Who has tried out different USB Cables?

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On 8/9/2019 at 6:01 PM, jabbr said:

Oh god, there are so many cables and so little time. I don’t do listening tests between USB cables (but I’d love an OK Computer cable TBH!) 

 

Lets see: I like that white Swedish cable with my iFI — oh wait it uses that weird connector so I use the AQ Dragonfly ... with @PeterSt‘s DAC I use his Lush cable ... with the Pro-Ject S2D I use whatever was in the box.

 

Life is short, I prefer sampling Bourbons  

Yes, sampling bourbons is much more fun and rewarding than sampling USB cables. I stopped using USB on my main system because I don’t think it sounds very good and now connect my main audio system computer via TOSLINK SPDIF and my Squeezebox Touch (Internet Radio only) via coax SPDIF. I do use USB in my office to connect my computer to my desktop system (Napa Acoustics N208A amplifier and a pair of Martin-Logan Motion 4i speakers served by an AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt DAC from my desktop Mac).

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On 10/7/2019 at 7:58 PM, xyzzy1 said:

Feeding a project dac s2+ from a MacBook pro.

 

Tried generic USB cable vs Pangea USB cables, heard differences in amount of edge/harshness in the sound with the Pangea cables being the better, but not by much. Switched to a linear power supply for the dac s2+, that made a pretty big improvement in sound clarity and reduced edge/harness further.

 

Then tried optical cable as the MacBook has optical out in the headphone jack and heard a huge improvement in sound quality with much reduced to almost eliminated edge/harshness and nice added liquidity/naturalness to sound of voice and instruments. No way I'm going back to any USB cable. Strongly recommend moving to optical cable if your setup allows it.

SPDIF Toslink is much better sounding, in my opinion, than USB as I have a similar setup: MacBook Pro to a 24/96 up-converter to a Schiit Yggdrasil DAC. While I realize that Toslink is generally only good to 24/96, I generally don’t listen to anything higher than that, although I do have a couple of audio-only Blu-Ray discs that do 24/176.4 and 24/192, I play them through my Oppo BDP-205.

I use the MacBook Pro to access my Tidal account on my main system and remote control it from my iPad using Remote-Pro.

 

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19 hours ago, Soothsayerman said:

Why even use a USB cable at all. Why not just go WiFi or Ethernet?

It’s kind of difficult to WiFi one’s digital audio signal from one’s computer to one’s DAC, when most DACs don’t have either a WiFi receiver built in or an Ethernet connector on them. Most DACs have only USB, optical SPDIF (via Toslink), Coaxial SPDIF, or AES/EBU (usually via balanced XLR connection). That’s it! No Ether, no WiFi.

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3 hours ago, Soothsayerman said:

I'm not saying you're wrong, but is there any evidence to support this assertion? What would you suggest I look at to become more familiar with this if anything?  Thanks!

Your point might be valid if all the DACs on the market offered these interconnect options, but most don’t and there is a lot more to DAC selection than merely it’s interface options.

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15 hours ago, marce said:

Yet other technology has evolved in leaps and bounds in the same time we have had digital audio! Whats holding audiophile audio back... maybe focusing on cables, fuses etc. 

Only some audiophiles focus on cables and fuses. Many other audiophiles, especially those with technical backgrounds, tend to scoff at the idea that, for instance, a power cord, the size of a baby’s arm, or a fuse between the mains connection and a component’s power transformer, could possibly affect the sound of that component, or that a 2 meter or shorter piece of coax (regardless of price) between two components could possibly affect the sound of one’s system. The electronics says no to both of these, but many other audiophiles embrace both, so the jury remains out on whether or not those who buy into these ideas are hearing real phenomena or are just victims of expectational bias, or of their own imaginations. 

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7 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

 The Jury isn't out. Neither are many people imagining these things that they report , especially when the cables are USB cables .

 Many of these things are capable of being verified by correctly performed DBT sessions.

I couched my comments in a way so as to be non-confrontational. I don’t want to open this can of worms and argue this. But I have been privy to many “correctly performed DBT sessions”, and I’ve NEVER heard any difference between either USB cables or analog interconnects (irrespective of cost) and neither could anyone else associated with the tests. So, as far as I’m concerned, the jury is very much “out”, and those who imagine that they hear these things are very much a victim of their own imaginations. 

Keep in mind that as passive components, cables can only subtract from a signal and cannot add anything. If one can actually”hear” a cable, it’s because it’s attenuating some part of the audio spectrum when compared with some other part of the spectrum. It is virtually impossible for a cable of 2 meters or less to have enough reactance at any in-band audio frequency to attenuate anything that one can hear unless it was designed that way purposely. In that case, it’s no longer a cable, but rather a filter. USB cables? As far as I’m concerned, they have even less chance of being able to alter the sound, because the digital data is either there or it isn’t. Of course, that’s a matter of indifference to me because I think all USB is compromised as a digital audio transmission medium and sounds terrible. I use only SPDIF in my main system.

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28 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

Hey George: How can both those statements be true at the same time?  

What two statements. All USB audio is equally poor, in my estimation, regardless of what kind or price of cable it passes through. I see no inconsistency in that statement.

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18 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

I have NEVER made a request for OP privileges in any threads that I have started.

My question above is completely valid too,. but is also likely to be removed .

 We need to find out WHY various USB cables can sound different without them altering the received Binary Data.

Removal of posts should only be used when the posts are a deliberate attempt to derail a thread, not to prevent genuine discussion.

Comparing digital audio USB cables is like comparing sewer systems, they’re all sh_tty, so who cares which is best? I suspect that if, indeed, USB cables alter the sound when the received data is unaltered, then either different cables “smear” that data enough to cause audible errors, or, it’s another case of listener bias.

