The Great Cable and Interconnect Swindle: An Etiology

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

It is absolutely NOT part of the signal. The bits are the signal. The system is designed to pass the bits and nothing else.

 

You are not suggesting ones and zeroes are being pulsed down the fiber ?

 

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

Lots of super smart people have designed it and it works. Not only do they say it works but there is test equipment that verifies it.

 

Lots of super smart people have tested it...to a degree of error tolerance.

 

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

 

If it didn’t work we wouldn’t be communicating. Probably the single greatest invention of the 20th century. Hmm ... do you use quantum mechanics every day? You use the Internet every day  

 

 

does quantum mechanics and the internet working mean better audio? Well, I guess if you stream from Qobuz 🙂

 

 

[jabbr]

5 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

You are not suggesting ones and zeroes are being pulsed down the fiber ?

 

Photons obviously.

5 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Lots of super smart people have tested it...to a degree of error tolerance.

 

Exactly and the error tolerances and test protocols are available to anyone who wishes to spend the time to read. 
 

5 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

does quantum mechanics and the internet working mean better audio? Well, I guess if you stream from Qobuz 🙂

 

 

Our usual suspects can continue to speculate that SSD noise is carried throughout the universe by little faeries flying in the aether ... ideally anyone may believe what they believe, and pray to whatever entity they wish — that’s religion. 
 

Tee hee. I have suggested a simple hypothesis and method of testing and validation — really as an example of how he could go about it — and then yes all the naysayers might read and make fanciful objections. I suspect one of the reasons folks in ASR are not interested in entertaining certain ideas is that no matter what, people have their own religions and wish to believe that SSD noise is carried over glass fiber by little faeries.

[jabbr]

8 hours ago, fas42 said:

Interesting experimenting I'm doing with the new active speakers,driven by boring Toslink from a Samsung DVD player - both units need mains filtering; and latest exercise has shown the that the speakers need lots of it - chaining filtering improves things. But the Samsung can't do without - if left with negligible conditioning the SQ suffers ... which indicates that jitter related behaviour over the optical link does matter.

Ethernet and TOSLINK are entirely different and share nothing really. Ethernet as of 10Gbe requires jitter testing and a tight eye pattern must be met. The details are publically available.

[jabbr]

9 hours ago, sandyk said:

 And the wider the Bandwidth of the fibreoptic Ethernet, the better it is for passing  along any UHF (and higher) RF/EMI that may be riding along with the Signal from the source device ?

 e.g. SSDs can inject noise into the PSU with harmonics that are capable of upsetting close proximity 2.4G devices and the EMI noise falling on 1.57 GHz band is excessively high for GPS applications

14A2-B4.pdf 384.34 kB · 0 downloads

You could do this same measurement between a computer attached by fiber Ethernet and tell us if you get the same results

 

The stressed eye pattern test requirement ensures that injected noise does not appreciably pass down the Ethernet link! 

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

Our usual suspects can continue to speculate that SSD noise is carried throughout the universe by little faeries flying in the aether ... ideally anyone may believe what they believe, and pray to whatever entity they wish — that’s religion. 

 

And it's religion to believe that all the degradation caused due to RF/EMI, and differences in the PSU area ,  in a hostile environment such as a PC can be cured by simply passing it through a Fibre Optic Ethernet Network. 

This is akin to shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.

You have provided no proof whatsoever of your claims in this area, yet you are completely unwilling to check out the comparisons that I have offered to you due to lack of interest.

Unlike you, quite a few well qualified members including George and Paul R. and many others have verified many of my reports, as well as with published correctly performed DBT sessions

Quote

The stressed eye pattern test requirement ensures that injected noise does not appreciably pass down the Ethernet link!

.

Similar claims are made for CD, USB and Wired Ethernet Audio,. yet people still hear differences between cables, PSU areas etc..

 BTW, it was al.fe who sent me the posted .pdf and suggested that HDD is better for audio then SSD.

