Calling Shenanigans On Super SATA's Claimed Audio Qualities 827
nk497 writes "Veteran Hi-Fi journalist Malcolm Steward has pushed newfangled Super SATA cables via his blog as a way to improve the sound quality of music, saying: 'My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the "air" around instruments.' If that doesn't sound right to you, you're not alone. As PC Pro blogger Sasha Muller argues: 'How on earth can a SATA cable delivering 0s and 1s to their respective destination have any effect on those 0s and 1s? The answer is, it can't. Unless it's a magical one made of pixie shoes.' So maybe don't invest in Super SATA cables unless you have proof they're magical first."
A fool and his money... (Score:5, Insightful)
This reminds me of the Slashdot story on several-thousand-dollar ethernet cables from Monster a few years back. *sigh*
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Funny)
It seems like a pretty good buy to me. Those Monster cables have prevented any Monsters from infesting my home audio equipment. My anti-shark rock is working well in the living room, too.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Funny)
my Pink Elephant cables have turned out to be a mixed bag, they're only an effective repellent during the work week, when I'm sober.
HA HA HA HA: (Score:5, Funny)
I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own.
Looks like someone commented about how asinine that the premise these cables could matter to sound quality.
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:5, Insightful)
I Put it through the BS to English translator and I got this
I have disabled Comments on this post so that people who believe everything I tell them do not have to read remarks made by a large number of scientifically and technically literate individuals who cannot tolerate people lying to and defrauding their customers.
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:5, Funny)
The translator needs some work though.
I did a BS-English-BS translation and got this:
I have special comment abilities on this post so that scepticly impaired persons do not have to read remarks by Rubinesque intellectuals who prefer not to appreciate biting the wax tadpole.
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that we can all agree that the 'magic' cables are going to pass the same 0s and 1s as any working cable. Still, it is not impossible that the 'magic' cables result in better sound. Allow me to play devil's advocate.
For example, non-magic cables might produce EM fields that may interfere with the audio equipment generating the sound that the blogged was listening to. The magic cables, with better shielding, might not, and thus, despite transporting the same 0s and 1s, result in better quality.
Of course, given the low voltage and current involved, I do not believe this for a second.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been saying for years that there is a new kind of wrong-headedness that people in today's society apply to factual matters - that if they don't understand the reasoning behind a factual statement, then they just claim its a matter of opinion. I think this is overcompensation for when we were taught in 2nd grade that sometimes facts are actually opinions. Well, the less intelligent among us have extended that to mean "sometimes things you don't understand and make factually incorrect statements about are 'just opinions'
Everyone is welcome to an opinion, but certain matters aren't a matter of taste. Example:
"Red is better than green." This is an opinion because you could like red or green or whatever color with essentially no justification and nobody questions you on it, because its purely a matter of taste.
"The color red has a wavelength of around 300nm" would be a factually incorrect statement, not a matter of opinion. Red has a wavelength thats more like 550-650nm or something like that... I wanna say 300nm is violet or ultraviolet. (I might be wrong on that one, but it still illustrates the point). Some people never learned the difference between "A factually untrue statement" and "an opinion." And 'magical cables make sound better!' is a factually untrue statement, not an opinion. It just takes more verification than the average jerk audiophile can be bothered with.
Disclaimer: My expertise is audio design/engineering, so the above comments may be tainted with objective fact.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Funny)
If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
And high-end digital cables are continued proof of this! I'm perfectly happy to pay $5 extra for a better cable so it won't actually break on me, or has a handy elbow bend in the connector, or whatnot (OK, maybe a bit more for a really long cable). Beyond that it's pure fraud.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Interesting)
The CD player reads the bits off the CD much like reading a CD-ROM, but there's a ton of CRC/ECC data. There's really no magic there at all. Most (all recent) CD players spin fast enough to oversample each region, in case of a bad CRC, but if the ECC works there's nothing left for the CD player to do at this stage.
There's a quality difference in DACs: a good DAC makes a difference, but it's subtle and with cheap speakers you wouldn't notice. The chips for a good DAC run about $10, plus a large heat sink, per channel and suck down a *lot* of power (10W each I think), so you won't find then in low-end or portable gear. My receiver with 7 of those DACs really heats up a room (I bought if for my bedroom and couldn't use it there). You'll routinely see those $10 chips sold in audiophile $1000 stand-alone DACs, which is amazing marketing (aka bullshit).
