I agree with you: Bits are bits and crappy coax cables probably work just as well as the ones that are a hundred dollars. With the long cables, the signal degrades because it gets weaker (the voltage goes down) and that's also what happens with the little inline potmeter of your special cable. But for long cables, the capacitance between signal and ground, and the induction between source and destination start to be significant too which influences the frequency characteristics of the cable. When you put in the stereo cable and use it in both directions, I think what happens is that the capacitance finally distorts the signal so much that the PLL on the receiving end can't recover the clock from the source anymore and the clock in the receiver starts running freely. That results in the bits getting shifted in at the wrong time most of the time, but not all the time. But the computer can still make out enough of the bits to grab a sample every once in a while, and at regular intervals. It's like an old CRT TV that has the Vertical Hold setting wrong, and the picture scrolls so fast that you can still sort of see what it should be. This only happens because your computer is still doing its best to get as many samples (really: subframes of biphase data) as it can. I happen to be very familiar with the circuitry in that DCC-951, and I think the Digital Audio Input/Output chip is a little bit more advanced that the chip in your computer. It detects not only when it can't lock on to the input clock with the PLL, but also when it doesn't see the various bits in the S/PDIF stream that tell it that the input has a valid checksum, is valid PCM audio, is ISO-60958 section 3 (not section 2) and other things. As soon as any of those is wrong, it flips an output pin, telling the recorder that it can't decode things. And I wouldn't be surprised if it needs an entire block of S/PDIF subframes (384 samples) before it flips the pin back. And when that pin is active, the recorder puts the DAC and possibly the output amplifier in Mute mode. So the DCC recorder cuts off the signal much more rigorously and won't turn it back on until it's absolutely sure there are no crackles or pops from misread bits. It's possible for an S/PDIF coax cable to receive enough interference (e.g. from a power cable that's right next to it) to cause problems. And if you have both analog cables and S/PDIF coax cables connected to a recorder, there's definitely a chance of ground loops / earth loops that make circuits oscillate. But all of those distortions, interferences etc. are not going to degrade a digital signal in the same way as an analog signal. The bits either arrive or they don't. In the unlikely event that a 0 arrives as a 1 or vice versa, you might hear it as a snap, crackle or pop on a receiver that's not picky about what it's receiving (i.e. it's just moving bits). On a smarter receiver like the one in the DCC-951, it will probably result in a muted signal. And you can't hear jitter in a S/PDIF connection. If some samples arrive a little too early or too late (i.e. jitter), the PLL in the receiver will compensates for it. The only kind of distortion that you might hear is from bad filtering on the D/A converter, causing quantization noise or phase problems. And by using oversampling, DACs basically multiply the Nyquist frequency so the filtering circuitry can become simpler or can be left out altogether.
@@vwestlife Oops, I thought you had a DCC-951. I wasn't paying enough attention there. I'm less familiar with the DCC-900 but even though it has different S/PDIF chips, the rest of my comment still stands :)
@B3ro1080 Absolutely. But it doesn't matter until the bits don't arrive anymore or can't be decoded. And that's where audiophiles (or the companies selling cables to audiophiles) disagree.
There's also a parity bit at the end of each SP/DIF subframe (bit 31 in the 0...31 sequence) which I've noticed only certain DACs bother to act on. When I was first testing the SP/DIF output of an ARM single-board computer, a bad register setting was causing it to output all-zeroes for parity, which caused my Yamaha A/V receiver to play no sound at all (though ~50% of the subframes would have good parity by random chance, it must have required a fair number of good subframes in a row to un-mute itself)... but the cheap TC-7510 DAC I use with my headphone amp, which uses a Burr-Brown PCM1716, happily played the zeroed-parity stream without complaint or apparent distortion. The latter device also ignored the bit-28 "Validity" flag, which some sources use to mark a bad sample (e.g. scratched CD beyond error-correction limits). OTOH, the PCM1716 does honor the rarely (never?)-used "pre-emphasis" mode set via a channel-status bit pattern, resulting in muddy output with severe treble roll-off when enabled accidentally, while the Yamaha seems not to have implemented that.
@@inputerase even with analogue audio there are no measurable differences between decent quality cables and ridiculous high end cables. The cables that ship with components are usually garbage, though. Not because of any audible differences as much as they tend to oxidize and cause intermittent connections.
@@artsimannisto5659 Decent RCA cables don't have to cost $100. The point of diminishing returns is well below $20. No one would argue that the cables that ship with equipment are decent. Go ahead and spend $275 on a set of Kimber cables, then come back on here tell everyone how much they expanded the sound stage and improved imaging and instrument placement. It will cost you $275 and all of your credibility.
@@jgrimsley2000 Finland,here these short rca cables pricerange was about 20euros. We must remember this,its a big difference between antennacable and balanced all shielted connector cables. A BIG-Difference.
Yup, I've bought one several years ago, not because it was gold plated, but because it was very cheap and of the right length. I still keep the packing with an inscription "Gold plated for better contact" because I like the concept.
Lol. Yup. Those people spending $300 bucks or more and I buy it for $5 bucks. Also those crazy people buying speaker wires for thousands of $$$. A $10 12awg cable sounds the same...Biggest rip off in history!
they might... if there was another cable in the non-terminated y.. of let's say 20 meters or so, and if it was a balanced bus, which it probably is not. lol.
I worked at an audiophool shop doing bench repairs for a couple of years. I had to leave, because of all of the b/s like you just demonstrated. We sold what was in reality a $50 Sharpie. Apparently, if you used it to blacken the edges of a CD, 'enlightened' ones could hear a vast improvement in sound quality. In the same case, we sold a glow in the dark plastic disc for $100 that would 'bathe the transport in light,' also claiming to improve sound quality. I don't even want to get into the multi-hundred dollar 'directional' RCA cables we sold. It was all dishonest smoke and mirror b/s. My conscious forced me to quit.
