I onced interviewed for a job at a software company developping virtual instruments plug-ins. At some point in the interview, the guy told me this great story :
"We made some test once, and we changed the skin of the software, to a new color. Every people said the software sounded better with that new skin. Yet we changed absolutely nothing except the color."
I'm still wondering if some graphical configuration ( such as a bright color) wouldn't stimulate the brain more, making it more receptive in general, and to sound in particular, letting people "hear" better.
While I totally agree with the moral of this story, I'd like to point some reasons why the visuals of a software might interfere with audio:
1. just check this website: http://thume.ca/screentunes/ there is a large chance that your computer videocard and/or LCD will make a noise on that page
2. when the videocard makes such a noise, it can interfere with the PSU and thus affect the soundcard as well.
3. Thus, it's actually possible that changing a "high-frequency stripy" interface to a solid color will lower the noise-floor on the sound-card a bit.
I can confirm that. On most computers I could tell what is happening on screen just by listening. Scrolling, video playback, task switching all makes different noises. I have decent headphones and amplifier.
This is a ground loop. Small part of the current returning from CPU to PSU goes through "common ground" connection to the DAC, then through the analog DAC-amp ground conductor, causing some voltage to develop across this connection, and then back to your computer through grounding cables in the walls.
The voltage across DAC-amp ground causes a DC offset seen by the amp (likely less than 1mV). The exact amount of voltage varies in time with CPU power consumption, producing AC that you hear.
You need to eliminate the ground connection between computer and DAC (toslink, USB optoisolator, etc.).
Nope. I'm running into an external DAC and then a Rega integrated amp. Makes noise her as the bars get smaller. The noise is independent of amplifier volume, including with the amplifier volume all the way down, and even occurs with the amplier and DAC switched OFF. The noise is actually coming from the LCD.
RE: #1, it definitely made noise on my LCD. It's an older CCFL type backlight, I don't know if that makes a difference but I do know that fluorescent lighting can emit similar sounds.
We find whenever we significantly change the look of our website or our emails, conversion goes up significantly for a couple of weeks and then most the time goes back to the normal levels.
I think a difference just stimulates the brain, along the same lines of why supermarkets infuriatingly keep moving the products around so you can't just auto-pilot your shop.
There's a reverb plugin I use that has 70s 80s and "now" modes, which drastically affect things like internal sampling rates (bandwidth) and noise. It also completely changes the color of the large GUI from deep red/brown to cool blue to bright white.
I find that I have to shut my eyes or look away from the screen when toggling the modes to avoid biasing my perception of how the audio is changing. It's particularly bad because the visual changes are designed to evoke the effect it has on the sound.
Sensory experiences are incredibly subjective and different modalities interrelate in all kinds of complex ways. It could be said that everybody is synaesthetic to some extent, some just more so than others.
In many contexts outside science, whether some sensory difference exists objectively or not may not be relevant at all as long as there is a perceivable difference in subjective experience.
There might not actually be anyone who buys these cables. The point might be to use their existence (or claimed existence) to make the $200 Ethernet cable seem like a good "middle" choice.
That some of the quotes on that blog seem to indicate that different cables can actually change rhythm and timing is really eye-opening to just how outlandish some claims can get.
It doesn't mean that the cables or other equipment differences, can change the 'beats per minute' of a music track.
If the bass is reproduced poorly and sounds 'woolly' it will subjectively mess up the timing of the bass playing with respect to the rest of the music, as though the bass player is less skilful. Whereas listening to the same track with equipment that has tight, clear and dynamic bass can make the music sound more lively and subjectively 'faster', and it is more likely to make your foot tap.
Yeah, sure. But most of these comments are about cables carrying digital signals, a class of devices which only have two real operating modes: "working perfectly" and "catastrophic failure". Instead of respecting the principles of the physics and information encoding associated with this layout, though, we see outlandish claims of frequencies traveling at different speeds and damaging your multi-octave audio.
With digital audio going to a DAC even with cheap cables, the '1's and '0's should be arriving OK and will be in "working perfectly" mode. You have to hope that is the case with USB audio as there is no error checking.
But when bits arrive is very important in audio, and whether or not the devices and cables in the chain before the DAC have introduced noise on the ground plane is also considered very important by some.
I can't see how an ethernet cable can affect timing, as the packets with the digital signal might even arrive out of order. The earthing of the ethernet cable might influence how much noise is introduced the ground plane though. It might explain why the Audioquest cables are directional, if their earthing arrangement is directional perhaps.
USB has error checking (there are checksums on every USB packet).
Isochronous USB has no error recovery (so if that packet arrives with a mangled checksum, you have a data dropout).