As far as cables, S/PDIF is quite robust, and the cable makes no difference at all unless it's physically damaged. I buy Dayton Audio cables from Parts-Express: for about $10 I can get a nice, solid cable of quality manufacture, similar to a $100 monster cable. But it makes no difference in sound quality, just ordinary physical quality.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Funny)
High end digital cables are totally worth it, especially if they have pretty lights! ;)
And titanium binary shielding to prevent bit leakage, drift, and collisions. When ALL the bits are travelling in the same direction with perfect coherency, the sound quality is so good it induces multiple orgasms even in males. I'd like to see a cable without binary shielding do that! And if its not titanium, it's crap. But that goes without saying.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
The California wine industry would be a shell of what it is now, if some enterprising brit didn't convince them to try a tasting without looking at the labels
Even after they tried to force him to supremeness the results...
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Informative)
Wine snobs usually have their opinions backed up by double-blind tests. The taste buds of good sommelier really can tell the type, vintage, and what kind of wood was used in the barrel that aged the wine. It was a blind test that proved that France wasn't the best in the world after all [wikipedia.org].
They might be snobs, but they do have some Scientific backing behind them. Audiophiles, not so much.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Informative)
Super interesting Wikipedia article! You would think that if they were so good at it (the french judges) they could at least tell the difference between American and French grapes (even if they secretly found the American taste "Better")...
Actually, the snobs of both fields probably do have something in common: They enjoy spending money on things (Even if it's only for spending's sake)... Behold: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html [cnet.com], a study that demonstrated the ability of something to be better (read: more enjoyable) so long as (and solely if) it is more expensive. Maybe the Audio guys aren't so crazy after all... Just deluded by their medial orbitofrontal cortex!
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the wikipedia article you just linked to...
Indeed, the organizer of the competition, Steven Spurrier, said, "The results of a blind tasting cannot be predicted and will not even be reproduced the next day by the same panel tasting the same wines."[4] In one case it was reported that a "side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers."[5][6]
Not much good in blind tests if there is no repeatability.
Kinda like some tests of psychic powers out there, or homeopathy.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not getting the same exact results every time would mean that the test is very imprecise but not necessarily inaccurate. If the averages work out over many samples so that some wines are clearly favored where others are not, it would still be significant even if you don't get the exact same results with every test.
Later on in the same article it is stated that statisticians analyzed the results and found that the top two wines were the only ones that was statistically different in ranking from the other ones. Now granted, they had a pretty small sample size, but if you can't statistically differentiate quality with almost a dozen tasters I think you have some real problems.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't like the taste of wine generally that's just your problem, but don't assume that it cannot be enjoyed for its taste by others.
Quite frankly I'm not at all surprised that rankings would change day to day even by the same people. Taste is very tied to mood. People tend not to want to eat the same thing all the time, even when it's something they like.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Funny)
Enough bleach or peroxide might do the trick.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a blind cab sav wine tasting with 6 wines ($3 to $62).
The person from the northeast placed them "correctly" except swapping the $20 and $30 wine.
The people from texas tended to prefer the $20 wine the "top" wine.
The worst wine was rated lowest by over half the people there.
The 3rd wine (price wise) had a peculiar "oak" gripping the sides of the tongue that people either liked or disliked but everyone could sense.
My comment on the $62 Hess was "this tastes the most like the 'ideal' of cab sav" but I preferred the Estancia cabsav. It was sweeter on the tongue (not from sugar either- it was a weird sweetness.)
Our blind trial provided strong evidence that we could sense differences between the wines but adjacent cost bands tended to blend together and everything over $20 was "just darn good". The $35 Robert Mondavi was not as well liked as the $20 Estancia generally.
I paired the wine with high quality steak. Some wines pair "magically" with the right foods. The wine tastes better and the food tastes better.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.
The skeptics make the claim that there's no way the expensive cables can affect the audio quality because the cables are digital. This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Informative)
That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.
The skeptics make the claim that there's no way the expensive cables can affect the audio quality because the cables are digital. This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.
