"Premium" USB & Ethernet cables?

[Chrispy]

The first clue is it was a Wireworld ad. One of the most ridiculous companies around.

 

[Palladium]

The low end vendors may try to cheat, or not do outgoing quality control. I'd also be worried about the ultra high end vendors not having the test equipment needed.

Its like those overpriced audio boxes that see an noise improvement with power cleaners, because their PSUs are so badly designed in the first place.

 

[boxerfan88]

My question:

If a digital system, with error correction, can can sound better thru one type of cable, does that cable change bits? Because that's the only way it could change how the music sounds, right? They also claim a USB cable, for the low low price of ONLY $499, is better than others. Can someone please tell me if that's the way digital works? Thanks for your time.

If a cable facilitates error free transmission, then the music must sound the same.

If the cable is bad & transmission has error, it’ll likely result in clicks/pops/dropouts, but not tonality changes.

These are my thoughts.

 

[GXAlan]

If a cable facilitates error free transmission, then the music must sound the same.

If the cable is bad & transmission has error, it’ll likely result in clicks/pops/dropouts, but not tonality changes.

These are my thoughts.

Review and Measurements of Wireworld Starlight 7 USB Cable

This is a review and detailed measurements of Wireworld Starlight 7 flat USB cable. It is on kind loan from a member. The cost is USD $100 including Prime shipping for the 1 meter/40 inch length I am testing. For this review, I compared it to my current favorite, the 6 foot/1.5m version of...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Again, Amir has shown that you do reduce mains noise with fancy USB cables. It is just that the mains noise was inaudible to begin with and you just move things even quieter. But this is a demonstration of how cables can make a “difference” in digital transmission while simultaneously telling you that you don’t really need to spend a ton of money on fancy cables.

 

[Palladium]

Review and Measurements of Wireworld Starlight 7 USB Cable

This is a review and detailed measurements of Wireworld Starlight 7 flat USB cable. It is on kind loan from a member. The cost is USD $100 including Prime shipping for the 1 meter/40 inch length I am testing. For this review, I compared it to my current favorite, the 6 foot/1.5m version of...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Again, Amir has shown that you do reduce mains noise with fancy USB cables. It is just that the mains noise was inaudible to begin with and you just move things even quieter. But this is a demonstration of how cables can make a “difference” in digital transmission while simultaneously telling you that you don’t really need to spend a ton of money on fancy cables.

Those inaudible sidebands reduction have nothing to do with the digital domain but better analog shielding of the cable which isn't correlated to price anyway.

 

[GXAlan]

Those inaudible sidebands reduction have nothing to do with the digital domain but better analog shielding of the cable which isn't correlated to price anyway.

Yes and yes.

But it shows how analog noise on a digital cable affects the sound.

 

[boxerfan88]

Those inaudible sidebands reduction have nothing to do with the digital domain but better analog shielding of the cable which isn't correlated to price anyway.

Exactly.

 

[boxerfan88]

Again, Amir has shown that you do reduce mains noise with fancy USB cables.

Or could it be poor device design that allows mains noise to leak from digital section to analog section?

If generic cable & fancy cable both ensures error free transmission, there won’t be sound differences.

 

[Palladium]

BTW my Acer XB271HU monitor has a rather flaky DP port which requires me to reseat the cable every year or so to clear up the intermittent dropouts.

Running at 150Hz, 1440p and 32bpp that's 4.4 GB/s over DP, magnitudes higher than any 2ch audio stream.

Even then either the display works perfectly fine, or it completely drops out to fully black. I have never seen any visual distortion of any kind.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

Somehow we were able to get high definition video from Pluto to our Earthbound TV sets and monitors using these digital transmission and error correction protocols. You know, the same ones the international monetary and banking system uses to move trillions of dollars around the world daily without fear of losing anything in the process.

But if those self same protocols are employed to move audio information across a living room from a pc hooked up to a DAC with a 1 meter length of usb cable, some advertiser at Stereophile will tell us nothing will work accurately unless said transmission wire costs upwards of $50k. For Redbook Audio!!! Really! And there are people will read and believe it.

How does it feel to know that there's some dentist out there somewhere who may have worked in your mouth who was stupid enough to believe that? How confident are you in his bridgework now? Better think twice about chomping down on that ear of corn next time you think he may have been one of the "brainiacs' who bought a $50 k usb cable. And would you trust your surgeon to do a quintuple bypass on you if you learned he was an "audiophile" with a $200 k system? Better be damn sure to ask him how much he paid for his usb cables before you let him cut on you!!! Seriously.

 

[SoundsGood2Me]

Thanks Everyone for all your time and thoughts. Honestly it's about what I expected!

Appreciate it!

 

[SoundsGood2Me]

To be fair, wireworld USB had measured improvements!

