Nordost Tyr 2 Review (USB Cable)

[welder]

View attachment 192581

Four people bought this cable and can't face their mistake.

It might be a just a loaner and his family

 

[Metronomy]

I was following @Blumlein 88's joke on the service where the nordost site is hosted. GoDaddy is known to be the cheapest.

Definitely Amazon needs to raise the price....

 

[Blumlein 88]

IF "Descartes" THAN start thinking ELSE stick with what you know AND stay in dogma. Descartes brought back us as the mesure from divine whatever. In the mean time we progressed quite when it comes to measurements and tools all do more hand work (kraftwerk) wouldn't hurt.

Did you mean IF, THEN, ELSE, AND? Are we talking BASIC? Of course there is the Descartes programming language superseded by RENE.

 

[RHO]

I must admit I voted waste of money knowing brand alone, let alone type. Didn't expect the review to show otherwise, but thanks for the review, keep it up.

Yep, I voted "waste of money" even before I read the review.
I know the Amazon basics cable does the job, so why would anything more expensive be not a waste of money?
At $1400 the performance could have been stellar and still it would be a waste of money.

 

[ZolaIII]

Did you mean IF, THEN, ELSE, AND? Are we talking BASIC? Of course there is the Descartes programming language superseded by RENE.

Just don't imagine what I meant by hand work please.

 

[ronwan]

My science teacher clearly was not a trained audiophile when he taught us that energy is not transferred via the wire.
Would there be a market for selling audiophile EM fields?

 

[KxDx]

$20 worth of materials.

$1380 worth of marketing

 

[Vini darko]

Pure malarkey.

 

[JeyElDee]

I tested such a cable once but the only thing I noticed was the speed. It was extremely fast. As soon as the cable was connected, music that I had in mind to play started playing before even booting the computer. So I didn't like it and sent it back. I don't like cables that know what music you will play before you hit any play button.

 

[_thelaughingman]

Definitely gives me few inches of confidence.

 

[xarkkon]

I was listening to the Nordost and my wife comes up from the kitchen and asks, "what did you do to your system? It sounds so much better!"

1400 for my wife to say that, regardless of audio snake oil and quackery, very tempting indeed!

i tip my hat yet again to the kind sacrifice of the owner who loaned the cable across for testing....

 

[tarikuz]

1400 gallons of snake oil!

 

[Lambda]

A other USB cable?! why? no one here is stupid enough to belie in any of this marketing.

 

[Soniclife]

Sure, just like you can’t measure the efficacy of snake oil.

Oh you can, you just have to use the right tools.
e.g. https://quickbooks.intuit.com

 

[Madjalapeno]

"But did he listen to it?" - yes he bloody well did.

 

[Deleted member 19122]

I can understand the hunger for gain, the frauds, all of that is in our society

Yep, but that don’t surprise me that much, the power of the greed is strong in this world. Me I was more trying to imagine this guy at the Nordst boot at a trade show hustling this stuff… Damn, how can you keep a straight face… that’s what my mind can’t register… So used to lie they come to believe that BS themselves? The human mind is fascinating…

Once you get past the basic understanding that most of mankind will do anything and I mean anything to make a buck or is just obsessed with GREED then it's not hard at all to imagine.You want to know why it happens...just follow the money.

 

[Thunder22]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Nordost Tyr 2 USB cable. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $1,400 (no typo).

Here was the kicker. I was listening to the Nordost and my wife comes up from the kitchen and asks, "what did you do to your system? It sounds so much better!" I told her not this time. And that I was wearing headphones so no way she could have observed that! Disappointed that she didn't score a point with me and hence couldn't cash it for something else, she went back down letting met to this review....

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

I like to laugh before going to work; thank you.

 

[pkane]

Sound quality can only be determined in the mind of the listener. To paraphrase Descartes ,I hear therefore I am.

Forget Klippel or AP equipment, we all need to chip in to help @amirm get a high resolution fMRI machine to do the level of testing required by this hobby.

 

[AndreaT]

Waste of money. Probably the manufacturing cost is less than $10. A great victory for advertising, a proof that humans are infinitely gullible. Thank you Amir! The review adds to the list of products with catastrophic cost/value ratio.

 

[Dennis_FL]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Nordost Tyr 2 USB cable. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $1,400 (no typo).
View attachment 192553
As you see, the cable doesn't look all that fancy but still has a premium feel to it. It highly resists rotating so when you try to align the USB cable, you may have to work hard at it. I think this is due to use of solid conductors.

I thought I start by quoting top line advertising from one of their resellers:

View attachment 192554

It would be wroth it if it did all of that....

