Effect of cables on digital *quality*

[chebby]

aliEnRIK:heros rule:
This is the last thing Im gona say about this, If a £50 digital cable gives better performance than a £10 one then surly that could apply to other forms of information such as sending a text document or spreadsheet. So if a £10 cable is worse than your £50 one then we would get text documents and spread sheets with inaccuracy's on cheaper cables but we don't! .documents and videos are sent all over the world though ancient phone lines to high speed Ethernet cables and guess what! there the same going in as they are going out! to a computer there is NO difference between a video and a text file there just bits that get processed.

Oh well

Id better put my cables up on ebay then..............

Evidently you did not get the irony of heros rule's piece.

Read it again carefully. Does it look like it survived the journey - along all those substandard cables and ancient phone-lines - intact?

 

[Andrew Everard]

heros rule:
This is the last thing Im gona say about this, If a £50 digital cable gives better performance than a £10 one then surly that could apply to other forms of information such as sending a text document or spreadsheet. So if a £10 cable is worse than your £50 one then we would get text documents and spread sheets with inaccuracy's on cheaper cables but we don't! .documents and videos are sent all over the world though ancient phone lines to high speed Ethernet cables and guess what! there the same going in as they are going out! to a computer there is NO difference between a video and a text file there just bits that get processed.

Ah, that old chestnut:

a) compare the amount of data required for a text document or spreadsheet with the amount of data per second required to play music.

b) sending a document from point to point is one thing; streaming music in real time is somewhat trickier.

c) either that or you've never, ever experienced a glitch or drop-out on a voice call on a mobile phone, whereas text messages get through unscrambled.

 

[Gort1951]

Are all your posts as misleading and fanciful?

Cause not, cable discussions again.

Gort1951 is the year "The Day The Earth Stood Still" was made and a classic movie, I don't know why they bother with re-makes.

War of the Worlds and The Time Machine are cult movies.

I didn't steal the hdmi cable from my mate, he'll have it back in a few days. So far he hasn't said nothing, you could call it blind testing.

 

[Andrew Everard]

Can't help feeling some of that last digital transmission got scrambled along the cables.

Can't make out what it was trying to say...

 

[aliEnRIK]

chebby:aliEnRIK:heros rule:
This is the last thing Im gona say about this, If a £50 digital cable gives better performance than a £10 one then surly that could apply to other forms of information such as sending a text document or spreadsheet. So if a £10 cable is worse than your £50 one then we would get text documents and spread sheets with inaccuracy's on cheaper cables but we don't! .documents and videos are sent all over the world though ancient phone lines to high speed Ethernet cables and guess what! there the same going in as they are going out! to a computer there is NO difference between a video and a text file there just bits that get processed.

Oh well

Id better put my cables up on ebay then..............

Evidently you did not get the irony of heros rule's piece.

Read it again carefully. Does it look like it survived the journey - along all those substandard cables and ancient phone-lines - intact?

Ive read it 3 times now chebby and it still reads the same to me

Your saying differently?

 

[visionary]

Am I the only one who thinks that we could spend more time LISTENING to music and watching film if we spent less time arguing about (sorry, discussing) the, relatively, esoteric apsects of what bit of wire we use to carry it from one box to the next? There are numerous threads where one group will try to convince another group that black is white. Let's allow each to believe what they will and get on with enjoying the content of those silver discs etc

 

[chebby]

aliEnRIK:chebby:aliEnRIK:heros rule:
This is the last thing Im gona say about this, If a £50 digital cable gives better performance than a £10 one then surly that could apply to other forms of information such as sending a text document or spreadsheet. So if a £10 cable is worse than your £50 one then we would get text documents and spread sheets with inaccuracy's on cheaper cables but we don't! .documents and videos are sent all over the world though ancient phone lines to high speed Ethernet cables and guess what! there the same going in as they are going out! to a computer there is NO difference between a video and a text file there just bits that get processed.

Oh well

Id better put my cables up on ebay then..............

Evidently you did not get the irony of heros rule's piece.

Read it again carefully. Does it look like it survived the journey - along all those substandard cables and ancient phone-lines - intact?