But what would the guy who designed my internal BR writer, and has several patents in the Optical area know ?

 G'night !

 

[jabbr]

22 minutes ago, sandyk said:

BTW, it was al.fe who sent me the posted .pdf and suggested that HDD is better for audio then SSD.

But what would the guy who designed my internal BR writer, and has several patents in the Optical area know ?

I would implicitly trust anything @alfe has to say on the topic of lasers, but differences between HDD and SSD are not what we are talking about here.
 

Like Don Quixote, you seem to be swinging at windmills. This started with a mechanism that I proposed by which cables might have different SQ, and if one was clever I bet you could transmit a radio signal on the USB power lines  

 

If you have an objection to my arguments, rather than swinging at windmills, why not find a specific objection to my specific argument — try to find a way to transmit an out of band radio signal On a fiberoptic Ethernet link — of course with SDR you can ADC/DAC the RF signal and transmit digitally over fiber, but I mean try to transmit a radio signal as RF noise on the link — go for it! Let me know what you find— be specific to this topic and don’t introduce extraneous arguments.

[pkane2001]

7 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

And it's religion to believe that all the degradation caused due to RF/EMI, and differences in the PSU area ,  in a hostile environment such as a PC can be cured by simply passing it through a Fibre Optic Ethernet Network. 

This is akin to shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.

You have provided no proof whatsoever of your claims in this area, yet you are completely unwilling to check out the comparisons that I have offered to you due to lack of interest.

Unlike you, quite a few well qualified members including George and Paul R. and many others have verified many of my reports, as well as with published correctly performed DBT sessions

.

Similar claims are made for CD, USB and Wired Ethernet Audio,. yet people still hear differences between cables, PSU areas etc..

 

 

There's really no point in continuing the discussion. We all agree that all science, knowledge and understanding is just a religious belief, there's nothing known or understood when it comes to audio or electronics. Anyone who is really interested in discovering the world beyond magical will have to find other places that are far less mystical. Here, we believe.

 

Enjoy all the "little faeries flying in the aether". May they help you lift an untold number of veils when listening to power cords and SSDs. ✌️

[gmgraves]

13 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Au contraire ... 🙂.

 

I would quite happy to say that "every single audio system suffers from RFI/EMI noise" - I have always found it trivially easy to introduce some source of interference into the environment of a system, and hear the SQ degrade as a result ... if someone says a vehicle has fabulous suspension, just bring it to the right sort of road surface, or pothole - and feel the car fail to handle it. There are always limits; the important thing is not to pretend they don't exist - but to explore them, and have a full understanding of where they may have a bearing - crossing one's fingers is not the best engineering approach ... 😉.

Maybe in Oz. Maybe in some systems. Not in mine. You know, you can see RFI/EMI. If you can’t see it or hear it, it isn’t there.

[gmgraves]

13 hours ago, sandyk said:

Several members are now routinely hearing differences of a small fraction of 1dB, and I think that you will find that Chris is now hearing extremely low level differences on very well measuring gear when using his RAAL-requisite SR1a headphones.

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/58443-raal-requisite-sr1a-has-landed/        #348

I think that many audiophiles have a very active imagination. Besides, in my opinion it’s not about fractions of a dB differences. It’s about enjoying the music, not obsessing over minutia. 

[gmgraves]

11 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Ah, so a fabulous suspension is intrinsically incapable of providing a smooth ride ... ?

 

BTW, pleased to hear you're still happy with recent hand held scope unit - one should be arriving here, very shortly.

Smooth ride and great road holding are pretty much diametrically opposed concepts, Frank (although modern computer modeling has allowed for some compromises between performance and ride for road cars, no such concessions exist on the track). You’ve obviously never driven a race car. Stiff suspension for best road holding (and lowest lap times) is costly and that’s what I consider a “fabulous suspension“.