You should still do that experiment double-blind. Otherwise you're just playing into the unscientific thinking.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.
Unfortunately, this isn't the whole picture.
Its pretty much certain that the data passed by the cable is identical. But its not certain that that the electromagnetic field created by pushing the signal through the cable is not interfering with a nearby analog component, introducing noise or hum. A better shielded digital cable might well actually make a noticeable impact.
For example, I used to work on a computer that where I could hear a low level buzz from the speakers when the hard drive was working. Maybe a shielded cable would have made a difference... or repositioning the hard drive relative to the other components. Or maybe it was grounding issue or something... I didn't investigate it; it wasn't my computer.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually accurate. I have a subwoofer now that hates my cheap HDMI cables but plays nicely with my extra shielded $50 ones. On the other hand they don't show any difference at all between my $50 well shielded cable and the one a friend of mine paid $200 for, and I am a bit of an audiophile, but I'm a cheap bastard on top of it so I always look for the exact reason something isn't quite right and go with the cheapest thing that will grant me my desired performance.
It was an analogue domain problem (Score:3, Informative)
Basically the system had a grounding issue, probably a ground loop. Those things are the bane of my existence when doing audio. The answer though isn't to try and shield a cable, since the noise may well be induced through the ground itself, the answer is to clear up the problem. It can involve isolation of some sort, like an isolation transformer or moving a DAC outside of the computer. It can also involve getting audio devices that don't use a separate safety ground. You can get amps, receivers, etc that only use two pins and that's why, the safety ground is a massive ground loop problem. Apparently you can build the device to still pass FC and UL standards and just use the positive and negative wires. Probably more complicated grounding system but it works.
At any rate the issue is with grounding, not with shielding.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.
Don't you know? In today's scientific world all you need to do is get enough people to agree with you and ANY skeptic is instantly labeled a "denier" and must be required to prove their case.
Of course, no rigorous proof is required of the claimant, only a panel of his like-minded peers to affirm that he is right, and that there is a "consensus".
Now stop being a Super SATA cable denier, fork over your money like a good little sheeple and sit quietly.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure there are some clearly degenerate choices for barrels, but otherwise it's a matter of taste.
I took a tour of the Wollersheim Winery in Wisconsin a few months ago with a tasting. Their Domaine du Sac is advertised as being aged in oak barrels, and has won its share of awards. I hated it. It's smells like oak (which is nice), but also tastes like oak (which isn't). Clearly, some people would do like that, but it's not for me.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is as they get older and (hopefully) more wealthy, their hearing is at the same time inevitably getting worse and worse. Before too long, their wealth easily eclipses their ability to hear and their ability to resist snakeoil like this. Salesmen score a slam-dunk appeal to ego as soon as they plug in a set of "unbelieveable, not just digital, SUPERDIGITAL" cables and laud the *obvious* improvement in sound. Not being able to hear a damn thing anyway, the audiophile quickly opens his wallet lest he be discovered for having gone deaf long ago.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Funny)
"If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them."
Furries.
You can get them to do ANYTHING, buy the most insane poorly-drawn stuff from the most talentless artists, and then the ability to lead them into drama.
Furries definitely top audiophiles in gullibility.
Actually, I know a furry audiophile. That's mind-numbing, there.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, the cable isn't just changing the timbre of the notes; mellowing the harsh electronic edges, reducing noise levels, and other mumbo-jumbo these things are usually claimed to do. It is actually changing the timing of the music, in other words editing the music as it flies down the cable! If I put one of these on my hard drive I could expect to find fewer typos in my code.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Interesting)
Offopic here. To be fair, there are at least three definitions of Christians that I know of:
1. One who professes to believe in Jesus Christ as a savior figure
2. One who acts in a manner similar to who Jesus acted and lived, in his or her relationships with others.
3. One who belongs to a church or denomination that directly descends from the original, ancient Christian church, such as Catholics, protestants, etc.