However, cables are the least of your worries; it's the driver stack (USB, ethernet, whatever) and the audio software feeding it that are the main sources of error. Unfortunately for Monster (et al) it is far harder for them to sell a $5,000 piece of software that does nothing than it is for them to sell a $5K piece of snake-oil-class hardware; the software is objectively analyzable without expensive tools, for instance.
I have actually used this claim for less evil purposes in the past...
I spent my summers in high school working phone support for a university. This was back in the day when people brought desktop computers with them to school and plugged them into the wall with an ethernet cable... Many of the issues folks had getting connected could be solved by reseating the ethernet cable (either it was poorly seated in the first place, or the process of unplugging it and plugging it back in caused the NIC to reset some stuck bit of the driver). Unfortunately, it was quite common for folks to ignore your instructions to unplug the cable and plug it back in (as they are _sure_ that couldn't be the problem). I quickly picked up a habit of suggesting they may have accidentally gotten a 'unidirectional ethernet cable' and they should try swapping it end for end.
you know how nigerian scams are badly written and full of typos to avoid anyone with half a brain? well, audiophile scams put on a price tag like that for the same reason.
"All audio cables are directional. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. Arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality. For best results have the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music. For example, NAS to Router, Router to Network Player."
This can probably easily lead to problems with even slight differences in cable length. A network technician told me about problem that can occur in the network when the connecting fibres of ethernet outlets have differences in length (say, more than few millimeters).
10mbit ethernet uses one wire pair in each direction at a low frequency.
100mbit ethernet uses one wire pair in each direction at a high frequency.
1gbit ethernet uses all four pairs simultaneously in both directions at the same[1] frequency as 100mbit. Which is why wolfgke mentions problems when the different pairs aren't the same length.
This will be perfect with the new HiFi Harddisks I'm developing at my startup.
They'll offer HiFi data storage to make sure your crappy youtube to mp3 rips don't lose quality when stored over a longer time period.
Without commenting on whether the product is worth the price (I don't know enough about HiFi quality):
There is a bell curve of purchasing mentality - from a minority who buy solely based on what's cheapest, through varying degrees of cost/benefit tradeoff, through to a minority who will tend toward whatever is most expensive. It often pays to offer something to that latter group.
This. Fashion and luxury is crazy. Sales may increase as you increase the price.
This video explains the Swedish concept of "vasking", essentially throwing expensive liquids down the drain to demonstrate how little their price tags matter to you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uhEpMJ3n_wU (it's also hilarious)
Making stuff that people use exclusively to show off is such a great business that the only reason everyone's not trying to do it must be some misguided faith in humanity.
My favorite example of this is drug dealer's cars. In Gang Leader for a Day, the author recounts how lieutenants in a Chicago drug gang who made only 30-40k/year had to spend almost all of it on their cars, and often had to live with their mothers as a result.
This applies to a lot of jobs. Lawyers at certain firms are expected to wear expensive clothes and drive nice cars; the guy who drives a Geo Metro to work and wears a "meh" suit is frowned at. Even more ridiculous is the fact that like the drug dealers, the fashion is driven by the richest people, and the less secure and wealthy folks follow.
There's a great book called The Millionaire Next Door, where they look at the spending habits of millionaires. One of the things that stuck out was the fact that a lot of these people have "boring" jobs that don't have "face" to keep. No one really cares about what the owner of a janitorial company or a welding supplier looks like, so there's no pressure for him or her to have the Right House or the Right Car or the Right country club memberships. In contrast, the book notes a couple of doctors and lawyers who are really active in their professions' social scenes and are living paycheck-to-paycheck despite earning far more.
Personally, I like my Shittic (beat-up Civic that is missing half the paint). Every month that it keeps running is another month that I don't have to make a car payment. My girlfriend winces every time she sees it, though...
> the only reason everyone's not trying to do it must be some misguided faith in humanity.
Or an inability to keep a straight face through an entire sales pitch. I doubt the effect works if the sales person or market copy actively mocks the buyers' intelligence.
>Making stuff that people use exclusively to show off is such a great business that the only reason everyone's not trying to do it must be some misguided faith in humanity.
This must also be the reason why this kind of manufacturing is prominent in Italy, where any faith in humanity is long gone.
I don't mindthat people make, sell, or buy these stupid cables.
My problem is with the dishonesty that often comes with it. There are some companies that are not crooks but mostly it feels like an area full of scams.
That's the difference between this crap and high fashion, which leads a far more respectable existence. Lots of people pay huge prices for Louis Vuitton bags or Christian Louboutin shoes. Easily 100x times the price of comparable alternatives.
But those companies don't advertise their bags as having more "stuff holding power" as the average purse. Or "unparalleled foot retention and lifting capability".
