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USB cable comparisons


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Here are some impressions of the stock cable that came with my apogee groove and the supra USB cable.

 

Transport : Surface Book 2015 running windows 10 64bit

Music player software: winyl 64bit (and few other bass library based players which sound largely identical minor depth differences aside).

DAC: Apogee groove

Amp: Apogee groove, Burson fun with sparkos ss3601.

Headphone : Shure srh1540. (Also tried with hd800, hd700 and urbanite xl all of which resolve less to my ears).

 

The stock cable from apogee:

This is not a bad cable at all (unlike the cable that came with my nx4dsd). It's sturdy, well designed, and even has markings on the body (E318233 PU AWM 2725 80*C 30V KAIBAO). I'll admit I don't understand even a single letter of that but it looks cool anyway. The sound is what I'd call as jack of all trades but master of none. It has a nice weight to the low notes, and fairly good amount of detail. But it lacks ultimate transparency, the weight doesn't look like it comes from perfect reproduction of sound but rather from a slight phase compression. Feels like I'm constantly being bombarded by positive polarity signals a little more than what would be accurate. Staging is fine but again feels mushed in a little, but with binaural is as expansive as ever.

 

Supra USB cable: It takes the exact opposite approach of the apogee stock cable. It does whatever compromises it needs to for extreme detail whoring. It's presentation can be described as laid back bright. Extremely transparent and intense detail. It's somewhat bright sounding. It sounds clean but also has a slight sense of fake cleanliness to it. Compressed voices, violins and especially roughly high passed cymbals can sometimes take an unbearable sheen to them. Forget listening to compressed metal. They feel as if there are knives stabbing your ears. But well processed ones can sound almost angelic on them. Probably the biggest Achilles heel I find for this cable is its lack of weight in the low notes. I hear the low notes, I hear the texture, I hear the pitch discrimination, I hear the layers. But somehow it feels like the bass notes are a bit dry and withdrawn. My srh1540 is very tactile and can actually physically rumble my skull on any good setup I've tried. Somehow this tactility is almost completely lost when using the Supra cable. I hear the rumble and actually hear the difference in pitch even better but somehow it feels less engaging. It sounds "bootleggish" and detailed for lack of a better word. (1.50 is an example of what I'm meaning

Another big downside I have of the Supra is that it doesn't sound as good as the stock cable for binaural music. Clearly something that defines spatial presentation is being altered. I have to say that my expectations of binaural is extremely high and that on a normal scale both the cables sound fine. They just don't sound excellent, the Supra even less so for binaural tracks. These deficits aside the Supra is without a doubt on a much higher technical footing than the stock one. The detail and resolution is much better. For most part all of my listening now happens on the Supra cable since I'm a detail freak even if it has some compromises. I would probably try the curious usb cable someday if I had the cash but I don't.

 

Note : I typically close my eyes when listening to music. Yes opening and closing your eyes can change your perception of sound. So some of the spatial presentation feel might change if you listen with eyes closed but the notes on overall texture, resolution remain unaltered.

 

Tl, dr:

Stock apogee cable : decent resolution, tiny bit closed in, lots of nice heft to the tones.

Supra : fantastic resolution but slightly forced, very sensitive to high pass filters used in recording process, bright and laidback, bass lacks heft and sounds a bit bootleggish.

 

I am looking for an upgrade from the supra now. I want to buy the supra but I don't have necessary funds for it now. I read audiobacon and it looks like chord company's silver cable is a good option. Would like to know other options.

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I am unsure how they measure jitter and how much of a coverage it actually provides. For sure they are not probing directly at the i2s bus and so we are having the variable of dac implementation (or masking) coming in. If any, it only says how that entire circuit behaves with different input.

 

I am actually interested in ethernet audio (for the diy dac I'm about to build - dddac1794). I just thought it wasn't a common thing yet. Do we have a thread for it?

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Well, an advice (having seen stuff on other domains as well) - never go by X>Y terminology unless you understand the full network. Yes clock extraction is a big deal but it can be done. Heck, DDR is a super complex assembly that samples at both edges of the clock and it has been made robust enough that we rarely encounter issues dude to data loss. You do need a stable input to begin with though. As always, implementation >> buzzword.