I know of many folks of different denominations who fit into #1, but not #2 (we might call these hypocrites, but hey everyone is to a point). I know lots of people of all faiths and beliefs, even non-"Christian" who fit #2. Heck I know some atheists that fit #2. So if someone claims to be a Christian, I take them at their word, and hope they, above all, fit in #2, because everything else follows that.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Funny)
Those Denon cables look great, but there's some severe problems with them, mainly because they're so good, the transmission rate exceeds lightspeed. Check out this review from Amazon.com:
Even worse, you might experience much worse effects with these cables. This review is very ominous:
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Funny)
Wow. Just wow.
Get the purest digital audio you've ever experienced from multi-channel DVD and CD playback through your Denon home theater receiver with the AK-DL1 dedicated cable. Made of high-purity copper wire, it's designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration (it stays plugged in!) and helps stabilize the digital transmission from occurrences of jitter and ripple (I just made that up!). A tin-bearing copper alloy (brass, idiots!) is used for the cable's shield while the insulation is made of a fluoropolymer material (for those awkward moments when you just dropped your cable into a puddle of battery acid) with superior heat resistance, weather resistance, and anti-aging properties. The connector features a rounded plug lever to prevent bending or breaking and direction marks to indicate correct direction for connecting cable (sound goes in direction of arrow).
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Informative)
Funny. But for future rants, copper-tin alloys are bronze. Brass is copper-zinc.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Informative)
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/04/1354224 [slashdot.org]
"James Randi offered US$ 1 million to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables 'danceable,' Randi called it 'hilarious and preposterous.' He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, 'they would be paranormal.'
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
If he has a really poorly designed motherboard and his old cables were really crappy(I.E had NO SHIELDING). The old SATA cables may have been injecting noise into the analog back end of the sound card.
Perhaps that's possible, but Steward is using those SATA cables on his NAS device, so the noise would also have to propagate across his network to the audio system.
On a side note, Steward is apparently making defamation claims against the folks discussing his blog:
http://www.hifiwigwam.com/showthread.php?44430-The-SATA-cable-thread [hifiwigwam.com]
This will not stop best buy from have monster sata (Score:5, Insightful)
This will not stop best buy from have monster cable sata cables and a big time geek squad up sell when buy systems there.
Re:This will not stop best buy from have monster s (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This will not stop best buy from have monster s (Score:4, Funny)
In this economy? Good luck.
Re:This will not stop best buy from have monster s (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually phone conversation I've had (multiple times in face):
Me: Hello?
Him: Hey what HDMI cable should I buy?
Me: The cheapest ones you can find?
Him: Really? Because they have some for $30 and some for $90, aren't the $90 ones better?
Me: Where are you?
Him: Best Buy, they have the good stuff.
Me: Just turn around and leave, buy them off the internet for $5, or at least go to Target or Walmart.
Him: But they have some for $90 here, they wouldn't charge more if they weren't better.
etc. etc. etc.
Re:This will not stop best buy from have monster s (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This will not stop best buy from have monster s (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This will not stop best buy from have monster s (Score:4, Funny)
I personally love how you can buy a DVD player at Best Buy for under $100, and then when you need a HDMI cable to hook it up? Over $100. Why does the cable that just sits there cost more than the DVD player it connects, when the DVD player has moving parts, a laser, and a remote control?
3. Profit!
Alliterate headline (Score:5, Funny)
Steward Says Super SATA Sound Swindles Some Suckers
Ah.. he has not reached audio nirvana yet! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait until he installs the pure ivory motherboard standoffs!
Re:Ah.. he has not reached audio nirvana yet! (Score:5, Funny)
They might work (Score:5, Funny)
Don't ignore the placebo effect in audio perception. Placebos have been proven to work, and it has also been shown that higher priced placebos are more effective.
Re:They might work (Score:3, Interesting)
What's even funnier is if what he implies (but doesn't quite spell out) is he's got this:
HDD -> (SATA cable) -> NAS box -> (meters of bog-standard ethernet cables) -> Ethernet Switch -> (ethernet cables) -> Computer -> ???
Even *if* there was a measurable difference in a 1 ft SATA cable, 4 Ethernet interfaces ports, a pile of ethernet cable, and two CPUs after it would swamp any benefit.
I especially love the comment on his blog (Score:5, Insightful)
Where the comments section would be, we get this instead: "I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own. "
Or in other words: "I have absolutely no fucking clue what I'm talking about and really don't like being corrected."