 

Yes, I think you’ll like that little oscilloscope. I also have a Tektronix 465 scope that now stays in my closet because the little ‘scope is so much more convenient to use. I have been really impressed with it’s performance.

Let us know your thoughts when yours arrives.

[gmgraves]

13 hours ago, jabbr said:

Yes. Really I am suggesting a (testable) possibility. I don’t spend endless amounts of time thinking about USB cables but lots of people seem to hear differences. It’s easy to completely eliminate the possibility of ground loops/leakage currents etc with fiberoptic Ethernet and it’s cheap so I use it. 

 

Well, I don’t like USB for audio, but I must say that the latest Schiit Yiggy has a newly designed USB interface that has greatly improved the performance of USB for audio. When I first connected it to my MacBook Pro, the computer couldn’t see the Yiggy untilI I upgraded the OS from El Capitan to Catalina (it’s not supposed to be possible, but I found an online hack that allowed it.). Then it worked fine. Much better sound with the Yiggy’s new USB protocol. However, I still hear no difference between a $2 “printer“ USB cable and the fancy AudioQuest USB cable that a friend loaned me. The one with with the “battery“. 

[Allan F]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Smooth ride and great road holding are pretty much diametrically opposed concepts, Frank (although modern computer modeling has allowed for some compromises between performance and ride for road cars, no such concessions exist on the track).

 

For some time, BMW road cars were considered to have achieved perhaps the best balance between these two competing objectives. Dunno about current models.

[PYP]

5 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

Enjoy all the "little faeries flying in the aether". May they help you lift an untold number of veils when listening to power cords and SSDs. ✌️

 

Let's assume for a moment that I'm a skeptic about power cords, but that I have heard a difference among cords.  Assuming for a moment that I'd rather not spend any funds on fancy power cords and that my reluctance may (or may not) work against what some see as the natural tendency of many audiophiles (or anyone for things outside audio) to fully expect that a more expensive cord has to be better than a stock cord -- what might be the objective reason for the difference that I hear?  

 

By "little faeries" are you referring to conscious electrons?  Just curious.  

[gmgraves]

47 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

For some time, BMW road cars were considered to have achieved perhaps the best balance between these two competing objectives. Dunno about current models.

The thing about BMW, is that they have different models that have different road manners. A normal 3 Series may have a modicum of road holding while giving a fairly comfortable ride, but on the other hand, a 3 Series “M” models are more hard-core and they eschew the softer ride. They also are much faster on road or track when driven for performance. Porsche does something similar. A 911 S spec is a good handling, fairly comfortable road car, a 911 GT 2, and 3, are not comfortable, they are race cars in various states of tune and cost as much as a Ferrari or Lamborghini,

[gmgraves]

34 minutes ago, PYP said:

 

Let's assume for a moment that I'm a skeptic about power cords, but that I have heard a difference among cords.  Assuming for a moment that I'd rather not spend any funds on fancy power cords and that my reluctance may (or may not) work against what some see as the natural tendency of many audiophiles (or anyone for things outside audio) to fully expect that a more expensive cord has to be better than a stock cord -- what might be the objective reason for the difference that I hear?  

 

By "little faeries" are you referring to conscious electrons?  Just curious.  

Expectation Bias. Let me ask you this. What would a boutique power cord do that a normal power cord couldn’t? Look at what is before and after that mains cord. Before it is many hundreds of feet of 12 or 10 gauge house wiring preceded by perhaps hundreds of miles of transmission line and a circuit breaker box. After the boutique power cord, the size of a baby’s leg and costing a fortune is a single filament of very thin wire called a fuse. After that is some 16 gauge hookup wire leading to a power transformer full of single strand copper wire. Here’s an analogy. The water main coming into your house is, let’s say, a three-inch pipe. But you want to upgrade your water service so you replace the three-inch pipe running from the water meter to your water heater and the rest of the house with a pipe that’s two feet in diameter. At the hot water heater, you transition to a 1-inch pipe because that’s what the water heater takes. Also the rest of your house is plumbed with 1-inch pipe to the faucets, shower heads, etc. What good did that length of 2-foot diameter pipe do when the incoming line from the well or city water Is only 3-inches and the rest of the system after the two-foot diameter pipe is 1-inch? Makes no sense does it? Neither do expensive power cords. They do nothing because the bottlenecks are both before and after the boutique cable! The fancy line cord can’t fix the noise and/or voltage fluctuations that MAY occur before the wall socket, and it certainly can’t correct for any power robbing or noise problems AFTER the boutique cable.

