Does anyone notice differences in usb cables when using the Audiophilleo 2 ?

[Terry]

Phil claims there is very little if any difference when using any competent usb 2.0 cable. I wondered if anyone had experimented I am using a Ultraviolet usb cable and want to know if there are benefits to doing that with Audiophilleo 2. I know the cables can sound different I just wanted to know if the device minimizes the differences to a point where they are negligible.

 

[Terry]

Bump

 

[esldude]

Don't have any expensive USB cables to try. Among cheap/free cables I noticed no difference (none of these over 6 feet). Using monoprice 16ft buffered USB extender no difference. Using a powered USB hub between PC and Audiophilleo resulted in a slight decrease in sound quality. Which is surprising, I was thinking a powered USB hub would take the 'load' off the PC in terms of powering only the hub and the Audiophilleo from the wall wart power supply. Seemed to loose a bit of fine detail, low end became smoothed over and less controlled. Music was just a bit less interesting this way.

 

Also have compared with different OS and PC.

 

Dell low end Inspiron laptop 1420 (core 2 duo), running Foobar with WASAPI gave better sound than software like media monkey or others. VLC probably came in second to Foobar though I didn't tweak VLC any. Nor did I do kernal streaming with media monkey yet. Running Mandriva Linux on the same laptop using VLC or a couple of other media players, eventually thought it sounded a bit nicer than Foobar on Vista. Though close enough I might have been fooling myself (though I don't quite think I am).

 

In a friend's system, we both agreed, same Dell laptop with Foobar sounded a very noticeable amount better than using the Audiophilleo with a Macbook running iTunes. Using Decibel on the Macbook made it closer though we thought maybe still a slight edge to Dell/Foobar. However, my friend didn't like the interface in Decibel. Using Fidelia on the Macbook was different. Very musical, maybe an improvement. I suspect the bitstream is being massaged though apparently with some skill to make it subjectively enjoyable in Fidelia. Fidelia sounded more "analog like" in a nice way, and stereo depth seemed increased. We didn't tweak Fidelia at all in our short software comparison session. I don't think my friend quite believed the playback software on his Mac would matter so much though it didn't take long for him to hear that it did.

 

In general though the Audiophilleo is certainly a nice piece of kit. No need for a digital cable, and it does its job very well. Betters transports costing 2-4 times as much at least.