I was thinking the same. If just 5-10 rich guys ask their personal shopper for the best setup, "money not an object" and the shopper buys these cables, then it was worth it to set up the entire thing.
As far as I know its just a Ethernet cable and that means that there would be no difference to the "sound".
It does have an extremely high bandwidth at 100 gbps (gigabits) but unless you have a audio file that requires 10 gigabytes per second then it is completely useless (Uncompressed audio is at most a few hundred kbps).
Also the pure silver and other features would not make a difference to sound quality.
So I would say go buy a $5 Ethernet cable as the audio is digital and the receiver will either get the packet or not, the cable can't damage the sound quality unless it's analog.
> it does have an extremely high bandwidth at 100 gbps
Please don't believe even this (technically sounding) claim! You cannot specify the "bandwidth" of a cable, so even if they'd write 2Tbit/10km it would be just as made up as what they are writing now.
What you can do is to specify physical parameters, such as attenuation at specific (most interesting: high) frequencies, distortion and reflection caused by impedance mismatches at the connectors. Then maybe it will meet the requirements to transport Ethernet accodring to the standard, and under the conditions specified therein (1000Base-T, IEEE 802.3ab), carrying 1 GBit/second over up to 100 meters.
And while the cable being sold might be well shielded enough, and using a dielectric that allows it to exceed the attenuation requirement of Gigabit Ethernet by huge amounts, 100 GBit/s is so far off the scale that I'm pretty convinced that with current technology this is completely unattainable, even under best laboratory conditions.
It's worth noting that the 100GigE standards only allow copper cabling up to 7m (or 30m at a push). Despite the advert's claims, 100m is fibre-only at this point.
I've seen this in my own business. In my last full time job (18 years ago) my time was charged out at £150 pre day, I setup on my own and started charging the same customers £600 per day.
The difference in the way the customers treated me was astounding, I was exactly the same person in the same clothes with the same knowledge but they valued my skills more just because they were paying more.
Would anyone then agree that this could be a marketing ploy? After all, given that we've all clicked on it to see what its all about, hasn't it worked on us?
Something I learned from startups is that PR is an underestimated force. Could this be for PR?
Great, I've been looking for an ethernet cable, I recently purchased a subwoofer cable for only £9,049 ( http://www.audiovisualonline.co.uk/product/8401/audioquest-w... ) and I was worried that I wasn't getting the best out of the sound as the cables earlier in the system weren't at this quality.
I wonder about the mentality of people that plug their £9049 cables into the highest end surround sound system at a comparably mere £6296?
Though the biggest gap in the market would appear to be in TV brackets, where the highest-end option, at a mere £599, doesn't even claim to have sound-augmenting properties
This is hilarious. You are sold the idea of a "pipe", through which something flows -- of course, having a "smoother" directional pipe would be better! But then again, we are talking about electrons -- alternating currents -- flowing one way _and_ the other for a short while. Having knowledge about how currents move in leads, typically on the surface of the lead, explains why quality cables consists of a multitude of small leads.
On these leads, electrons are flowing a little bit in one direction and then as the polarity of the source shifts, a little bit in the other. The whole idea of having a "direction" in a cable is just...
At one time we really had analog equipment "all the way down", so it kind of made sense to minimise distortion and loss in every individual link. Nowadays, we use digital systems where the music information is conveyed as "symbols". In this realm, a lot of the concepts from analog systems (or even the "pipe" system mentioned above) just makes no sense.
It is true that the digital information is still run over analog cables, in this case I assume we are talking about an Ethernet layer, but it has very little resemblance with the idea of a loudspeaker cable as information is packaged and translated in various ways before actually appearing on the cable.
Do you remember that funny marker pen that you could use to paint the edge of CDs to minimise effects of laser light running back and forth in the CD. That was a try att connecting a common understanding of the turntable with the new CD medium -- the idea of having a pickup that could be disturbed. I wonder onto what common understanding the idea of these cables are trying to connect, the water pipe idea is visual and easily taken but jumps a generation or two of reality.
I choose to see this as a taxation of... less gifted but wondrously more wealthy people. Actually a tax that kind of makes sense.
I have always wanted to ask this but never found the right place to do so.
Why, in the world of Digital Audio with ones and zeros, would any cable, be it silver or gold or what ever super conducting cores make any difference to sound quality?
Yes it would properly make 0.0001% ( Wild Guess Only ) speed difference due to better conductivity and less Error correction. But if everything gets decoded at the Chip level, then the cable should in theory makes absolutely NO difference in sound quality what so ever.