Ive read it 3 times now chebby and it still reads the same to me

Your saying differently?

yEs im saYing thert endeed. i their is to be erraws aplenty And dont say their isnT it¨

 

[aliEnRIK]

chebby:aliEnRIK:chebby:aliEnRIK:heros rule:
This is the last thing Im gona say about this, If a £50 digital cable gives better performance than a £10 one then surly that could apply to other forms of information such as sending a text document or spreadsheet. So if a £10 cable is worse than your £50 one then we would get text documents and spread sheets with inaccuracy's on cheaper cables but we don't! .documents and videos are sent all over the world though ancient phone lines to high speed Ethernet cables and guess what! there the same going in as they are going out! to a computer there is NO difference between a video and a text file there just bits that get processed.

Oh well

Id better put my cables up on ebay then..............

Evidently you did not get the irony of heros rule's piece.

Read it again carefully. Does it look like it survived the journey - along all those substandard cables and ancient phone-lines - intact?

Ive read it 3 times now chebby and it still reads the same to me

Your saying differently?

yEs im saYing thert endeed. i their is to be erraws aplenty And dont say their isnT it¨

I see where your coming from Chebby but I think your giving him FAR too much credit there

My personal opinion is he just cant spell (or rushed it)

 

[Gort1951]

When a document is sent over the internet, protocols are used. If they don't add up at the other end then the error received bytes of data are sent again. You can use cheap cables with computers but without any handshaking it would never work.

You can't do that with a live feed, only error correcting, that's why you get glitches while watching Freeview or Satellite when you get a storm.

 

[Anonymous]

yep I do admit my spelling was awful, usually the result of typing away late at night when I`m really too tired and I should be in bed for an early start!

 

[kinda]

Don't want to ignite the argument again, but wanted to add my experiences.

I've recently moved from using XBMC in a XBox playing FLAC over optical digital for music, as it broke. Until the new Sonos is up and running, I'm using an XDE500 over coax digital playing CDs. The data being sent to the amplifier is the same, but the quality is much improved to my ears, and I had previously realised the the XBox solution wasn't giving me what I'd heard in demos of my amp and speakers for music.

So whether it's the cable or device, the same digital data can be delivered in a way that affects quality. the whole point of moving from analogue to digital transmission is to reduce signal degradation as it's difficult for an on to turn into an off or vice-versa, and fitial cables should all be pretty reliable from that perspective.

The difference I think is in the stretching and shape of the square wave, which must alter how well it can be processed when delivered. In music and video this is an issue, as everything is in real time as pointed out in an earlier approach, whereas in the computer wolrd, for a word document or whatever, there is plenty of time to put the bits together into the end result to be presented, so it probably isn't an issue.

 

[Anonymous]

final word.

http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/03/audiophile-clai/

and I belive 5.1 sound has been transmited via the same method.

 

[Andrew Everard]

And still the same old articles keep cropping up. We haven't had Ben Goldacre or The Amazing Randi yet - you guys are slacking...

 

[The_Lhc]

heros rule:
final word.

http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/03/audiophile-clai/

and I belive 5.1 sound has been transmited via the same method.

Did you even bother reading the article? They're talking about speaker cable, not interconnects, I'd love to see how you'd connect coat hangers to a digital coax socket...

 

[aliEnRIK]

heros rule:

final word.

http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/03/audiophile-clai/

and I belive 5.1 sound has been transmited via the same method.

Id love to hear from ANY 'audiophile' thats actually REPLACED his speaker wie with coathangers and claimed after a month or 2s use theyre better/ the same

Id hazard a guess they were chucked to one side after a week or 2 when theyve been properly tested

 

[Anonymous]

My confused 2 cents..

After having read a lot of these posts im quite confused about all of this. I admit im a complete noob when it comes to hi-fi, but im a data comms designer and know a bit more about internet technologies so im thinking the basics of transmission are the same.

To the person that suggested his pictures were of superior quality when transfered to his laptop using a more expensive USB cable, that makes no sence at all. When transferring a file, USB still uses ACK to acknowledge that all bits have been recieved to close the connection. Speed doesnt matter when transferring a file over, so with a low quality cable it may take a wee while longer but the quality of the image or file would be exactly the same.