[pkane2001]

42 minutes ago, PYP said:

 

Let's assume for a moment that I'm a skeptic about power cords, but that I have heard a difference among cords.  Assuming for a moment that I'd rather not spend any funds on fancy power cords and that my reluctance may (or may not) work against what some see as the natural tendency of many audiophiles (or anyone for things outside audio) to fully expect that a more expensive cord has to be better than a stock cord -- what might be the objective reason for the difference that I hear?  

 

By "little faeries" are you referring to conscious electrons?  Just curious.  

 

First, you want to objectively verify that you are really hearing the difference between cords. Do this by testing with someone swapping the cord for you, and not letting you know which one is in the system. If you confirm that you really can hear the difference, getting say 9 out of 10 tries correct, you'll want to start investigating what this difference might be and what causes it.

 

"little faeries" was a reference to @jabbr's earlier post where he said this:

7 hours ago, jabbr said:

people have their own religions and wish to believe that SSD noise is carried over glass fiber by little faeries

[jabbr]

43 minutes ago, PYP said:

Let's assume for a moment that I'm a skeptic about power cords, but that I have heard a difference among cords.  Assuming for a moment that I'd rather not spend any funds on fancy power cords and that my reluctance may (or may not) work against what some see as the natural tendency of many audiophiles (or anyone for things outside audio) to fully expect that a more expensive cord has to be better than a stock cord -- what might be the objective reason for the difference that I hear?  

 

The Placebo Effect is very real and powerful. I cures diseases with a surprisingly high effectiveness. If you spend $$$$$ on a cable it really will improve the sound of your system!

 

My own religion requires me to be an ascetic, that and my wife would threaten to cut me with Occam's Razor, so overindulging on an AC power cord would cause me both psychological and physical harm that would diminish my enjoyment of music...

 

... I *have* build my own power cables with leftover wire using the technique described at Bottlehead. My workstation solves problems much more smoothly now and my network switch relays frames more effortlessly.

[Allan F]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

The thing about BMW, is that they have different models that have different road manners. A normal 3 Series may have a modicum of road holding while giving a fairly comfortable ride, but on the other hand, a 3 Series “M” models are more hard-core and they eschew the softer ride. They also are much faster on road or track when driven for performance. Porsche does something similar. A 911 S spec is a good handling, fairly comfortable road car, a 911 GT 2, and 3, are not comfortable, they are race cars in various states of tune and cost as much as a Ferrari or Lamborghini,

 

O.T. Dunno if you remember the BMW 2002Ti introduced in the late 60's, a remarkable vehicle for its price. Car and Driver rated it the best sports sedan in the world for under $5,000.

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

The thing about BMW, is that they have different models that have different road manners. A normal 3 Series may have a modicum of road holding while giving a fairly comfortable ride, but on the other hand, a 3 Series “M” models are more hard-core and they eschew the softer ride. They also are much faster on road or track when driven for performance. Porsche does something similar. A 911 S spec is a good handling, fairly comfortable road car, a 911 GT 2, and 3, are not comfortable, they are race cars in various states of tune and cost as much as a Ferrari or Lamborghini,

 

BMW 850csi (a GT coupe with M treatment) was a very comfortable ride while remaining sporty. Good feel of the road, but not hard. Designed to remain comfortable and civilized at speeds well over 100mph  It was certainly a heavy car, not meant for the track. 