Review and Measurements of Wireworld Starlight 7 USB Cable

This is a review and detailed measurements of Wireworld Starlight 7 flat USB cable. It is on kind loan from a member. The cost is USD $100 including Prime shipping for the 1 meter/40 inch length I am testing. For this review, I compared it to my current favorite, the 6 foot/1.5m version of...

www.audiosciencereview.com

It’s just that the improvement was not audible.

It might be good to use a Wireworld USB cable if you were focused on testing gear.

Edit: But for Ethernet, it’s unlikely to matter if you are using short runs and better than spec. You can run 10GbE of Cat5e for residential distances.

THANK YOU GXALAN!!!

This is EXACTLY some real world quantification.

And thanks to Amirm for his due diligence.

 

[SoundsGood2Me]

Hi-fi Ethernet cable - does it help with network streamer?

Looks very high quality but also expensive.

www.audiosciencereview.com

Do USB Audio Cables Make A Difference?

Aftermarket USB cables seem to be all the rage with people paying as much as $15,000 for a short run of it!!! Lots of subjective performance reports are out there but none back with any objective measurements that demonstrates any difference. On the other side of the fence many believe there...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Is Digital Audio Transmission Analog? [video]

A new argument has developed that transmission of digital audio is really analog. And for this reason, everything digital can be subject to audible difference from digital audio cables to digital output of streamers. This was emphasizes in a video by Darko Audio saying this explains his...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Thank You!

THIS is real world experience, not fantasy.

 

[Palladium]

Thank You!

THIS is real world experience, not fantasy.

In the case of that ethernet cable, that's even more clear-cut snake oil since both devices at each end are required to be galvanically isolated by transformers by design.

 

[DSJR]

I had to buy some USB C cables recently and rather than get a plain white or black one for a very few quid (fiver or less), I spend a few more and got some with braided outer sheaths which may not 'bend' as well, but may possibly last a bit longer with luck. One of them was a 3m one (A-C) to power the SU1 and data connect to the PC up there. No 'audible' difference than the wall-wart and optical connection I'd used before, so I'm happy with the slightly simpler trail of cables around and behind the rig.

I did the same with s couple of short HDMI cables I bought, purely for visual reasons - they either work or they don't and as an aside, the more you chase up your backside with inaudible 'improvements and upgrades' the quicker your wallet is emptied.

Oh, and to 'Stereophile' - it isn't *fun* at all, especially when punter's money is being wasted on foo and snakeoil products as too much of this damned industry still runs on!!!

 

[Cbdb2]

A cable with high resistance, because of narrow gauge wire, tinsel conductors, or overly long will lower the "1" voltage, possibly the "0" voltage and the voltage difference between the "1" and zero. A lot of capacitance or inductance will make the slope between "0" and "1" more gradual. On a 3.3 volt system, the boundary between detecting a "1" or "0" may be set at 2 Volts. Up to a certain point of severe voltage loss or rise/fall time the detector in the receiver will get back the signal perfectly.

Digital transition has moved beyond using 2 voltages. There's many modulation schemes, some use a frequency shift some a pulse width change, Ethernet uses pulse amplitude modulation (PAM). Mostly PAM-3 where the pulses have 3 different levels. Noise is not a problem. Standard CAT cable is not shielded and runs of 300' are not uncommon even in these situations and even if the other half of the tray is full of unshielded speaker cables running Amps of current or HDMI cables running Mhz.

 

[Fahzz]

I was recently looking for a short flexible HDMI cable for a small touch screen that I use in my streaming system, and I looked at the website for a well known big box store. 2.5 foot cable from Audio Quest for $2500 !!!!!!!!. I smiled and kept looking.

 

[AdrianusG]

... is one of the most overpriced cable companies ever. They are made by unicorns in the starlight of another dimension.


JSmith

But in that case, are they really overpriced?
i mean, that alone has to count for something, right

 

[neilt]

G'Day Folks! Long time lingerer, I rarely post, but I'd love an opinion. I've subscribed to Stereophile my whole life and just got April. While the written reviews tend to be an advertisement for the product, John Atkinsons' measurements are what drew me to this mag and quite possibly got me into RF engineering.

On page 150 WireWorld has an ad for cables. They claim:

"...Platinum Starlight 8 Ethernet recreates the most transparent, resolving, detailed, natural and immersive performance..."

TCP protocol corrects any errors with the data transfer! You can copy a file 1,000,000 times and MD5 sum it and it will be the same. If there is a network outage the copy will stop. You'd expect any system to panic at a network outage or retry .

As for HIFI USB cables same thing applies.

 

[delta76]

A passive cable cannot change bits, and therefore cannot change the sound.

It's funny.
If a brand tried to sell a passive HDMI cable that improves saturation and bokeh, then everyone would be laughing at them.

But change video to audio and suddenly, audiophiles lose their common sense and start believing in magic.

to be fair, it's much easier to compare video quality than audio. You can stop two TVs at the same moment and then it becomes clear.
There is a reason there are so much snake oil in audio industry - because A/B testing with sound is difficult to do properly