@Infinite Possibilities exactly. I mean if you run a gas station are you gonna not sell cigarettes just because they don't really do anything besides give people cancer? no reason to quit your job.
Some people have more money than sense. And yet they're entrusted with jobs that pay this extra money. It makes you worry about society in its entirety.
@@michaelmitchell6089 Got about ten minutes into that video. My favorite part was when he says "I don't know how this works..." and in the very next sentence offers some BS about how it supposedly works. I've got a bridge to sell this guy...
I can tell you about the USB cables...one day whilst *extremely* bored at work, I took a whole bunch of passive couplers and went to town. I was well north of 75 feet if not 100, and several different flash drives continued to work perfectly well at USB 2.0 data rates. There was no notable loss of speed. I figured voltage drop would be a problem long before data integrity. Making a video about this has been on my to-do list for a long time now, but I misplaced the cable couplers not long after and they've never shown up again.
that mostly comes down to what you're plugging it into and how strictly they enforce the spec, at those lengths you would be well outside the official timing specs for usb
@@brendanrandle By my rough calculations, at 75 feet he's 4.6x over the timing spec for 480mbps transmission. The only possible explanation is methodological error, personally I suspect a flawed baseline measurement.
For the other side of this, I had an HP scanjet once at work that would scan half the page and then get a scan error. We read the manual and it said that the maximum cable length was 6 feet and we had used a 10 foot cable. Sure enough, we moved the scanner closer and used a 6 foot cable and the scan error went away.
For those that don’t understand the principles of basic electronics, audio components are mysterious magic boxes and mysterious magic cables can seem alluring. Once you understand Ohm’s law, the basics of digital and analog sound and how resistors, caps, tubes and transistors work, the mystery disappears along with (hopefully) the tendency to fall for magical marketing claims. I consider myself an audiophile and there are “bad, good, better” cables, but the differentiator is construction quality which affects durability and the likelihood of failure.
@@doltBmB No. Speaker cable capacitance is not an issue. The resistance can be a factor, though, and the gauge of the wire must be adequate for the length of the run. For normal distances under 50 feet, standard 18 gauge lamp cord is more than adequate. For very high power applications, lower impedance speakers below 6 ohms, or distances over 50’, 14 or 12 gauge may be necessary. Again, this has to do with resistance not capacitance. Capacitance can sometimes be an issue for source component cables, particularly phono cables. Most audio cables provide the necessary capacitance, however, so it’s the rare circumstance where specialty cables must be used.
This is exactly what it sounds like when a recording on DAT gets corrupted somehow and the error rate goes out of control. Pretty neat to see it happening because of excessive cable length.
Now I'm reminded of seeing ADSL routers with huge measured distance to exchange and lots and lots of CRC hits. I guess it's doing the same thing to the bits in all the cases... dropping or flipping until the integrity of the packet doesn't hold up.
A good friend of mine who has paid over 100,000AUD for his stereo system is a firm believer that a high quality digital audio cable makes a difference.. I am an electronics technician and I know better. 1's and 0's are 1's and 0's -- if they get through a cheap $2 lead intact it will sound identical as it would through a $300 lead. When the signal is too weak too many 1's turn into 0's.. just as when the signal is too hot too many 0's turn into 1's and both have the same effect -- total loss of audio or very bad broken audio. I can't believe people fall for this crap and spend ridiculous amounts of money on something that simply does not make a difference. It really is a case of placebo effect -- if you believe it will sound better because you just spent $300 on a cable -- it probably will. Any of us with the technical knowledge really do know better.
@@patrikjankovics2113 Of course. But the common argument from audiophiles is that it will improve the audio quality by having an expensive cable and this is just simply rubbish.
The one that gets me is thinking that a fancy expensive POWER cables affect the audio signal. I'm a retired electrician and electronics has been my hobby and I've tried to explain it can't happen, to no avail. People really do hear a difference but can't accept it's just in their head. If a cable actually carries audio signal THEN it can have some effect.
What you did is creating a coil, so the signal itself is creating a magnet field and influences the signal that is right now in a different part of this stacked cable. If you had split up this stereo cable, your issue would be gone.
Yeah, I was curious if plugging back into the same end of the cable the first input was in, rather than looping round to the opposite corner on the same side, might have dropped less bits. Since it would be two parallel coils rather than a mirrored coil?
Sata and Ethernet audiophile cables... I just wonder: ordinary sata and Ethernet cables are good enough for banks transmit/write/read/receive billions of financial transactions every day, they are good for NASA to access billions of informations, good enough for the most awesome super computer deal with tons of data for its researches, but they are not good enough to play a simple audio file.
I think that most of the applications you described probably lean towards the higher end of the mid-range cables. As my IT tech father can attest, some of the normal to low-end stuff is fraudulently labeled junk that can't meet it's spec (I'm thinking of Ethernet: he got one from a store once that was labelled as ordinary Cat-5, but was actually Cat-3: fine for phone and probably some older networking, but not usable for 100base-T, nor anywhere near the 1000base-T that was rolling out to consumers at the time). Though, it's not like you have absolute guarantees with anything.
@@233kosta I was using Foobar2000, and it's great for Windows but the Mac version isn't as good in my opinion. (I haven't used it as much, so I may try again.) For Mac and Linux systems, I use Clementine. Foobar2000 does have a Snap pack for Linux, but runs over WINE, and doesn't work correctly with Linux partitions / directory structures. I play with everything, so I usually try to find the best for each platform.
I dropped my subscription to Stereophile Magazine many years ago when they started spouting nonsense about digital audio. "Color the outside edge of your CDs with this specific green marker to make them sound better!" Yeah. I may try to replicate your experiment, I'm wondering if having the signal going through the stereo cable in the same direction (instead of doing a U-turn as in your setup) would make a difference. Also, running the signal through the attenuator was an excellent idea!