Re:I especially love the comment on his blog (Score:3, Insightful)
My favorite was his sentence:
they are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors.
Into the molecular structure?!? Sure, the cable can have some random water or oxygen molecules sticking to it, and (infrared, I assume - ultraviolet or lower might just ionize them and cause *more* oxidation) irradiating may remove them. But if it's "in the molecular structure" it's already oxidizied the metal and irradiating it isn't going to do squat.
What an idiot. (Score:3, Informative)
The author now has this up:
I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own.
Which really means "I'm an ignorant, lying, idiot, and dont want people pointing that out on my blog, so I have closed commenting and deleted all comments, since they all pointed out my stupidity."
Ah well...
Re:What an idiot. (Score:5, Funny)
He's improved it. Now he's taken his entire site offline. It now simply reads
Error establishing a database connection
Oh wait, that was us.
These are _musical_ 0s and 1s (Score:5, Funny)
It could succeed or fail to deliver the 0s and 1s with their souls intact.
Re:These are _musical_ 0s and 1s (Score:3, Insightful)
It could succeed or fail to deliver the 0s and 1s with their souls intact.
That won't bother me, I listen to popular music.
You morons don't unstand how Super SATA works (Score:5, Funny)
A normal SATA can only carry 0s and 1s, but Super SATA carries 0.0000s and 1.0000s. Thats 4 digits of precision beyond the bits that normal SATA can represent.
Audiophiles. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a scam... or stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
Any sufficiently advanced scam is indistinguishable from blind ignorance.
It's pretty obvious that these cables are a scam preying on people who care about their sound systems but who don't understand enough of the technical aspects to avoid buying overpriced crap. This Stewart fellow is probably getting paid to plug this cable on his blog, but it's possible that he's just an idiot.
Re:It's a scam... or stupidity (Score:3, Interesting)
But, it's worse than that.
Some of the people I've seen defending this stuff comes from audiophiles themselves. People who can recite the formulas related to the physics of speakers and audio-connections from memory. People who in theory could build a set of really good speakers and have likely built tube amps at some point.
People who claim to have "golden ears" which can identify the species of fly by the tone of their farts in a blind listening. Guys who swear up and down they can hear a slightly off-note from a 1954 recording on a direct-to-vinyl pressing and why that's important.
If it was only the guys at Best Buy or the people who fell for Monster Cable, I'd agree with you. But to hear someone who seemingly knows all about the technology -- well, that just baffles my brain.
It seems that some people truly believe this stuff. Though, as someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the placebo affect get stronger the more expensive the placebo. I'm not convinced that it's only people who don't understand the technology who fall for this -- at least they have an excuse of being duped and needing to defend their actions.
Re:It's a scam... or stupidity (Score:3, Insightful)
But the gourmets can beat double-blind tests, whereas the audiophiles cannot.
Re:It's a scam... or stupidity (Score:3, Insightful)
You see it in all foods. I like vodka, some of the most expensive vodka is not very good. Grey Goose is a great example an American named Sidney Frank made it up and charged a lot for it so people would think it is good. It is in fact no better than a $20 a handle vodka. Corazón tequila is what they are now claiming is so great. Another average quality product sold at high grade prices.
Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable (Score:5, Informative)
For a humorous spin a related snake oil product, check out the Amazon reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. Many of the reviews are absolute comedy gems.
Maybe, just maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe, just maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading TFA, he replaced the *SATA* cables on a *NAS*, which then sent the audio files over Ethernet to his network. I think it's pretty safe to write it off as an ignorant misunderstanding of digital electronics (by him, not you - you are just giving him WAAY too much credit :)
Re:Maybe, just maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell are you talking about? What terminations and EMI?? The cable connects the hard disk to the hard disk controller, it either does successfuly (like any $1 sata cable that is not broken) or does not (the broken cable), and from then on the audio data has to go get processed/decoded/whatever and at some point passed on the the Digital to Analog converter. ONLY FROM THEN ON does quality of electronics/cables etc matter.
There are some things that are simple as 1-2-3 that you can certainly write off.
Re:Maybe, just maybe (Score:3, Informative)
When do software developers talk about circuits?