 

That said, I'll never trust anything from ASR chart, let alone take it as a validation of anything. There is hell lot of variables that is often hidden, and doesn't even care to show the filter responses most of the time. Filters are what make a large portion of the sound (and can have consequences on aliasing, phase shifts and other kind of stuff which are audible).

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On 2/15/2020 at 5:14 AM, Kimo said:

I don't know.

 

I just installed a Supra USB cable between the Innuos and the Satie, and noticed the same thing.  As compared with the Belkin Gold USB, the Supra sounds cleaner, but doesn't have the same weight in the bass.  I am not sure that I would call it brighter, but certainly it sounds lighter, or maybe even a bit whiter.   

 

There is less grit, but more detail.

 

I can't tell you which one is better, though I am guessing the Supra is doing something better, since vocals are a little easier to understand.  

 

I am pretty sure the DAC designer is a bigger fan of AES and coaxial, than USB.  The Sony Blu Ray player pretty much sounds the same through 1 meter of Apogee Wyde Eye and 1.5 meters of Belden 1694 into the Satie, and always a little darker than the Innuos, no matter what USB I have tried.

Quick question. What is the length of the cable. If it is a small cable (0.7m or 1m like the one I have), would it be possible for you to try the 2m variant or longer? (I can't since I had to import the cable I have).

 

I ran into few interesting blogs, one of which is here: https://www.febo.com/reference/cable_data.html

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3 minutes ago, Kimo said:

 

It is a 2 meter cable.  I will say that the differences are more noticeable on some material than others.

 

For example, on my Aqua Velvets Nomad ripped CD, the Supra and the Belkin sound very close, but on my Alan Parsons high resolution download they sound more noticeably different, especially in the bass.  The Belkin simply provides more thump.  Anyone on this board would spot it.

 

I think that your description was spot on, though I think as the Supra as maybe whiter, as opposed to brighter.  I wouldn't necessarily call it harsher in my system.

 

And from what I have read online, tin plated copper seems to have a sound that has been described as something akin to what you and I noted.  There is a beguiling aspect to it.

Thank you. I was torn up if I should get the higher length one assuming velocity factor*length plays any serious role, but I guess the factors are well over that (they may still have a role albeit minor). I think I'll try to import the chord silverwire (also thinking of the other cable someone recommended here, forgot its name).

 

The bass difference is super easy to spot in my headphone since it's quite a tactile system and changing the cable removed the tactility altogether. The treble is hard to describe but yeah it's kinda lighter the way you say, but I also feel a tizz in my system when the music has any high passed content (which means 90% of the music I listen 👹).

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2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

What the supposedly scientific crowd can't seem to handle, is that the length of the cable is relevant because the change in sound may be caused by some parasitic characteristic of that link which is variable per the length - it's part of, "sometimes things aren't as simple as you would like them to be" nature of the real world ...

Some rudimentary calculations.

 

For a 500MHz wave the pulse duration is about 2ns. For a 1meter cable with velocity factor 1, the time delay is about 3.33ns which is over 1.6x the clock cycle. This will start to compound over higher distances or different velocity factor.

 

Considering USB protocol is not bi directional, and the fact that the slave does have to communicate back certain things (I've seen this in wireshark), it's not out if possibility things could have an impact. After all, the cpu jitter also adds up (think in terms of the things that gave way to spectre and meltdown).

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think I have spent enough time evaluating the supra usb cable, trying through different music player softwares. Right now I'm using wtfplay. These are general observations of the sound from supra on my Apogee groove.

 

1. The level of detail is very good, though the bass is a bit masked. The bootleggish bass I got when using winyl on windows has reduced in wtfplay but it's still there to some extent.

 

2. There is some sine wave ish prescence between 500hz regions, easily audible in flutes, and shouty voices. They shout more than they should.

 

3. Both the above stem from one or more common aberration, and the effect is there till treble range. They sound clear but not in a natural way, I cannot say bright, but rather light and a tiny bit shouty. Stereo separation feels wider than they should for normal music and binaural starts to suffer a little, though the effect is less annoying when on wtfplay.

 

I'll be getting the USPCB soon (ordered) and will let you know if my opinion on supra stays the same.