Coloring your CDs with marker was actually a real way to defeat certain copy-protection technologies. You had to color them in exactly the right place - the aim being to color-out the deliberately corrupted data-disc table of contents that was made to jam up CD drives, so they would fall back to the valid audio-only ToC.
@@manFromPeterborough Nope. Macrovision on DVD isn't really 'on' the DVD: It's something the DVD player adds in. The DVD only contains a flag that tells the player it needs to turn macrovision on, so you can't color it out. Players have to obey the flag because it's a condition of the licence that manufacturers must agree to in return for access to the decryption key needed to (legally) play a DVD.
The "audiophiles" who hate you for pointing out some of their record deck fallacies are going to double down now. I've always wondered how quickly their heads would explode if they saw the (poor) quality of some of the kit and cables actually used in recording studios and broadcast kit to make/broadcast the media they obsess about the playback quality of.
M T I suppose I can’t exactly comment on headphones, as I don’t have enough experience. But with iems, this is 100% not the case. I will admit, that the sq/price ratio decreases as you go up the ladder. But to say that a >£1000 pair of headphones only gives an extra 5% is demonstrably wrong. You may not have experienced this as intensely due to the fact that your HD660 are renowned for how great they are for the price, but in other similarly priced models, the same can’t be said.
M T I’m hardly ignoring dr, I even admitted that when prices significantly increase, sound quality increases too, but nowhere near in the same ratio. Also, I don’t know where in my message I said the totl’s were a must, I just said that the difference between something that costs >1000 and >200 are significant. Again, this is simply from my personal experience.
I saw a post by someone a few years ago that said "music lovers use their hifi to listen to the music, audiophiles use music to listen to their hifi" if it sounds good to you then it doesn't matter what anyone else think's and there's no need to spend vast amount's of money on that elusive golden sound that you hear about from companies wanting you to part with a lot of your cash
I've done similar experiments with TOSlink in the past. Technics CD-player from 1993 -> cheap 5m TOSlink cable rolled up -> TOSlink coupler -> another cheap 5m TOSlink cable -> Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum eX (the external box had TOSlink input, and it supported bit accurate recording). I then compared the recorded audio data to a EAC rip of the same CD, using the program "Compare It". It's a bit tricky since the files have to start and end at the same samples, but it can be done in Adobe Audition. The results: The files were identical, even when comparing the recorded data to the original FLAC file (the one I used to burn the CDR for the test).
I think my psu got a virus from a song i had downloaded for free. Probably because i didn't use the special anti virus Norton audio cable that sifts out the viruses coming through the audio file
Very interesting video. Now do the same with TOSlink... Edit: For a better sound quality there even exist TOSlink cables with gold "contacts"... The irony...
@Anthony96922 As with for example CD's, once there is only a little bit of error flying around the music is unbearably broken. But with an old cassette or record having "issues" there might be a little hiss, or a crackling sound, but it's still okay. Digital audio has no room for error. You either get it 100% or it's useless
@@dantevortex "Digital audio has no room for error." That is just wrong. Even a brand new Audio CD has some bit errors - but due to additional bits used for error detection and correction these errors could be perfectly fixed so the output is still perfect. If the error rate increases due to scratches or dirt it comes to a point where errors are still detected but not corrected anymore. In this case a normal CD player tries to do best possible - interpolating samples which could not be correct by interpolating them from the previous and next sample - which is NOT 100% accurate but normally still not hearable at all. But of course if to many samples could not be read than there is nothing more left to interpolate unreadable samples. So in reality an audio CD hat plenty of room for errors and can handle without any hearable effect until the error rate is to high.
I think you were experiencing interference as the digital packets went through the stereo cable side by side in both directions at the same time. Probably if you stripped the two wires apart so they aren’t touching each other for 25 feet, it might have continued to work fine. Or maybe twisting it like a pair of conductors in a Cat5 Ethernet cable. That might have canceled the inter-wire interference.
I like how you know the age of your cables. Every cable has a story, doesn't it? I actually still use the very first audio cable I ever purchased and remember the location of the Radio Shack that I bought it from. Speaking of cables, once I used a really long telephone cable (probably 50 ft or more) to run audio between two pieces of equipment on different floors of the house (I think it was a VCR downstairs and a computer upstairs) because it was the only cable I had that was long enough and I really didn't want to move the equipment. I had RJ11-to-four-prong adapters on each end, then used alligator clips onto RCA or TRS cables into the respective equipment. And it worked! Barely any hum actually.
Thing I love about Digital AV stuff is that it just works. Only benefit I've found to having better cables is they're not as likely to break (but thats not always the case especially if a brand is selling 60 dollar HDMI cables made for less then a dollar that breaks easily). Aside from a few cheapo cables, I've been getting by with $7 Amazon basics HDMI stuff. Unless you have really expensive equipment that you can't take chances with broken bits getting stuck int he ports, cheapo HDMI, RCA or Toslink Optical cables will do the job at delievering 100% of the quality that your equipment can output (but may not last as long).
The only thing with HDMI is the standards have evolved so for instance the cable I had been using from my PC to my old receiver didn't work with my new receiver and it took me a while to figure it out. Cheap enough to fix but if you already have a lot of old cables it can be hard to tell which ones are still useful.
The only thing to watch out for is that many cables do not adhere to the newer HDMI specs, even when they claim to, especially on longer cables. If you're trying to drive something that needs HDMI 2.1, make sure a third party has tested and validated the brand's HDMI 2.1 compliance at the length you need.
I can output DTS 5.1 from my Z170 motherboard to my SX-315 Pioneer, and am having zero issues using a crappy cable that used to be a left channel mono analog audio composite cable from the dollar store.