I thought Software Devs were more interested in languages, algorithms, data structures, run-time analysis, debuggers, and compilers.
Not the first time... (Score:3, Informative)
All the same points were made, and shenanigans called.
There was a lot of interesting stuff said in the old discussion - a lot of it had to do with the fact that when people review this HiFi/Audio stuff - the testing is all very subjective, and is never done as a blind trial. Thus, one can boast the virtues of the $500 Ethernet cable - as they know they are listening through one - but one would never do a blind-sound test between a $500 and a $5 cable.
Re:Not the first time... (Score:4, Funny)
Maths (Score:4, Insightful)
Ya well, this shit has been happening forever (Score:5, Informative)
Audiophiles are just dead convinced there are all sorts of magic ways to improve your sound quality. Sometimes it is just pure, 100% made up bullshit like the "brilliant pebbles" thing. Other times there is a kernel of truth from long in the past that they over apply to everything.
With digital cable, that's the case. So S/PDIF is the major transport for digital audio. It is slowly being superseded by newer things but it was the big one forever and is still used a lot. Turns out S/PDIF isn't all that well designed with regards to having a solid clock signal. So what happened was back in the day (and still occasionally) you'd have devices that didn't reclock an incoming signal, they use the clock off of the wire. This meant they were sensitive to clock skew, which would happen if your cable wasn't tightly controlled to 75 ohms, in particular with a long distance. The kind of distortion caused by this is quite audible. S/PDIF has no real error correction, and no retransmit so any errors get played. Thus, for long runs (as you find in studios) good cable was needed, even for digital.
Obviously there are a lot of ways around this, the most common these days being just reclocking the signal you receive with an internal clock. Also better standards came about (like AES/EUB which runs over balanced cable). Doesn't matter, once and for all time people were convinced that cable quality mattered. It still crops up too, because you get audiophile devices that are poorly designed. They go for a "minimal component" design. So you'll have a DAC that doesn't reclock and thus is sensitive to clock skew.
Of course snake oil salesmen seized on this and started selling "high grade" cables that offered nothing.
Now of course when you get to SATA, none of this shit matters because it isn't a synchronous, no-retransmit system. If an error happens, the data will be resent. This is easy to do since everything is operating so much faster than the audio signal, and is further buffered by the system. If there are any errors on the wire, you never know, the system handles it behind the scenes. Also none of it affects the analogue audio signal, as it isn't clocked and converted until it hits the soundcard. Internal to the CPU, it is all just data.
Re:Ya well, this shit has been happening forever (Score:3, Insightful)
That's quite an informative post about the S/PDIF protocol. But I suspect the cable quality debate harkens from a period where the signal sent to speakers and between devices was analog. In which case, signal degredation and interference was in fact an issue.
But at this point, manufacturing processes are so solid that even coat hangers sound as good as any "high fidelity" speaker cables. Which is to say that the real worth of any speaker cable irrespective of marketing and street price is probably only slightly more than its worth in copper.
you surely mean jitter, not clock skew (Score:3, Interesting)
Cables cannot cause clock skew, because again long term the cable would have to somehow create or delete samples and a cable just can't do that. Cables can cause jitter, but the effect is vastly overstated.
Not reclocking data is a better way to deal with skew than reclocking is. Because if you reclock you have to drop samples or resample to deal with the long-term drift between the input clock and the reproduction clock.
Jitter on the input data can show up if you go straight to a DAC. But you can redesign your DAC to avoid it.
AES/EBU is a data format like S/PDIF. Either system can run over different forms of cable. AES/EBU is not an improved follow on to S/PDIF as you state. They were developed in parallel.
The colors! The colors! (Score:5, Funny)
The 0s are zeroier, and the 1s more one-ey!
/. discussions about stupid things... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lighten up Francis. (Score:5, Insightful)
The subject may be "obviously stupid" to you, but perhaps others have interesting things to add. I've already read some informative and insightful comments in this thread about audio/video cables, interference, hum, etc., which I would not have learned had I decided that the discussion was too "obviously stupid" to follow.
