music sucks . . . ?

        • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Funny)

          by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @07:06AM (#49024643) Homepage

          iptables -A INPUT -m state --state BIEBER -j DROP

        • reminds me of the cd/dvd burning linux guy (berlioz or something was his website). for a long time, he had an faq about cdroms and linux. one question was something like 'the audio tracks from my cdrom sound bad. what's wrong?' and his answer was something like 'its country music, its supposed to sound like that' ;)

          anyway, getting serious, here's a situation where the data is NOT checked along the way. cut-thru switches. old switches (bridges) would receive a whole datagram, crc it and then only forwar

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fisted ( 2295862 )
            Where's the problem? It's not strictly the switch's job to do that error checking, in fact, that would be a fairly odd thing to have.

      • Actually no, on the Ethernet side of things this is the most expensive cable.

        Sure there are more expensive audio cables, but they at least make claims which sound believable for the true idiot, but ethernet is a packet transfer system with error correction. There's simply no amount of fancy words to describe how technologically a cable could be the difference.

        In the audio chain people talk about sound waves affected by the cable.
        In the digital audio chain people talk about jitter, temporally accurate rising and falling pulses, and transmission lines.
        In the power supply side people talk about shielding and noise from the power grid.

        But this is a system which inherently transfers data from one side to the other, checks it along the way, and then stores it on the far side in preparation for being played. There's only so much garbage to be made up.

        But it won't do any good unless you have matched vaccuum-tube ethernet adapters on both ends!

        Seriously. SILVER? Silver tarnishes. Is plain old gold like the cheap cables at Office Depot sells for $5 too pedestrian for them?

        • Re:Audiophile market (Score:5, Informative)

          by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @08:02AM (#49024883)

          Gold is a worse conductor than copper and silver. Its only benefit is that it does not corrode. Silver is superior to copper in just about every way.

          The ultimate conductor (if you wanted to pretend that errors come from resistance, rather than RFI) would be gold-coated-silver, I believe.

    • Also other hobby&sport related markets are incredible goldmines: look for example at ham radio, angling, running, just to name a few. The method is always:

      1) Design a new product, the more useless the better
      2) Put up a web site describing it, and pay somebody to praise the new product
      3) ???
      4) Profit!
    • Just think of this as another means of wealth redistribution.

    • Re:Audiophile market (Score:4, Interesting)

      by amxcoder ( 1466081 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @02:45AM (#49027267)
      The same company sells a $13,500 HDMI cable: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... [amazon.com]

      a $550 2.6ft USB cable: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQue... [amazon.com]

      a $6900 standard power cable: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQue... [amazon.com]

      and $13,000 speaker cables: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQue... [amazon.com]

      "a fool and his money are easily separated..." comes to mind.

  • a fool and his money... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by txoof ( 553270 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:19AM (#49024309) Homepage
    If there's a market, somebody will exploit it.

  • Look at what happened the last time... (Score:5, Funny)

    by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:19AM (#49024315)
    ... it was disaster [amazon.com]:

    We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

    PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long... I will type as fast as I can.

    DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

    We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began.

    Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND.

    No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out... oh, god, the screaming... the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!

    WHY CAN'T I FORGET THE WORDS???

    We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

    Do not use the cables!

    • The comments are absolutely awesome, definitely a must-read.

      I'm dead serious... unlike the commenters. Then again, how could you stay serious when commenting on something like this?

  • Government Bid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:21AM (#49024319)

    Next cost plus contract I see, I will spec all the cables as these.
    The contracts are the cost plus a profit margin.
    The more we spend the more we make.

  • OTOH (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:25AM (#49024341)

    What actually matters isn't the fidelity of the sound, but the self-satisfaction you feel when you listen to it.

  • The review is right (Score:3)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:31AM (#49024359)

    The review linked at the bottom is right on the money. As the money goes up you get increased clarity. That much is obvious.

    Even a deaf person should have the clarity to realise that fools and their money are more easily separated.
    And any engineer or psychologist would agree that as the cost of snake oil reaches new heights more and more people become amazed at the stupidity of others.