 

[John Dyson]

43 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

The Placebo Effect is very real and powerful. I cures diseases with a surprisingly high effectiveness. If you spend $$$$$ on a cable it really will improve the sound of your system!

 

My own religion requires me to be an ascetic, that and my wife would threaten to cut me with Occam's Razor, so overindulging on an AC power cord would cause me both psychological and physical harm that would diminish my enjoyment of music...

 

... I *have* build my own power cables with leftover wire using the technique described at Bottlehead. My workstation solves problems much more smoothly now and my network switch relays frames more effortlessly.

It is so funny to hear about all kinds of strange beliefs about 'quality' in the audiophile world.  Even audiophile recordings (not even talking about FeralA) have often been made using equipment with off-the-shelf, and sometimes ugly technologies and cables.   Those recordings can sound really good, and be of full audiophile quality.

 

One problem in the audio world, probably other hobby worlds also, that two people with similar misunderstandings will re-enforce an mistaken belief.  Dunning-Kruger is operative here where two people will each not understand the depth of their knowledge, re-enforicing a mistaken belief.  There is a poor risk/reward for technically compteent people to try to explain things to people who do not want to know, who already know 'everything.'   Even now, my ego encourages accepting my own mistakes -- opposite of many people.  My philosophy is to accept a mistake earlier on, rather than to continually compound the folly.

Now, I'll give a technically accurate evaluation about cables:  Sometimes there are really bad cables, sometimes the interfaces to/from the cables are not well designed/bad grounding, sometimes the RFI environment is egregiously bad, sometimes experiments are poorly controlled.  Sometimes, people simply want to believe something strange, and will psychologically make that fake-fact true in their own minds.

 

There are actual, scientific explanations for given observations, but the observation might be in error, the analysis is often very defective, and the conclusions are sometimes absurd.   Until a correspondent understands&accept the possibility of these potential flaws, and looks at a situation with an open mind, it isn't helpful for an actual expert to participate in the discussion.  It is best for the expert to demure even if that true expert REALLY KNOWS what is going on...

 

John

 

 

 

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

O.T. Dunno if you remember the BMW 2002Ti introduced in the late 60's, a remarkable vehicle for its price. Car and Driver rated it the best sports sedan in the world for under $5,000.

Remember it? I had one. After my Jaguar XK-140 threw a rod, I bought a metallic green 2002Ti. Yes it handled well for a sedan. I didn’t keep it long because my example had terrible ongoing electrical problems. Replaced it with an Alfa GTA. (Talk about out of the frying pan, into the fire!). Oddly enough, the GTA gave me no problems the entire 5 years I had it. I credit the fact that electrically, the Alfa was very simple and it was all Bosch electrics (but so was the Beemer!!!????).

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, John Dyson said:

It is so funny to hear about all kinds of strange beliefs about 'quality' in the audiophile world.  Even audiophile recordings (not even talking about FeralA) have often been made using equipment with off-the-shelf, and sometimes ugly technologies and cables.   Those recordings can sound really good, and be of full audiophile quality.

 

One problem in the audio world, probably other hobby worlds also, that two people with similar misunderstandings will re-enforce an mistaken belief.  Dunning-Kruger is operative here where two people will each not understand the depth of their knowledge, re-enforicing a mistaken belief.  There is a poor risk/reward for technically compteent people to try to explain things to people who do not want to know, who already know 'everything.'   Even now, my ego encourages accepting my own mistakes -- opposite of many people.  My philosophy is to accept a mistake earlier on, rather than to continually compound the folly.

 

Is that the late Arnie Kruger?

2 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Now, I'll give a technically accurate evaluation about cables:  Sometimes there are really bad cables, sometimes the interfaces to/from the cables are not well designed/bad grounding, sometimes the RFI environment is egregiously bad, sometimes experiments are poorly controlled.  Sometimes, people simply want to believe something strange, and will psychologically make that fake-fact true in their own minds.
 

