Usb cable shootout

[Currawong]

On 3/12/2023 at 10:53 PM, Kimo said:

So, I just added a new contender.  A Supra Excalibur.   Been comparing with another certified cable, the baseline Belkin Gold.

 

Not sure which is better, but I am sure that they don't sound anything alike.  The Supra is probably the brightest USB that I have tried.  I have around 100 hours on it at this point, and it has changed little.

 

Read somewhere that Rob Watts stated all certified cables should sound the same.  Well, maybe with Chord DACs, but not with mine.

 

Anyone have any idea which might be closer to a "neutral" sound, given that they are both certified?

 

What you want to do is, compare with optical. Anything that sounds brighter -- you're likely hearing more HF noise being let through. You wont hear anything that is darker! Basically, all the cables are doing is changing the noise profile of your system, as they let through different frequencies of noise. It's easy to mistake a brighter, harder (or harsher) sound as having more detail.

 

A friend of mine, who is pretty far down the proverbial rabbit hole with tweaks to his system, said that when he added an SU-6 to his system, trying different USB cables connect to it, he couldn't make a difference between the cables any longer.

 

In my experience, if you remove noise from your system overall, such as by adding power regeneration and filtering, the differences between cables disappear, if they are all to spec. Ones that are not to spec will cause reflections along the cable, which can cause issues. Unless the cable is stated as meeting the 90 Ohm spec required for USB, I wouldn't use it.

[Currawong]

Now if only ST optical had become the standard instead of that junk Toslink connection, this would all be a non-issue. 
 

Reminds me, I have thought about trying one of those USB-over-Optical cables. Has anyone tried one?

[Currawong]

11 hours ago, creativepart said:

Like this?

https://sewelldirect.com/products/light-link-usb-usb-3-0-over-fiber

That one looks cheaper than I've seen before. It might be interesting if the power lines are disconnected. However, I wonder about the data integrity of the optical to USB receiver and whether it might be worse. Might be worth experimenting with. 

[Currawong]

4 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

Something interesting happening this weekend:

Monster hunters descend on Scotland for biggest Loch Ness search in 50 years

 

Apparently there have been >1100 "sightings" for the creature. So people are clearly "seeing something", right?

 

I appreciate that the monster hunters are giving this a good try at least (even if just in good fun)! Not sure I've seen this same level of desire/devotion to find answers among certain audiophiles.

 

I get the scepticism. I was playing with network isolation and DACs recently, which to my understanding, should make NO difference, given how ethernet works. But it did. I am not happy!  Though, it was YMMV, depending which DAC I tried it with. For the TT2, the difference was extremely minimal -- below the point that I'd consider myself reliable. This even after I'd done my best to eliminate noise from my system, which has otherwise negated any effect different USB cables have.  

 

I really want to get a suitable 'scope and compare my impressions with the amount, and type, of noise different products pass through -- also how resilient different digital products are to that noise.