Nordost Tyr 2 USB Cable Measurements
We don't listen to USB cables but rather, the analog output of our audio devices, in this case, a DAC. I usually use my Schiit Modi 2 DAC for USB cable testing because its USB implementation is poor and highly dependent on the computer activity and to a minor degree, USB cable. Alas, today it would not produce a stable output with its SINAD jumping between 85 and 90 dB. It did the same with every USB cable so I put it aside and instead chose the Topping DX3 Pro+ that I had pulled out recently for other testing. This is a $200 DAC and headphone combo with superb performance.

For comparison, I chose to use my usual 6 foot Amazon Basics USB cable. I really like this cable due to its flexibility and durability having been plugged in and unplugged probably 1000 times in my system as I test various USB device. It costs all of $6.83 including Prime shipping!

Let's start with our usual dashboard, first with Amazon Basics:
View attachment 192555

Exceptional performance with distortion near -130 dB (15 dB better than threshold of hearing). SINAD is therefore determined by noise level which is around -115 dB (at threshold of hearing). Now let's swap the Amazon Basics USB cable for Nordost Tyr 2:
View attachment 192556

All we see are incredibly small run to run variations. Output voltage is the same to three decimal places. Frequency is the same to 5 decimal places. Noise floor is the same. SINAD is the same. We could stop here but let's keep going, testing with 32 tones at much higher sampling rate of 192 kHz (hence more traffic on USB cable):

View attachment 192557

Again we see both measurements being the same. We are digging deep down to -150 dB and can't find a difference. Notice how the top of the tones is the same indicating identical frequency response as well.

Maybe noise floor has changed. Let's measure that difference:
View attachment 192558

Just random run to run variation. Notice the super wide bandwidth of this test going 25X than maximum hearing range! And we still can't find a difference.

Let's widen our analysis of noise and distortion for 1 kHz tone:
View attachment 192559

Worst case noise and distortion is only -120 dB at around 50 kHz. The instrumentation has no problem digging so deep but is not finding a difference between these USB cables.

Ah, what about "timing?" OK, let's run a square wave through the system. We up the sample rate to 768 kHz to allow the edges to resolve well:
View attachment 192563

No difference at all even if we highly zoom on the edge:
View attachment 192564

I did some testing for mains hum immunity by holding a transformer next to the USB cable. Neither cable caused any rise in mains hum into the DAC output. Doing the same by the way near its unbalanced RCA output did so proving that the test is valid. It is just that the DAC doesn't care about mains hum on USB or none was induced into either.

Nordost Tyr 2 USB Cable Listening Tests
I plugged in my Dan Clark Stealth headphone ($4,000) into the output of the Topping DX3 Pro+ to perform my listening tests. Stealth has one of the lowest distortions of any headphone I have measured and being closed back, nicely isolates outside noise allowing me to hear lower level detail better.

I started with Amazon Basics cable and my reference test tracks. Sounded great as usual. I then switched in the Nordost Tyr 2. The quick impression was that the sound became more compressed and congested. To confirm, I went back to Amazon Basics. It indeed sounded better. A bit later I switched back to Nordost. Now the Nordost sounded more clear and detailed! Listened for a bit more and switched back to Amazon. Now the Amazon sounded more detailed and clear! Continue to listen and these differences faded within a few seconds. Needless to say, none of this is real. The cables are not making a difference. It is me that is varying my perception as I go through plugging and unplugging stuff and music keeps playing.

Here was the kicker. I was listening to the Nordost and my wife comes up from the kitchen and asks, "what did you do to your system? It sounds so much better!" I told her not this time. And that I was wearing headphones so no way she could have observed that! Disappointed that she didn't score a point with me and hence couldn't cash it for something else, she went back down letting met to this review....

Conclusions
We could have concluded a priori that such a cable can't and won't change anything in the output of an audio device. Still, it is always good to put solid facts behind an opinion. And those facts are strong. There is not even a remote hint that the Nordost cable is impacting the performance of our DAC. We all know that it can't change the binary values going over the wire. All it could do was change the nature of noise it lets through and we measured that: it did nothing in that regard.

I know someone will say, "but you tested one device." Yes but given the sensitive nature of our instrumentation, if this cable had made any difference we would have seen it. If it can't possibly make a difference on some DACs, then it better say so. Statements of benefit are unconditional. From Nordost advertising for this cable: "The Tyr 2 USB 2.0 Cable is guaranteed to take your computer audio system to the next level. "

Well, the guarantee failed. I measured no difference let alone taking my system to the next level. Listening tests showed the same past the vagaries of such tests.

Needless to say, I can't recommend the Nordost Tyr 2 USB cable. Save your money and buy more music with it.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

My problem with some USB cables has been bandwidth. They work fine on most everything and then fail with DSD sources. I have that now. I had frequent noise only on DSD and I bought a new cable (only $15) and all is OK now.

Makes sense? Similar to an extension cord wire diameter?