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USPCB arrived today. This cable is wicked fast. I'm hearing buffer overflow issues. Much more transparent and harshness free than supra, but detail depends on how the source functions. Now I'm 100% sure packet loss need not be super audible pops and clicks. It can be subtle and graceful.

 

I'm running a surface book, and I use wtfplay OS for my music playback. Here are my observations

 

Started off feeling that something was truncated off and dark with the typical 16 bit 44.1khz Redbook flac material. Changed buffer from the default 2048 x 2 to 1024 x 2 and it worked much better.

 

Then I played "purple rain" (a higher resolution recording). Huge buffer overrun in the default 2048 x 2. It was literally stuttering. Purple rain started playing fine after changing buffer to 64 * 8. Later I realized this overrun is so audible only because of the period count =2. Changed it to 4, with default period size of 2048 frames and it played without super audible stutter.

 

Also heard minor aberrations in other songs with default settings. "Mausam and escape", in Redbook cd format, there's a quick series of drum hits at the left side around 1 minute mark. It sounded quantized. Like I can hear the sample pulses (part of what makes the full sound) instead of the reconstructed sound.

 

Went to my computer uefi, disabled simultaneous multithreading. Purple rain played fine with default settings. But I didn't like the sound in this settings. Sounded too smoothed off.

 

Thought I was screwed. Realized I have one more control. Changed system priority from 50 to 30 in the command line, no changes to buffer. Everything else fixed, and no system tweaks as well (hyperthreading enabled again). Sounds fantastic, still got scope to tweak. Funky thing doesn't have a sound of its own (unlike the other cables I've tried that impart a specific character). The cable is super fast, I could probably tweak it to do anything which is a nice thing. But it's also sensitive and can show flaws without masking. I doubt there is any burn in period, but feel free to let me know of the designer officially confirmed any such thing.

IMG_20200306_144613__01.jpg

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  • 3 months later...
22 hours ago, OldBigEars said:

 

 

I also use one of these USPCB connection devices.  I've never reached a conclusion as to whether or not it actually improves or degrades the sound on my system vs a stock cord.  I just use it for space saving, neatness and low cost (compared with a fancy cable).  I've never been able to move the tiny, little switch that apparently turns the VBUS on/off.  I can't even tell for sure what position it's in.  Does that matter and why would anyone want to turn it on/off?

It connects/disconnects the 5v line from your pc usb port to your dac. If your dac has external power supply, keep the button off, else keep it on.

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  • 10 months later...
5 hours ago, MarkusBarkus said:

@manueljenkin et al: To up the ante on this discussion a bit, I just finished a USB test using Shunyata's Omega USB.
 

I had a very limited opportunity to borrow one for a demo. This is a $3,500.00 USB cable (plus 5K retainer for the divorce attorney), so stop reading now or grab your air-distress bag if you get queasy during take-off and landing. 

I listened in two systems (actually, I'm still listening at home), one a friend's Benchmark Audio system on Monitor Audio speakers, and my own.

 

In both systems, adding the cable yielded an audible change. IMO it was also a net-positive change. My friend agrees about his system (he did not hear mine).
 

More separation among instruments. More momentum and drive to the music. Increased liveliness. Very nice.

Time to rewatch Ocean's 11 for tips on planning a casino heist. <Joke>

Lol thanks. I'm happy that these things exist but way out of the range of what I can pay 😅.

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4 minutes ago, richard_crl032 said:

Oh no ..  trying to playback not all 1 and 0 are the same .. better engineered solution are often complex and expensive to get rhe 1 and 0 as rectangle shaped as possible in simple terms. How about noise etc. from ssd and hdd ?

 

Capacitance, inductance, loss etc. are also real in cables.

 

Even ripping quality in digital format varies.

 

Anyway, glad you believe you can or have accurate recording playback but from my experience, even the 1kk full FM accoustic system heard many times while unbelievably dynamic, details, surreal, who knows or care if accurate.

 

Cheers.

Oh yes I do optimize my system for low access noise. I use one of these tools - junilabs audio player and file optimizer, wtfplay live distro, xxhighend or playpcmwin. Apart from xxhighend the rest are free, so anyone could give it a try.

 

Cable comes next to pc optimization for me.

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