That's probably very close to what's actually happening here. It's hard to tell without seeing the actual raw waveform down to almost the individual sample, but I'd imagine what's happening is that the degraded but still readable signal is delivering just enough for some sound to be reconstructed, but many samples are being skipped, making the sample rate lower and resulting in interpolation between sample points that's large enough that it's audible. Might be doable in audacity if someone wants to try and see if the effect is similar.
You could synchronize the various recordings to the same sample in the stream and export to RAW 16-bit PCM with no headers or timestamps. Then run a checksum utility over these raw files such as md5sum or shasum. You will find that the checksums are equal. This means that the received data is the same regardless of cable quality. Great video.
I've been wanting to do this for so long, to even prove that different CD transports output the same digital signal. But I don't have a soundcard that can do SPDIF recording and I don't feel like spending money to prove someone wrong on the internet, because they won't believe you anyway.
@@RedShift5 I have a video on my channel where I sent HD video (1080p, 60fps h.265) over TOSLINK. I would be shocked to find that different CD players emit different S/PDIF data unless they had some kind of filter or equalizer. There would almost certainly be a way to disable it if such a thing did exist. It's hard to convince the audiophools.
@@TheResistorNetwork there's a whole community out there that believes different cd players fed to the SAME DAC produces different audio. Google "which cd transport should I get" or similar. I don't think a lot of them understand how CD's and electronics work.
@@rzeka Surprisingly no! There's a spreadsheet called "NEWER VGM Sound Sources" and the sounds that we know of from Mario 64, come from a variety of places. Korg 01/W, Roland SC-88, AKAI Sound Libraries, etc
SPDIF is a really robust signal. All that crappy cable, especially when coiled up like that must be acting like an antenna for every WIFI, Bluetooth, microwave or RF signal you can imagine and it still works even when 60ft beyond it's technical spec. That's also with multiple points of termination. Great demonstration.
Great video! Would like to see more on this topic. By the way, I've seen audiophile SATA cables as well! If regular SATA cables were dropping bits along the way, our computers wouldn't function. I can't see how such a cable would be of any benefit to the sound quality.
Audiophile sata cables? Wtf? I mean crappy sata cables may fail with some bits (and because of that the s.m.a.r.t. crc value), but the computer requests an entire data stream, if its corrupted and the system didnt crash it wont just use it like a analog device.. And worse! Tecnically unless you have like 12mb of ram, the files should load up entirelly on ram.
@@Carambal81 "Cryo threatment", "vibration dampening", "better audio and video quality", this one could easily be sued due to false advertising. I think that my faith in humanity has dropped quite a bit.
I've always made my analog/digital audio cable from aerial/antenna-cable fitted with RCA-Phono connections and it's fine. Practically with 0 (ZERO) dB loss for the analog side. Hell, I've even fitted them with snakeskin socks to make them look expensive. They can compete with $500 cables according to an honest source. Stupid Audiophools while hypnotized by some extremely expensive golden unidirectional copper-crystal thingy-things, somehow manage to forget everything about the tiny and small copper traces on the PCB's (Print Circuit Board) inside their gear, where components are connected using melted tin/lead. Even the metal pins on the components are left out of the equation. The most wacko of the kind spend their money on expensive power connectors, between their gear and the wall-230Volts/110Volts outlets. As if the electrons after travelling hundreds of miles in copper wires between the powerplant and their wall outlets, all of a sudden would be so freakingly happy travelling that one meter/three feet in an expensive power cable until they reach the transformers, full wave rectifiers, resistors, inductors, transistors and resistors, not to mention the tiny traces of copper on the circuit boards, that they alone from that, will reward the phool and deliver the most spectacular, clean firm airy crisp sound ever heard on Planet Earth. Well.........yeah..........
I've been getting that catalog for some reason. I never requested it that I know of. The crap in those catalogs are laughable. We saw a power cable that they were selling that used like 8 gauge wire for six inches that they claimed would provide you with superior power quality or some junk to your equipment. Houses in the U.S. are generally wired with 14 or 12 gauge wiring. Like that 6 inches of 8 gauge wire is going to magically improved the power from hundreds of feet of 14 or 12 gauge wire. Household wiring is a little thicker than necessary for a bit of a safety margin so I don't think that's the problem. Besides, it's generally not shielded in a metal conduit or twisted in route so it does pick up stray interference. Not to mention what it gets off the rest of the grid from poorly made electronics dumping noise back into the grid. A power filter should help with that, but high quality electronics should already have noise filtering as it, you know, rectifies the AC to DC anyway.
I get extra phono buzz from LP120 at random parts of the day, it maybe a plasma TV or light dimmers somewhere up the road, I'm at the last pole on the overhead wire. That buzz is that strong it is audible at 2/10 and can be heard on the dead wax
I used a 50 foot piece of cable for years for a digital signal. Worked fine, even still have it because it's very handy to have an RCA cable that long.
There are boxes of "junk" (used, untested)cables at the electronics shop near me in Japan and i always dip in there for cables when I need them. Never had a problem with any of them so far and I pay something like $1 a cable compared to whatever new cables run for. i heard the same kind of claims about "quality" HDMI cables too and learned it was also a joke.
Insertion loss? I'd be interested to see some electrical measurements of your long cable / coupler setup vs one of your short, relatively decent cables.
In college, I worked for a big chain electronics store. The commission we’d get on selling a brand new ps3 was a third of what we’d get for pushing the gold plated super-amazo monster hdmi cable with it.
BRILLIANT you nailed it Digital is ALL or Nothing, unles you go crazy and connect loads of cheap cable for a massive length always has been and always will be ! regardless of if you used a £1 cable from the poundshop or a £1000 cable from the Audiophile-Nob-Head-Shop what actually happens on these massive lengths of cheap cable is the I/O on/off timing pulses eventually can't be handled by the cllock of the DAC you are using.
