Re: So Stupid
I wholeheartedly agree.
$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience
Got £6,899 (US$10,500) to spare and worried that a Cat-6 Ethernet cable is keeping you from hearing the very best of your NAS-stored collection of MP3s? Fear not, your moment has come, with this work of wonder from Audio Quest. El Reg notes that the advertisement indicates the age of Audio Quest's engineers. Since the super- …
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Monday 9th February 2015 15:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So Stupid
I've always found binary value 100101111010111110100001000111 is less reliably transmitted through ordinary Ethernet cable. And this value is often found in classical music encodings. You lose the tips of the 1's. It's more reliably transmitted if coded first using Courier New though.
Yours truly, Stephen Fry
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Monday 9th February 2015 13:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Anyone who would fall for this load of old bollocks...
Just try your average audio forum. The snake oil vendors trying to tell you that the really expensive HDMI cables will give you 'better ones and zeros' then the cheap ones abound...Unfortunately it seems that there is no shortage of gullible suckers. This also explains why we still have religions I guess...
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Monday 9th February 2015 01:32 GMT Kanhef
One born every minute
There's at least some plausible basis for fancy audio cables for analog connections, where noise or interference can affect the output. (Whether or not that effect is noticeable or not is beside the point.) Once things are digitized, though, all the ridiculously expensive materials become irrelevant; as long as it still resolves to the same sequence of 1s and 0s, it doesn't matter how much noise there is in the signal.
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Monday 9th February 2015 10:02 GMT dan1980
Re: One born every minute
@Tom 35
Warmer?
"Warmer" is dangerously close to something one might be able to quantify objectively.
No, things like cables upgrades and hard drive swaps and CD beveling must bring only the unquantifiable and thus should be described in ambiguous words that can never reflect anything one might be able to test.
Thus, swapping to a more expensive cable will make instruments 'float' in the air yet still, somehow, display far better stereo imagine and separation. They will increase the 'punch' and 'weight' of the bass but never anything quite so crude and pedestrian as increasing the actual amount of bass.
Likewise, no increase in treble but more 'air' for certain. Though yes, it will be 'smother' and with better clarity, Also something about transients.
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Monday 9th February 2015 04:01 GMT Charles 9
Re: One born every minute
That's the thing. I know some cables can be so messed up that signals get flip-flopped (1's become 0's and vice versa) or just plain cut off, resulting in signal loss. Just how crappy do the cables have to be to reach that point?
Another point I'm wondering. I recall electrons can move at different speeds through different solids. How much an effect would silver have on the speed of electrons vs. copper? And how would that translate into a lag savings?
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Monday 9th February 2015 04:29 GMT Flocke Kroes
Speed of electrons
In a good conductor electrons travel millimeters per second. A semiconductor has far fewer electrons (or holes) that can move, so given the same current density, the electrons travel much faster. If they want fast electrons, silver is a really bad choice.
When one electron moves, it leaves behind an excess of positive charge that attracts electrons. The place it arrives at gets an excess negative charge that repels electrons. Although the electrons themselves barely move, regions with extra or missing electrons move fast - like a ripple on a pond moves far more than individual water molecules.
An excess of charge in one place is a voltage. A change in voltage moves along a pair of wires at the speed of light in the insulator between them. Light travels through popular insulators at between one half and one third the speed of light in vacuum. High frequency traders have already switched to air to reduce latency.
I can just imagine audiophools listening to their music with vacuum spaced ethernet cables while a pump chugs away to maintain the vacuum.
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Monday 9th February 2015 09:52 GMT 's water music
Re: Speed of electrons
In a good conductor electrons travel millimeters per second. A semiconductor has far fewer electrons (or holes) that can move, so given the same current density, the electrons travel much faster. If they want fast electrons, silver is a really bad choice.
IME really fast electrons give a clinical listening experience. You really loose the warmth of slower conducting media. I couldn't believe the difference when I swapped from 1.5 metre silver interconnects to 50 metre cables. The increased propagation delay allowed the pre-amp time to really open up the sound-stage. Honestly I think it even beats liquid nitrogen cooled granite speaker stands I bought last year.
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Monday 9th February 2015 12:28 GMT lotus49
Re: Speed of electrons
I used to know someone who really talked like this. He has plenty of money so £10k on a pair of speaker cables wasn't that big a deal to him. I pointed out that measuring equipment was not able to discern any difference between his solid silver interconnects and £50 copper cables. He did indeed resort to the audiophile nonsense of talking about "warmth", which, according to him, couldn't be measured. He genuinely believed that there was a difference so, to him, the £10k was worth it.
Clearly, he was a fuckwit of the first order but he really thought his money was well-spent. Truly, high end (i.e. high price) audio equipment is the alchemy de nos jours.
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Monday 9th February 2015 12:32 GMT picturethis
Re: Speed of electrons
This reminds me of my youth, (carbon)-dating myself here. Back in the mid-70's during the Citizen's Band radio craze (here in the US) I once had a guy open up his trunk (boot?) and proclaim that he had a stronger mobile signal than anyone else. He made this bold statement because he had 200' feet of coax rolled up in there connected between his rig and the antenna - and at 3db / 100 ft he was getting 6 db of gain (4x) the power. I just said "cool" and walked away... I didn't know where to begin... and even if I had he wouldn't have believed me.
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Tuesday 10th February 2015 04:13 GMT Gartal
Re: Speed of electrons
No, not in this digital age. a linear amplifier would not do the trick, he wants a massively parallel token ring powered starnet clustercon exuberance extatisising malifluence incredulating widget grumplising wallet deflator, something like the cable being talked about.
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Monday 9th February 2015 21:04 GMT BristolBachelor
Re: Speed of electrons
We have quite a complex compressor and liquid helium to maintain our vacuum. How do they do that in a cable?
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Thursday 28th May 2015 20:09 GMT ew100
Re: Speed of electrons
Er, no. The electric field wavefront moves at the speed of light in the medium, the electrons themselves just rattle around a little and drift gently along. If you had relativistic electrons bouncing around in your cable i) your cable probably wouldn't last long and ii) you really wouldn't want to be within a few feet of it!
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Tuesday 10th February 2015 04:02 GMT Gartal
Re: Speed of electrons
Except that Silver is a far better conductor than copper, in fact the best room temperature metallic conductor on the planet. The problem is not conduction or reluctance in copper or silver, it is in the use of silver as contacts. The silver will eventually tarnish unless coated with something meaning that all of those poor little electrons will become neurotic or tied up with ennui because of the presence of oxides. Then your piece of Benjamin Britain conducting Handles Fireworks music will come out as Sid Vicious on banjo with the violin parts played by Doug on the drums.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