    These cables really do provide clarity.

  • ...will be able to see the value of these cables. If you idea of fine dining is hotdogs and cheetos while watching Gilligan's island, then you won't be able to tell the difference. You might as well use your crappy coax cable with duct tape on it for your streaming audio!

    But if you actually want to reduce the latency between your brain and pure audio bliss (and also have a higher TCP window size), then these cables are a *requirement*.

  • My favourite cable (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @05:42AM (#49024405)

    I am truly sad that I forgot the brand, but my favourite snake oil product in the audio industry was an RCA interconnect cable. It was unique compared to all the other cables. Rather than using some weird alloy hand picked by Hathor the goddess of music, they decided to eliminate the pesky metal altogether and replace it with .... optic fibre.

    Yes gentlemen they did the impossible. They produced the first RCA cable which actually had a measurable performance impact on the sound. By modulating an LED on one end and picking it up with a photoresistor on the other the cable selling in the thousands of dollars introduced in the order of 0.2%THD to the signal, orders of magnitude worse than a cheap amplifier, and infinitely worse than any other cable which produces no measurable change at all.

    I am really annoyed I forgot the brand of it, but believe it or not people actually bought into this shit and said it sounded amazing.

  • Redesigned connector, unbreakable tabs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by giacomo-b ( 249521 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @06:04AM (#49024479)

    Maybe 10k$ is a little bit over my budget, but trust me, I would pay a lot for an Ethernet cable whose connector has virtually unbreakable tabs.

  • For HDMI, the signal is all digital, but it gets weaker. As long as it is strong enough, it's fine. If it's too weak, the picture is gone.

    So you have standards how much the connector on your computer is allowed to distort the signal, how much the receiver on your TV is allowed to distort it, and how much damage the cable is allowed to do. If all three are below the limit, you are guaranteed to be fine. If one or two are above the limit, you may be fine because the damage adds up - rubbish laptop with exc

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

      HDMI is not tolerant of line noise, and that is entirely dependent on the length of the cable. Whether the cable actually works, therefore, is a binary condition: it does work, or it doesn't work. It doesn't "work but the picture's snowy". Similarly for ethernet: the TCP/IP transport protocol is a binary method: the packet did transmit successfully or it didn't. If it didn't, resend. If it did, send the next one. It also does not matter what dopants are in your cable. It could be cotton (known to happen - e

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bwcbwc ( 601780 )

        HV line are aluminum because the weight of copper would require more poles to support them. So aluminum is cheaper to build/maintain. Copper is more conductive than aluminum over a broad spectrum of frequencies, including 60 Hz.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

          that too... typical weights for copper vs aluminium using standard alloys for the same load are 1:0.54 and cross sectional area 1:1.56, so even though aluminium is thicker for the same load, it's still lighter (by a factor of ~4). As far as costing goes, in the long term (ie the lifetime of the conductor, including repairs and general maintenance) there is no difference whatsoever. The considerations therefore are reduced to how much space you have and the market price of the raw materials. Right now, and f

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Alioth ( 221270 )

        Aluminium house wiring is awful, they used it a lot in former Soviet satellite states and it breaks all the time. The Soviets probably used it because it was cheap.

        Our local telco also used aluminium interconnects in the exchange - if they found you using your own SDSL equipment on a "dry copper" leased line they would replace the interconnects at the exchange with aluminium ones which made the line go out of spec and your SDSL to stop working to force you to buy their high speed leased line product at 10x

  • Not all audiphiles are like this (Score:5, Informative)

    by Camembert ( 2891457 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @06:14AM (#49024511)
    Just a note of perspective. It is easy to tag audiophiles as naive fools with too more money than sense.
    But not all are like that.
    I am quite interested in good rendering of favourite music, so are a few friends. We do indeed try out hifi gear, but that doesn't mean we all fall for this snake oil product.
    By and large most people are used to the sound of multimedia speakers or mini systems. For a music lover, it is possible to get so much better results, and it does not need to cost crazy money on crazy products for a decent result.
    So far I find speakers having the largest influence on the end reproduction quality. There is some difference between the electronics, but once you are beyond the bare basic level the differences are getting smaller. But speakers are worth spending money on if you are a music lover using a good quality music source.
    • now now, don't come here with your rational well-reasoned statements of it being possible to have great sound without spending crazy money!!
    • I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination but I agree that speakers are where you should spend the bucks if you want good sound. Bigger is not always better, but heavier usually is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bwcbwc ( 601780 )