Damn it, all those cables do is transmit binary data which is then converted to analog audio. You can use the most craptastic thrift store cables ever and they work no problem. I have bought gold plated cables but they were cheap and cool looking. All gold plating does is make them less likely to corrode.
Indeed, I've got a decidedly ordinary old home theater amp, but changing the speakers(got some big 90s Wharfedale speakers very cheaply) certainly made a big difference!
I wish you would have read their catalog line about the receptacle they were selling on the facing page. Probably a $9 commercial receptacle they are hawking for over $100. Cracks me up every time!
@@Stjaernljus OH Wow! I've heard that it sounds even better than the unobtainium, it automatically converts music to 5 D surround and adds negative distortion. You are one hell of a lucky guy/girl. In fact the sound is so clear that you can listen to the voices of the workers who put together the HiFi in factories. (Yes the sound gets embedded in the capacitors but you can't hear them with coat hanger or even HIGH QUALITY AUDIOFOOL CABLES).
If you think about it, this kind of bitcrush distortion makes sense. Digital signals are streams of fast signals that are either 0 or 1 - so if an input signal is something like 0.9 or 1.2 it obviously rounds it down to 1, and if it's something like 0.1 or -0.2, then it obviously rounds down to 0. With you moving volume down, that 1 gets "quitened down" to 0.9, 0.8, 0.7 and so on, sounding just fine with it rounding up to 1, until 0.5 where the noise results in each 1 getting randomly rounded up or down (but 0 is still 0 so the audio is still partially intact), and then below 0.5 where it just rounds down to 0 where it's not heard. That player could tell that something is really bad with digital signal and would instantly cut out audio when it sees malformed audio data coming in, as it can just check the actual value before rounding it to 0 or 1, and if it's something below 0.6, it can assume the signal is bad and tell the user to check it. This way, it simply never gets down to the volume levels where 1s would get rounded down to 0. Meanwhile, a PC's card can't just easily tell the user that the input signal is bad, or they didn't bother designing such a check, so it just pumps whatever gets in as audio into the system. I guess that's also why the stereo cable started doing the exact same thing. I think it's reasonable to assume that because it's exactly the same data going through both wires that are directly one to another there was some interference which caused either a enough noise or a significant enough volume drop to cause exactly the same effect.
With digital, the equipment will also usually try to compensate for timing mis-matches by adjusting it's own clock to match the incoming signal. With a bad enough signal, you can wind up with the clock stopping at the wrong speed, or even swing it's speed up and down constantly, producing any number of wrong interpretations of the signal.
All those female-female couplers will significantly degrade signal on their own..added with the length of "cheap" cable you added, the signal still is strong enough for any error correction, until its breaking point...nice! I used a 17 foot RCA cable from a cheap Scosche car amp kit and it cleaned up analog signal path and dropped noise from my PC to a remote amp drastically after previously using several old "hi quality" 6ft Radio Shack RCAs and couplers to do the same thing! But yea if you need to go long distances(50ft or more) then maybe higher quality cable could be the solution, but even those will only get you so far...thanks for sharing!
If you get that last long stereo cable and actually split it into two separate ones, it would probably work. The way you are connecting it right now, means the signal goes all the way to one end and then returns through the other half of the cable which runs inch for inch in parallel to the original. This causes massive crosstalk.
Very bad example, for ADSL there is a ton of processing going on the signal to determine the channel. Your cheap plastic router is going through an activel training phase on connection with the DSLAM in order to determine the quality of the cable and to decide on the bands to use for communication and using bad cable will actually degrade the throughput.
Good video as always , I was never fooled by the fancy overpriced cables back in the day , especially as most people only needed 6 foot or less cable at most for their needs .
I was at a friends house a while back and he was showing his new sound equipment. We started to detect a crackling sound in the left channel. Long story short, he was using 30 year old cables of dubious quality. After buying mid-grade shielded cables the sound quality was noticeably improved. The cables were not expensive, but made a difference. It is important to get copper cables, not the copper coated aluminum. Great video demonstration.
Hydrogen Audio represent! Admin kode54 here. E: Also going to guess a possibility that the audio passing twice through that same paired cable can also result in RF interference between the two cable lengths. E2: I watched the whole thing this time, rather than commenting while I was still watching it lol. I see it's just the DCC having the smarts to cut off on signal degradation rather than playing the resulting audio.
Hey, as an electrician I think you are onto something! Signal, that is passing through the same paired cable in the opposite directions could cancel itself out, ecpecially if the cable is coiled. I've seen inductive interference filters that are working on the same principles.
interesting, LMAO. It is not just the increase of resistance in very long runs, there is also an increase of capacitance as well. Parallel wires (insulated) close to each other ( as in a cord/cable) act as a capacitor as well. BTW: those expensive cables are a ripoff, but people are too gullible to not buy those.
Some audiophiles may claim that this test doesn't count due to the use of low end speakers and a computer, and that someone with good ears can tell a difference on a high end system. I would personally call such a claim BS, but let's just for the fun of it assume it's correct. In that case there's one more argument for not buying insanely expensive cables: They will reveal the flaws of for instance the cd media (which for a fact exists) even more. This a great test, and a great video. It clearly proves the point: Don't waste your money on snake oil. Stay awesome mate, and keep the cool stuff coming.
Yep! And those audiophools that convince themselves that their $100+ digital audio cable is SO superior to normal RCA cables never seem to consider the standard of the components; the main board, the copper traces on that board, and internal wiring inside the components being connected.... those will have more influence over the resulting quality than 3-feet of over-priced oxygen-free, pre-sexed, and gold plated cable outside!