Now when it comes to a digital cable, such as an optical cable between a cd/dvd player and an amp, you are literally streaming bits from one device to another where each bit is an up or down to reflect the analog sound wave. The digital bits are recieved by the amp and then its processed by the DAC and sent through to the speakers. So since the digital cable is dealing in bits, I feel theres only 3 things to consider with the cable....

length - the shorter the better.

speed - how many bits can be passed in a second. eg, 1Gbps

delay - how long the bits take to reach the amp after it has left the cd player. eg 1ms

jitter - the variance in the delay. eg 0.02ms

Now your basic 16bit stereo sound wont require a hell of a lot of speed and optical cable manufacturing has gotten better and cheaper, especially in the area of data comms over the last few years. I very much doubt there is any difference between an optical cable priced at 10 vs a cable priced at 50 when dealing with audio, unless ofcourse you have a faulty cable. To me the amp DAC that processes the incoming packets, deals with the variance in bits and smooths this through to an accurate analog signal is far more important that the cable.

When it comes to HDMI however, thats a different matter as your dealing with both multi-channel audio and video which require much higher speeds and capacity. High quality HDMI cables are capable of a speed of about 15-16 Gbps. Lower quality cables are much less that this, so yes the cable will matter more here.

Cheers!

 

[Anonymous]

yep I knew they were talking about speaker cable I did read it but, The same applies to interconnects too in fact there was an article where a guy transmitted digital audio through a coat hanger to his receiver but i couldn't find that one again.

The problem with music is that it can be quite subjective, in one sense that subjectivity is our personal tastes were one persons music is another poison and in another it is our perception of what we are hearing and like taste its different for everyone and this creates the biggest problem in the argument as perception is so easy colored by circumstance,beliefs and various other factors.

The only sure way is to resolve the cable argument is to prove it scientifically and it has, time and time again in listening tests and through various measurements, in addition audio enginers and various other profetionals who work on developing audio hardware have stated that a lot of the common beliefs about interconnects and speaker wire bare no relation to the science they work with everyday.

yet this is a tired old argument and peoples jobs rely on the cable industry, moreover there is the argument that if as a doctor a hundred people came to you complaining of headache and yet despite your expertise and some though testing you could not find any sign of it . that does not mean that there not suffering from a headache!

The only thing I could ask of people who wish to buy cable to improve there system is to please buy with a little caution in mind and that the quality of materials and construction benefits analog components infinitely more than digital

 

[The_Lhc]

heros rule: The only thing I could ask of people who wish to buy cable to improve there system is to please buy with a little caution in mind and that the quality of materials and construction benefits analog components infinitely more than digital

Erm, speaker cable passes an analogue signal and you just categorically stated there's no difference between speaker cable and coat hangers...

 

[SteveR750]

I'm still of the opinion that if it souds different it should be measurable. If it's not measurable, and there is still an audible difference then either it's not truly an audibale difference, simply mind games with oneself (the Golden ears test should tell you how varied and subjective the diferentiation of audible sounds is), or that simply the wrong parameters are being tested. Either way, if you can justify spending X on a certain cable and it gives you some subjective benefit then thats perfectly reasonable, though not worthy of any lengthy debate.

 

[aliEnRIK]

SteveR750:I'm still of the opinion that if it souds different it should be measurable. If it's not measurable, and there is still an audible difference then either it's not truly an audibale difference, simply mind games with oneself (the Golden ears test should tell you how varied and subjective the diferentiation of audible sounds is), or that simply the wrong parameters are being tested. Either way, if you can justify spending X on a certain cable and it gives you some subjective benefit then thats perfectly reasonable, though not worthy of any lengthy debate.

I see the problem being as WHAT do you measure? All the sceptics measure the cable. If cables do make a difference then surely the best thing to measure would be the output itself? But I for one wouldnt know HOW to measure that either. You could have a 'tighter more defined' bass say, but it probably MEASURES the same in decibels.

If anyone has any ideas and software in mind im all ears as id LOVE to be able to measure the differences using some form of 'sound analyser'.

(Theres no way I could afford a professional 'jitter' measuring gadget though)