"Competing"? Why do you think it's a competition? Maybe an amusing thought just popped into their head and they decided to share it. Obviously some people enjoyed them or they wouldn't have been moderated "Funny". You seriously need to get over yourself.
wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Couldn't interference from the SATA communication interfere with analog components somewhere along the chain of hardware that converts "1s and 0s" to "sound waves colliding with my ear drum"?
I know that when I have headphones plugged into my computer, occasionally I'll get interference that seems to match up with disk usage.
Re:Who is this moron? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Digital? (Score:5, Informative)
If the delivered analog voltage always delivers the exact 100% same 1s and 0s, then it delivers 1s and 0s.
SATA cables can be grouped according to their transmission quality - class A SATA cables (the usual ones) deliver 100% quality; class B SATA cables deliver less than 100% quality, so they don't work and you throw them back at the shop for a replacement.
Re:Digital? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when does a SATA cable deliver 1s and 0s? It delivers an analog voltage, that happens to be determined as a 1 or 0 by noise thresholds. They could be making a better cable, the problem is once you meet the noise margins for this digital interpretation all extra improvement are for nothing.
That's what an electrical/computer engineer, when actually doing their job and not just trying to show off to non-engineers, calls "digital". Every digital electric circuit is an analog voltage that happens to be determined to be a 1 or 0 as long as it is within a threshold. That's what it means to be a (binary) digital circuit. It's why it's advantageous, because you either meet the threshold or you don't. And when it doesn't happen, we call that "failing". Heck, thanks to the nature of digital signaling, you can even use error correction codes, tolerate some amount of failure, and still recover 100% of the data.
So as long as you presume that "SATA cable" has an implied "functional" modifier, then it's fair to say it's delivering 1s and 0s.
Re:Digital? (Score:3, Funny)
Furthermore... if there is some gigantic RF source that’s screwing up the data crossing your SATA cable, you have worse things to worry about than something a fancy SATA cable will fix.
In fact, DON'T MOVE. Someone might have accidentally installed a 110 kilovolt power line directly through the room you're in, or, alternately, you might have set up your sound system around one of those. Very carefully look around around the room you're in, or around the tower you're at the top of, to see if you can see a six inch thick wire suspended by thirty-foot high pylons. THEY ARE NOT INSULATED, DO NOT TOUCH THEM, THEY WILL KILL YOU. Call emergency services if you can reach a phone. Otherwise, see if you can use them to transmit the audio signal.
Once you've discounted that, it's time to check for other problems.
For example, did you accidentally install your sound system inside a microwave oven? If so, simply do not use them both at the same time. Also, do not operate the microwave while you are inside it. (Also, don't operate your sound system when you're inside it, either. Also don't put either of those inside of you. Just stop putting things inside of things, okay?)
Another thing to check is if the sun gone supernova. You can check by seeing if everything's on fire. If so, RF is going to be a bitch for the next several hours, until the blast wave from the sun destroys the earth...we don't recommend trying to fix the cabling, and instead sitting and contemplating how you could have gone to six flags yesterday instead of spending the money on those cables.
Then check for dark matter and other dimensions. Some theories suggests that gravity might be able to cross dimensional barriers, which has bugger-all to do with any RF problems, but, frankly, you people who think digital signals degrade like that can't be swayed with facts.
Once you've eliminated all RF options, there are only a few possibilities left.
A major remaining cause of problems is if one part of your sound system traveling a significant portion of the speed of light compared to another part. Even if they were in the same frame of reference when you installed, they might not be anymore, so check. If so, time dilation will cause a frequency shift. Also, after several milliseconds, your entire system will be ripped apart as the cables no longer reach.
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:3, Informative)
Since both are carrying digital data, how is one stream of digital data any better?
Electrical hookup vs optical hookup isn't just digital vs digital. You have to consider grounding effects too. If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.
But that mains hum would have to enter *after* the digital->analog conversion, no? So the cable still wouldn't matter, unless you're saying that the cable itself is transferring hum from the dvd player to the analog amp.
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ya know, I'm in the live entertainment biz and folks that have come from the computer world don't have near the ground problems as the stereo jockies. We just put everything behind two UPS with an autoswitcher in the middle and never looked back. Of course all of our stuff is HD-SDI so it either works or it doesn't. Grounds loops don't matter when you are digital as that interference won't mean anything to the decoder which wouldn't ever have the opportunity to receive said interference as the interface controller will do the signal passing at which point all grounding effects disappear. This was a huge issue when cameras had analog outputs with BNC connectors. Now that it's SD or HD-SDI none of us have ever looked back.