Regarding the part at 3:50 where you show the CD: The album title is actually "Gentle Journey" and the group who recorded it is Colors In Motion. As per Spotify, it was released in 1991. Thought I'd let everyone know just in case anyone's interested.
An absolutely brilliant video! But even better - Thank you for introducing me to the awesome group Echo Movement. They remind me of a much much mellow version of 311. Thanks a ton for the video, bro!
It seems to me these $100 cables (which couldn't truthfully promise better signal quality) often focussed on durability. "Woven Kevlar construction". It makes me wonder if people are buying them to hook up a TV in their living rooms or in trenches in an active war zone.
That last cable that's doubled up, in opposite directions, you made a common-mode choke. If you had sent the signal in the same direction through both halves, it probably would have worked.
Seems like the distortion is more down to running the signal through the same cable twice. The distortion reminds me a bit of the sound of ring modulation.
I forgot Silver had one valence electron, but you don't really see silver-coated cables pushed these days. Wild to see that the "Monster cables" business model has been around for decades
I've asked around at audiophile forums, but I've never got a satisfactorily logical answer as to why a high end CD player is any better in terms of music quality than a cheap portable Walmart special - Especially if the CD player is outputting digital. I realize that there can be differences in DAC quality, but I'm thinking that's largely negligible and psychological too. Speaker quality is undoubtedly where you'll get the biggest variances in sound.
Cables don't produce sound, audio cables or otherwise. They only carry a signal which of course cannot be altered by any sort of cable. That's as stupid as saying your car gets better gas mileage on sunny days compared to on cloudy days.
I should try this too one day, my motherboard also got a digital audio in (Coaxial, although I've seen the same mobo with TOSLINK), but here is the catch, I don't have any equipment that takes digital coax audio in anymore (I used to). Really interesting though.
You can probably find a converter. At least in the case of S/PDIF, it literally uses the same encoding as TOSLINK: the TOSLINK stuff is arguable best for either isolating grounds, or using Mini-TOSLINK to fit TOSLINK in the same socket as a TRS or TRRS cable. Beware that there's a little bit of stuff that uses TOSLINK cables for non-TOSLINK purposes! TOSLINK cables are just like RCA cables: generic-purposed!
@@absalomdraconis if I had equipment that could use S/PDIF over TOSLINK I would've bought a converter already, but the catch 22 being that I have no equipment that can use SPDIF currently (aside my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe which happens to have a RCA jack for S/PDIF, I'm not really sure if it's a input or output, maybe I'll find out when I get my cMP 5,1 which already has TOSLINK connectors, it should be a matter of buying a converter then.)
Besides the unmatched impedance, having a digital signal go past itself twice in unshielded cable will induce an artificial reflection confusing the clock in the spdif signal. What you are hearing is a multi-bit shift where the values are being overlayed, cancelled, and losing clock. Since the red side and black side of the 25ft paired cable work fine separately, simply separating the left and right unshielded cables the full length, will clean up the signal. That is why single unshielded cables work fine but when 2 of them are next to each other and unshielded, the signal will induce a phase shifted one in the other cable, but since its a loopback, you are just artificially inducing reflection into the same signal. Two shielded cables of the same length in the same side-by-side setup will not create this same effect.
With that coiled dual RCA cable you probably built a nice delay line without knowing. The effect was utilized in some older oscilloscopes amongst other things.
I can be a factor with higher bandwidth requirements. Like if you have HDMI 2.0 hardware and an old cable, it might not want to offer the proper throughput.
Audiophools are everywhere. Companies like AudioQuest prey on these hapless idiots. Jitter can be measured, but any decent shielded coaxial cable that's rated for 75 ohms will work perfectly for SPDIF.
I remember when I was a kid i wanted to hook up my pc in my room to the tv in the living room. I didn't have quite enough cable, so part of it was literal speaker cable taped to the RCA ends of two other cables. Worked just fine. My pc had no issue lol. I learned from a young age that a lot of times, cable is cable. doesn't matter what it's for as long as it's hooked up how both ends expect them to be.
The actual data that is encoded in Digital Audio includes some error-correction bits along with the bits that carry the audio information, this enables the CD playback system to automatically correct for any loss of data that might be caused by a scratch on the surface of the CD, it is capable of correcting data loss caused by a 4 or 5mm hole drilled literally straight through the CD.
Presumably that happens within the CD player circuitry though, not after it's transmitted. I'm not sure, but from what I could find, the PCM data sent from a CD player doesn't have error correction data in the signal.
I don't know how but I somehow got subscribed to that Audio Advisor magazine. I had a good laugh when looking through some of their audio and power cable claims.
SPDIF can carry raw pcm audio samples where a little noise is just like dust on a vinyl record. But it can also be a compressed format, then you may hear bigger skips.
Do I assume that the page you flipped from (in the catalog) has audiofool-grade electrical outlets (that connect to one's regular house wiring)? And maybe ultra-premium power cords, as well? :þ
On DAB we get the "bubbling mud" effect on weak DAB signals on stations that are encoded with the original MP2 codec, on DAB+ which uses the AAC codec, those stations start echoing on a weak signal. Also, not every DAB radio supports AAC or DAB+, there are older radios that only support the older MP2 codec and not AAC, which means these radios can't tune into to stations encoded in AAC.
I agree with you: Bits are bits and crappy coax cables probably work just as well as the ones that are a hundred dollars.
With the long cables, the signal degrades because it gets weaker (the voltage goes down) and that's also what happens with the little inline potmeter of your special cable. But for long cables, the capacitance between signal and ground, and the induction between source and destination start to be significant too which influences the frequency characteristics of the cable.