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3 hours ago, Superdad said:

 

You do know that what travels on a USB is not "ones" and "zeros" data, right?  It is very high-frequency "analog" DC voltage, and inside that "noise," every 125 microSeconds comes a modulated packet in which the data is encoded.  Then, in every USB input--be it a printer or a DAC--is a PHY chip (these days integrated in the USB MAC processors, but its function is there nonetheless) whose job it is to determine what in that bursty/noisy high-speed signal is a "one" or a "zero."  

Study the function of a PHY for a bit (@JohnSwenson has actually designed PHY chips) and you will see they are filled with PLLs, clocking at various phases, and funky gain circuits to allow them to decode some rather piss-poor signals.  The harder the PHY chip has to work, the more noise (from bursty current demand) it puts on the ground plane--inside the DAC. And this is measurable inside the DAC.

 

This brings us back to the reason USB cables can "sound" different (as well as the raison d'être of our REGENs): Impedance match and signal integrity. This is measured on an eye-pattern, which will show amplitude, slew, noise, and jitter.  

And while yes, anything within the USB spec will allow the PHY to do its job, for audio it is bit like with other measurements.  That is, the measurement folks will say that below a certain threshold we can not hear differences of distortion, jitter, slew rate, transients, etc.--yet people hear plenty of differences, some of which probably have no correlation to present measurements.  So I don't care how good someone is at interpreting an eye pattern: it's just proving there are differences between the cables or the signal--it can not be used to characterize what will be heard.

 

So George, I question you when you say "All USB audio is equally poor"--while at the same time saying that all USB cables sound the same--because it demonstrates either your lack of technical understanding or a lack or curiosity. 

Yes, I know how it works. I also know that the bus was developed to connect keyboards and mice to computers. It’s relatively slow, was designed with interrupt protocols to facilitate bus sharing and was designed so that the computer, not the peripheral controls arbitration and priority. Not exactly ideal for transferring audio from computer to DAC.

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On 10/18/2019 at 7:39 AM, barrows said:

@marce, Look it up and see for yourself.  I am sure some (audiophile, and cheap Chinese) cables do not meet spec.  But the spec is only for accurate data transmission.  I am sure in 99.99% of cases there is accurate data transmission, and that data errors have absolutely nothing to do with hearting different performance from different USB cables.  This has been discussed on this site over and over, and I am not going to bother to re-hash it all here again.  If you would actually like to learn some theories as why this may be (and no, I am not aware of any proof of these theories yet: measurements) search for John Swenson's posts on the topic..

If you would actually like to make a positive contribution here, with your considerable knowledge of high speed data transmission, as to why and how the different cables actually do result in different sonic results, that would be appreciated.  Otherwise, the constant badgering of people who already know that different cables do sound different contributes nothing, and is just more noise.

WRT to audio, one would have to really try to make a cable that didn't "meet spec". A lot of audiophiles are hung-up on the notion that there is something "special" about an audio signal. There is not. It is a low-frequency AC signal that puts no particular demands on any conductor. USB cables, while carrying higher frequencies than an audio cable are still relatively low frequency conductors. The problems with USB, as I see it, lie in the way the data is arranged on both ends of the cable. While it is certainly possible that different USB cables mess with the timing of the packets somehow (I, personally, don't see how, though), the best that I have heard* still sound mediocre when compared to even Toslink SPDIF. 

* And, the best that I have heard is an AudioQuest Diamond cable (with the "bias" battery) and two Jitterbugs in tandem. Still nowhere near as good sounding as a simple Toslink cable plugged into the combo headphone jack on my MacBook Pro. 

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8 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

Hi GM,  seems you have a lot of variables there. There’s Toslink vs USB cable, the MacBook Pro’s clocks, interfaces and power supplies and the receiving end’s clocks, interfaces and power supplies, all of which have the possibility of influencing the signal. As far as I can see, the only conclusion you could reliably reach from your example would be in relatIon to your exact implementation of USB and Toslink...which is why people are advised to try stuff in their system.  As far as I can see, you are just as likely to see the opposite result in terms of SQ in a system where USB has been optimised throughout.   I am 100% certain that USB cables affect the sound although I don’t know why. I do accept that the USB cables are unlikely to modify the bitstream per-se but I do think that clocks, PSs and interfaces on either side of the cable could have a major influence as can EMI picked up by a cable

I appreciate your comments, but I have heard USB vs optical (and coaxial) SPDIF in other systems as well as in my own. Remember, I have lots of USB cables, including (AudioQuest Diamond, with that ridiculous 72 volt “bias” battery hanging off of it*) as well as USB cables from Kimber, Nordost, Pangea, and various generic cables too numerous to count. 1) In my system, they all sound the same. 2) They all sound inferior to either optical or coaxial SPDIF.

 

* AudioQuest’s cable bias system is patented, but if you look at the patent, it was only granted for analog interconnects, not for digital. Putting an “active shielding system” on a digital cable such as the Diamond USB is like putting an expensive Borla exhaust system on a Model T Ford. It might look interesting, but it won’t do anything to enhance the Model T’s performance!

IOW it’s a “gimmick”.

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1 hour ago, mansr said:

I'd say it's more comparable in effect to painting racing stripes on a car.

I like it! Yes, it’s a much better analogy!

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3 hours ago, marce said:

And putting a dielectric bias system on analogue systems isn't going to do much...

Its not active shielding its 72V DIELECTRIC-BIAS SYSTEM and proof that in the USA you can patent anything...

Agreed!