      True this. If you look at how ethernet works, there are 3 possible sources of digital "noise" that the cable contributes to.
      a) dropped packets - if the cable is physically damaged or otherwise defective.
      b) long latency times combined with out of order delivery of the packets. A very long cable would have to cause this, combined with poor buffering on the receiving device.
      c) bitrot/data errors. - long cables and poor quality cables.

      A $10k cable vs. a $10 cable won't do anything about any of these. Even if yo

  • I can sell you cans of higly purified Himalayan air for reducing the harmonic distorsion introduced by the WiFi connection between your Ipad and your NAS. Results guaranteed or your money back!

  • ...a zero and a one arrive out of order.

    I blame the cables.

  • When Chord announced their latest cables 1m ethernet cable [chord.co.uk] (GB£850 is about US$1300) , and 1m RCA stereo cable [chord.co.uk] (GB£1600 is US$2500), I emailed them asking for some technical details, as if I might be a buyer, but they didn't respond. They probably sensed I had a bullshit detector.

    I had a discussion with their local Trading Standards, a government-run operation that exists to protect consumers, stating that their scientific claims were bogus, and the TS people said that since I hadn't bought

    • you want to report someone, how about those folks selling cordless anti-static wrist straps, such as:

      http://www.amazon.com/Static-D... [amazon.com]

      its almost funny (but its quite sad) to imagine lab people wearing these, thinking they are protected when its not doing a thing other than pinching their wrists and emtying out their pocketbooks.

  • Lawsuits coming? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fgouget ( 925644 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @06:53AM (#49024609)
    How come these companies don't get sued into oblivion for false advertising (claiming an impact on sound quality, unidirectional data transfer, 100Gbps compatibility). And why don't the reviewers get sued too for professional misconduct?

    • money changes hands!

      why doesn't ATT get sued for allowing telemarketers to scam their callerid? because att gets money from them!

      why do isp's allow spammers? money!

      why does amazon allow 'cordless anti-static wrist straps' to continue to be sold? they make money from sellers!

      no one cares about ethics. this is the modern money grab 'I want mine, get the fuck outta my way!' capitalism. watching out for the consumer was so 1970's, dude! get with the program!!

  • Reminds me of.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by rjforster ( 2130 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @07:15AM (#49024677) Journal

    A letter in a hi-fi magazine (Hi-Fi News and Record Review, but I'm not 100% sure) years ago from someone who was upgrading his system.
    He started by describing the upgrades to the cables and connectors. Then moved onto rewiring the amp with better quality conductors. Rewiring his house for a better electrical feed into the kit. He then described chasing his dream of perfect audio further by liaising with his local power company to get the substation upgraded. Finally (the punchline) was that he had written to the power generation company to change the isotope of uranium they used to get better bass.

    Made me giggle.

  • My 0's were much more vibrant and the 1's, well, they were richer in tone.
    Don't be a hater before you try it... ;)

  • One of my favorites... (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @09:07AM (#49025321)
    One of my all-time favorites in this area was a review done many years ago by a upper midwest audiophile club.

    .
    They did a listening test comparing a $300 Pioneer receiver with two $10,000 "audiophile" mono tube amplifiers.

    At the beginning of the test, the listeners knew which device they were listening to and, predictably, the Pioneer receiver was painful to listen to, destroying the music.The mono amps were all that is wonderful in listening.

    Then the identities were masked and the listening test was done again. Most of the listeners could not tell the two apart, guessing incorrectly about half the time.

    A sad commentary on the industry when an audiophile club cannot even tell a $300 receiver from $20,000 of audiophile amplification.

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