Amen, brother.

2 hours ago, John Dyson said:

 

There are actual, scientific explanations for given observations, but the observation might be in error, the analysis is often very defective, and the conclusions are sometimes absurd.   Until a correspondent understands&accept the possibility of these potential flaws, and looks at a situation with an open mind, it isn't helpful for an actual expert to participate in the discussion.  It is best for the expert to demure even if that true expert REALLY KNOWS what is going on...
 

Everything you say is quite correct!

2 hours ago, John Dyson said:

 

John

 

 

 

 

[PYP]

4 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Expectation Bias. Let me ask you this. What would a boutique power cord do that a normal power cord couldn’t? Look at what is before and after that mains cord. Before it is many hundreds of feet of 12 or 10 gauge house wiring preceded by perhaps hundreds of miles of transmission line and a circuit breaker box. After the boutique power cord, the size of a baby’s leg and costing a fortune is a single filament of very thin wire called a fuse. After that is some 16 gauge hookup wire leading to a power transformer full of single strand copper wire. Here’s an analogy. The water main coming into your house is, let’s say, a three-inch pipe. But you want to upgrade your water service so you replace the three-inch pipe running from the water meter to your water heater and the rest of the house with a pipe that’s two feet in diameter. At the hot water heater, you transition to a 1-inch pipe because that’s what the water heater takes. Also the rest of your house is plumbed with 1-inch pipe to the faucets, shower heads, etc. What good did that length of 2-foot diameter pipe do when the incoming line from the well or city water Is only 3-inches and the rest of the system after the two-foot diameter pipe is 1-inch? Makes no sense does it? Neither do expensive power cords. They do nothing because the bottlenecks are both before and after the boutique cable! The fancy line cord can’t fix the noise and/or voltage fluctuations that MAY occur before the wall socket, and it certainly can’t correct for any power robbing or noise problems AFTER the boutique cable.

Thanks.  This logic is familiar to me and I subscribe to it.  That is why I'm a power cord sceptic.  But I'm also what I consider to be a pragmatist and so tried a few for myself.  Some were quickly returned and others stayed a while until I used them with more transparent (neutral) gear and some are still in my system.  Given that experience, while it makes no sense to me other than the cord acts as a filter, I use cords that sound good to me.  I suppose I was trying to say:  suspend your logic for a bit, assume some folks hear a difference, then propose why that might be.  I see placebo is one proposed reason.  I'm not sure if my inconsistent response to a placebo is a good thing or not.   

[PYP]

4 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

First, you want to objectively verify that you are really hearing the difference between cords. Do this by testing with someone swapping the cord for you, and not letting you know which one is in the system. If you confirm that you really can hear the difference, getting say 9 out of 10 tries correct, you'll want to start investigating what this difference might be and what causes it.

 

"little faeries" was a reference to @jabbr's earlier post where he said this:

 

Good suggestion but my wife would rather I buy these kind of cords than participate in that experiment, so I'll consider myself a lucky subjective (self-deluded?) audiophile.  My own method is this:  connect the cord (always a good first step) and listen for a week or so.  With Roon Radio (random selection from my own library and Qobuz), pay no particular attention to whether it makes a difference.  If I eventually I am more engaged in casual listening, try my favorites and hear what has changed if anything.  Also, if my wife asks if I've changed anything (read:  this doesn't sound good), return the cord for a refund (or return demo) -- actual example and she was right, or course (I had concluded earlier that the cord wasn't simpatico, but was waiting to the end of the review period).  

 

Regarding "little faeries,"  I did see your reference, but I'm obsessed with thinking electrons now that I've read they are conscious (according to some physicists).   

[sandyk]

8 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Besides, in my opinion it’s not about fractions of a dB differences. It’s about enjoying the music, not obsessing over minutia. 

  Which is exactly what the ASR Brigade (and a few others) do with their measurements that they often draw invalid conclusions from.