When you put in the stereo cable and use it in both directions, I think what happens is that the capacitance finally distorts the signal so much that the PLL on the receiving end can't recover the clock from the source anymore and the clock in the receiver starts running freely. That results in the bits getting shifted in at the wrong time most of the time, but not all the time. But the computer can still make out enough of the bits to grab a sample every once in a while, and at regular intervals. It's like an old CRT TV that has the Vertical Hold setting wrong, and the picture scrolls so fast that you can still sort of see what it should be. This only happens because your computer is still doing its best to get as many samples (really: subframes of biphase data) as it can.
I happen to be very familiar with the circuitry in that DCC-951, and I think the Digital Audio Input/Output chip is a little bit more advanced that the chip in your computer. It detects not only when it can't lock on to the input clock with the PLL, but also when it doesn't see the various bits in the S/PDIF stream that tell it that the input has a valid checksum, is valid PCM audio, is ISO-60958 section 3 (not section 2) and other things. As soon as any of those is wrong, it flips an output pin, telling the recorder that it can't decode things. And I wouldn't be surprised if it needs an entire block of S/PDIF subframes (384 samples) before it flips the pin back. And when that pin is active, the recorder puts the DAC and possibly the output amplifier in Mute mode. So the DCC recorder cuts off the signal much more rigorously and won't turn it back on until it's absolutely sure there are no crackles or pops from misread bits.
It's possible for an S/PDIF coax cable to receive enough interference (e.g. from a power cable that's right next to it) to cause problems. And if you have both analog cables and S/PDIF coax cables connected to a recorder, there's definitely a chance of ground loops / earth loops that make circuits oscillate. But all of those distortions, interferences etc. are not going to degrade a digital signal in the same way as an analog signal. The bits either arrive or they don't. In the unlikely event that a 0 arrives as a 1 or vice versa, you might hear it as a snap, crackle or pop on a receiver that's not picky about what it's receiving (i.e. it's just moving bits). On a smarter receiver like the one in the DCC-951, it will probably result in a muted signal.
And you can't hear jitter in a S/PDIF connection. If some samples arrive a little too early or too late (i.e. jitter), the PLL in the receiver will compensates for it. The only kind of distortion that you might hear is from bad filtering on the D/A converter, causing quantization noise or phase problems. And by using oversampling, DACs basically multiply the Nyquist frequency so the filtering circuitry can become simpler or can be left out altogether.
It's actually a DCC 900, but thanks for all of the detailed information!
@@vwestlife Oops, I thought you had a DCC-951. I wasn't paying enough attention there. I'm less familiar with the DCC-900 but even though it has different S/PDIF chips, the rest of my comment still stands :)
@B3ro1080 Absolutely. But it doesn't matter until the bits don't arrive anymore or can't be decoded. And that's where audiophiles (or the companies selling cables to audiophiles) disagree.
There's also a parity bit at the end of each SP/DIF subframe (bit 31 in the 0...31 sequence) which I've noticed only certain DACs bother to act on. When I was first testing the SP/DIF output of an ARM single-board computer, a bad register setting was causing it to output all-zeroes for parity, which caused my Yamaha A/V receiver to play no sound at all (though ~50% of the subframes would have good parity by random chance, it must have required a fair number of good subframes in a row to un-mute itself)... but the cheap TC-7510 DAC I use with my headphone amp, which uses a Burr-Brown PCM1716, happily played the zeroed-parity stream without complaint or apparent distortion. The latter device also ignored the bit-28 "Validity" flag, which some sources use to mark a bad sample (e.g. scratched CD beyond error-correction limits).
OTOH, the PCM1716 does honor the rarely (never?)-used "pre-emphasis" mode set via a channel-status bit pattern, resulting in muddy output with severe treble roll-off when enabled accidentally, while the Yamaha seems not to have implemented that.
Wow, you sure know your stuff!🤯😇😎
I have been an audio tech for 40 years. High-end cables are nothing but jewelry for your stereo equipment.
Except if you are using it for analog audio.
@@inputerase even with analogue audio there are no measurable differences between decent quality cables and ridiculous high end cables. The cables that ship with components are usually garbage, though. Not because of any audible differences as much as they tend to oxidize and cause intermittent connections.
@@jgrimsley2000 I changed my aiwa adf770 deck pakage rca- shitcables to all shielted guality copper ones. IT Made a difference. Period.
@@artsimannisto5659 Decent RCA cables don't have to cost $100. The point of diminishing returns is well below $20. No one would argue that the cables that ship with equipment are decent. Go ahead and spend $275 on a set of Kimber cables, then come back on here tell everyone how much they expanded the sound stage and improved imaging and instrument placement. It will cost you $275 and all of your credibility.
@@jgrimsley2000 Finland,here these short rca cables pricerange was about 20euros.
We must remember this,its a big difference between antennacable and balanced all shielted connector cables. A BIG-Difference.
The greatest offender has to be the optical cable with gold plating. It's light, you dolts!
Yup, I've bought one several years ago, not because it was gold plated, but because it was very cheap and of the right length. I still keep the packing with an inscription "Gold plated for better contact" because I like the concept.
Lol. Yup. Those people spending $300 bucks or more and I buy it for $5 bucks.
Also those crazy people buying speaker wires for thousands of $$$. A $10 12awg cable sounds the same...Biggest rip off in history!
But shiny?!
Nooo don't use non terminated Y! Bits will fall off!
I wonder what happens if you zapp it or connect some additional digital or even analog signal.
Is no worries, someone else will pick them up. Is like sharing.They work kinda like xp-orbs in Minecraft.
@mr.necercis Duct tape will fix that...
they might... if there was another cable in the non-terminated y.. of let's say 20 meters or so, and if it was a balanced bus, which it probably is not. lol.
Actually that proves his point more. Showing even more that they are trying to rip you off from the "premium" cables.