The only time I run into grounding effects these days is on the other side of distro where I'm outputting SD distro for large projectors. Everytime it's been because their cables were way longer than they needed to be so there wasn't enough signal to reach the other side. These days more often than not, hum bars are caused by lighting which can be adjusted for in most cameras.
Of course the audio is done separately and we put it back together for our recordings. Audio has been digital for a long time too. The only analog part is the microphone who's cable will attach to an amplifier usually only a few feet away. Noise is calibrated during the sound check so it gets filtered and has negligible impact on quality. The wireless microphones goes to their receiver which is almost always digital out as well. They all got sick of those grounding issues especially since most stage performances have to more or less share the same ground.
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:5, Informative)
Electrical hookup vs optical hookup isn't just digital vs digital.
Correct. High speed digital signals actual have a lot of analog related physical issues. The field is generally called (digital) Signal Integrity [wikipedia.org], and one of the better known experts is Dr. Howard Johnson [signalintegrity.com].
You have to consider grounding effects too
If you mean shielding and/or signal termination, then yes.
If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.
Sorry, but mains hum should be rejected by as always being below the noise threshold in a well design digital system. That's one of the most widely cited reasons for usage of digital signal processing of what are naturally continuous analog signals (e.g. audio, RF (mostly), visible and non-visible light/radiation).
In a classic digital system, the logic levels have a wide margin sepearing the two digital states. Say in a 0-5V TTL logic, common from the 1970s to 1980s. As long as the digital signal says outside the "dead band" around 2.0V (from memory), while a digital bit is either 0.0V (or very close to it) or 5.0V (or very close to it), so the noise from the AC mains hum (50-60 Hz) will not distort the signal enough to swap logic levels.
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless the interference is happening after the D-A conversion...I have this issue with my desktop computer, which is why I switched to a USB headset, issue gone. Thos AC97 chips are terrible, I wish they would burn in hell and bring back discrete sound cards. I miss the decent sound cards you used to be able to get.
Actually it is sometimes worse (Score:3, Informative)
The reason is that most optical cable you get is plastic, POF cable. It is great because it is flexible, durable, cheap, and can be made the size of the TOSlink opening. The problem is it is lossy as hell. Really poor transmission characteristics. Well this matters not at all when your DVD player sits on top of your receiver, as is so often the case. However if you have a setup where the devices are far apart, sometimes you discover that it doesn't work at all, or you get dropouts. You can, of course, replace it with real glass fiber but that is real expensive. Coax, on the other hand, works just great. A good 75ohm coax cable will go as far as you'd ever need in a home.
Also has the advantage that it uses the same kind of wire as video. Any 75ohm coax cable suitable for video is also suitable for S/PDIF.
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The facts are right there (Score:4, Informative)
If your SATA cables are working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s your computer reads into memory is exactly the same as the sequence stored on the disk. You can't improve on that.
If you SATA cables aren't working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s will be different -- but as your quote pointed out, this would affect everything. The cable doesn't know whether it's transmitting a WAV, an MP3, a JPG, or an EXE. If your cables are corrupting data, your computer probably won't even boot!
But, as the quote also pointed out, there are systems in place to detect and correct errors. Even if your cables are corrupting data, it's extremely unlikely that your computer will think it's getting the correct data and proceed to play it. Instead, it will retry, and the symptoms you'll see are slow or stalled transfers (just like a bad network connection).
Re:If you will buy this.... (Score:5, Funny)
I have some 700$ RCA cables you would love. A 1200$ toilet seat that I swear will make thinks "move" easier.
Just swipe your credit card here....
Dude, that's not a credit card reader. Stand up and pull your pants back up.
Re:It does work you fool... (Score:3, Insightful)
Poe’s law is in full force today... I can’t tell if you’re serious or being sarcastic.
Re:Comments Disabled (Score:3, Funny)
Well, it's a darn good thing that you're the 93rd slashdotter to post the exact same comment. I might've missed it otherwise!