Poor quality or really long connections can cause jitter, especially since in most consumer stuff the clock is sent with the signal. That jitter can cause differences in the signal out from the d/a. That said, the difference is less than minuscule, and time and time again people post double blind tests that prove even people who consider themselves trained audiophiles can't tell the difference. Same goes for analog - in practice the cable doesn't make an audible difference, no matter what you use (see below)
the whole jitter thing is nonsense in the context of something like an Ethernet cable since only the data is being sent, the packets only have to arrive 'fast enough', the timing doesn't matter.
For buffered data being sent and decoded, like via ethernet, the bits are the same on both ends, so I'm not sure what effect you would even make up to say it could change the output.
Yeah I remember reading an article a few years back about hdmi cables. They tested a load of different ones and found they found no difference between the expensive 'gold' ones vs the cheapest of the cheap hdmi cables.
Its just a hangover from the old days - the big electronics stores still get to sell mom & dad a £20-30 cable when in reality could pick up one, just as good, for £2 on amazon!
I can't remember a title and link to it, but not long ago there was an article about people demanding lossless encoding and how it doesn't make sense because it's almost impossible to tell the difference.
Same here, I guess. There are rich people who believe they have a very special taste and can afford it :)
"Silver plated plugs" Can someone remind me of the electric properties of Silveroxide? ( Or do I need to hire someone who polishes the plugs before each track?)
Somewhere around here I have a printed copy of a white paper from Tyco (mostly known for IC socket mfgr, although they make a lot of other connectors) on the topic of silver vs gold, mostly as applies to IC sockets.
From memory the oxides, sulfides, and chlorides all have to be worried about but they tend to be mushy semiconductors and any wiping action in the connector will 1) destroy the connector plating in 10-20 uses at typical plating / finish reqs 2) wipe itself clean giving a lovely perfect silver to silver contact until it wears out.
Another interesting aspect is this engineer from Tyco went to great lengths to claim they can commercially ship lower electrical and thermal resistance SILVER connectors than GOLD connectors as a complete connector system. Its not the bulk conductivity of Ag vs Au that matter, its that every gold plate has an underlying nickel plate or whatever, and some discussion of the deformation of silver being a benefit so you get higher contact area leading to higher conductivity.
Then again this whitepaper is around a decade old and gold prices haven't exactly dropped back to $230/oz since then, meanwhile Tyco and everyone else still ships mostly tinplate and goldplate IC sockets and I don't recall ever seeing silverplate IC sockets in any mouser/digikey product list. So maybe there's other problems with silver plated electrical contacts in the real world. It has the odor of a mid 00s marketing doc in its (remembered) claims that by mid 10s no one will ever use tinplate / goldplate in connector design. Well, we can see how that turned out, but maybe the 20s.
It made some impression on me a decade ago WRT thinking about RF connectors, .mil / aerospace will pay anything of course for higher performance so it gave me something to think about, if they really can deliver then we can expect gold to disappear from military aircraft radars and stuff like that. Although nothing seems to have materialized on this topic since then.
I couldn't find the original, but this seems to be an updated review of the use of silver platings in connectors. It even mentions the rising gold prices as a motivation to look into alternative materials.
Gold causes problems with the wibblefrozits in the audio due to the harkenfarf effect and a low bunfloading, as anyone with any experience in this area knows.
These cables are truly wonderful for deconstructing the Mozartian spacial qualities of the sound and to perpetuate the plateau-spreading fluidity of the music.
Some Hifi equipments are in the range of hundreds of thousands, it is easy for the reseller to slip in a couple of cables in the range of thousands. It's 1% of the final price.
Of course there will be absolutely no difference with a 5 € Ethernet cable.
Most interesting is that expensive analogical cables are as much as useless. During a blind tests listeners are unable to tell which cable is the "expensive" one.
To be fair, that price is for the 12 meter (40 ft) cable. The 75cm (2 ft) cable is much more affordable at just £600.
The best part about that cable is that someone took the time to determine which direction it sounds best, and the cable is marked to make it straightforward to attach it in the best direction!
I doubt it. That seems like the sort of thing that could be illegal. Getting an intern to listen to the cable in both directions and mark an arrow on would cost what, $.50/cable?
Essentially same type of four pair cable that is used for SpaceWire and Ethernet on-board of ISS is readily available and generally costs less than 10EUR/meter.
Because it gives you a "large sound picture". If there's anything I've ever wanted in my pictures, it's for them to be large sound.
What's more, these ethernet cables work better passing data in one direction than the other. Here's me using ordinary, non-directional cables, like a sucker :(
"We made some test once, and we changed the skin of the software, to a new color. Every people said the software sounded better with that new skin. Yet we changed absolutely nothing except the color."
I'm still wondering if some graphical configuration ( such as a bright color) wouldn't stimulate the brain more, making it more receptive in general, and to sound in particular, letting people "hear" better.