I worked at an audiophool shop doing bench repairs for a couple of years. I had to leave, because of all of the b/s like you just demonstrated. We sold what was in reality a $50 Sharpie. Apparently, if you used it to blacken the edges of a CD, 'enlightened' ones could hear a vast improvement in sound quality. In the same case, we sold a glow in the dark plastic disc for $100 that would 'bathe the transport in light,' also claiming to improve sound quality. I don't even want to get into the multi-hundred dollar 'directional' RCA cables we sold. It was all dishonest smoke and mirror b/s. My conscious forced me to quit.
@Infinite Possibilities exactly. I mean if you run a gas station are you gonna not sell cigarettes just because they don't really do anything besides give people cancer? no reason to quit your job.
Some people have more money than sense. And yet they're entrusted with jobs that pay this extra money. It makes you worry about society in its entirety.
uh oh. Don't tell AnaDialog that the $50 sharpie is BS. He swears by the thing lol
@@michaelmitchell6089 Got about ten minutes into that video. My favorite part was when he says "I don't know how this works..." and in the very next sentence offers some BS about how it supposedly works. I've got a bridge to sell this guy...
In the same case, we sold a glow in the dark plastic disc for $100 that would "bathe transport in light" it did it's job but with a $99.00 markup! :-D
I can tell you about the USB cables...one day whilst *extremely* bored at work, I took a whole bunch of passive couplers and went to town. I was well north of 75 feet if not 100, and several different flash drives continued to work perfectly well at USB 2.0 data rates. There was no notable loss of speed.
I figured voltage drop would be a problem long before data integrity. Making a video about this has been on my to-do list for a long time now, but I misplaced the cable couplers not long after and they've never shown up again.
that mostly comes down to what you're plugging it into and how strictly they enforce the spec, at those lengths you would be well outside the official timing specs for usb
I think I saw a 75 foot USB extension cord at the thrift store and it looked passive so, your findings make sense.
@@brendanrandle By my rough calculations, at 75 feet he's 4.6x over the timing spec for 480mbps transmission. The only possible explanation is methodological error, personally I suspect a flawed baseline measurement.
For the other side of this, I had an HP scanjet once at work that would scan half the page and then get a scan error. We read the manual and it said that the maximum cable length was 6 feet and we had used a 10 foot cable. Sure enough, we moved the scanner closer and used a 6 foot cable and the scan error went away.
Have you tried searching between the sofa cushions? Things have a tendency to get lost there. Once I found a portal to another dimension there.
This cable turns smooth jazz into EDM!
I'd love to hear what "rough, cloudy, 2-dimensional sound" sounds like
Justin Bieber
@@JonnyInfiniteth-cam.com/video/QspuCt1FM9M/w-d-xo.html
maybe not rough or 2-dimensional, but yeah, cloudy...
@@rzeka heh I remember this when it first appeared on Soundcloud. Who knew Beiber was a hidden genius
LOL me too, especially 2D sound VS 3D, is 3D one of those barbershop headphone things?
@@jamiemarchant th-cam.com/video/XYa3dkxTPgo/w-d-xo.html
For those that don’t understand the principles of basic electronics, audio components are mysterious magic boxes and mysterious magic cables can seem alluring. Once you understand Ohm’s law, the basics of digital and analog sound and how resistors, caps, tubes and transistors work, the mystery disappears along with (hopefully) the tendency to fall for magical marketing claims. I consider myself an audiophile and there are “bad, good, better” cables, but the differentiator is construction quality which affects durability and the likelihood of failure.
Word 100%
🤔 Ohm's law.
Speaker cables actually benefit from being thicker, something to do with the capacitance of the cable, otherwise it attenuates the bass.
@@doltBmB No. Speaker cable capacitance is not an issue. The resistance can be a factor, though, and the gauge of the wire must be adequate for the length of the run. For normal distances under 50 feet, standard 18 gauge lamp cord is more than adequate. For very high power applications, lower impedance speakers below 6 ohms, or distances over 50’, 14 or 12 gauge may be necessary. Again, this has to do with resistance not capacitance.
Capacitance can sometimes be an issue for source component cables, particularly phono cables. Most audio cables provide the necessary capacitance, however, so it’s the rare circumstance where specialty cables must be used.
@@FluxCondenser Yes it is, there's a lot of good tests that show thickness matters.
This is exactly what it sounds like when a recording on DAT gets corrupted somehow and the error rate goes out of control. Pretty neat to see it happening because of excessive cable length.
Now I'm reminded of seeing ADSL routers with huge measured distance to exchange and lots and lots of CRC hits. I guess it's doing the same thing to the bits in all the cases... dropping or flipping until the integrity of the packet doesn't hold up.
A good friend of mine who has paid over 100,000AUD for his stereo system is a firm believer that a high quality digital audio cable makes a difference.. I am an electronics technician and I know better. 1's and 0's are 1's and 0's -- if they get through a cheap $2 lead intact it will sound identical as it would through a $300 lead. When the signal is too weak too many 1's turn into 0's.. just as when the signal is too hot too many 0's turn into 1's and both have the same effect -- total loss of audio or very bad broken audio. I can't believe people fall for this crap and spend ridiculous amounts of money on something that simply does not make a difference. It really is a case of placebo effect -- if you believe it will sound better because you just spent $300 on a cable -- it probably will. Any of us with the technical knowledge really do know better.
Well, digital inference exists as well, so a cheap shielded cable should do the trick.
@@patrikjankovics2113 Of course. But the common argument from audiophiles is that it will improve the audio quality by having an expensive cable and this is just simply rubbish.
@@patrikjankovics2113 Or an optical cable.
The one that gets me is thinking that a fancy expensive POWER cables affect the audio signal. I'm a retired electrician and electronics has been my hobby and I've tried to explain it can't happen, to no avail. People really do hear a difference but can't accept it's just in their head. If a cable actually carries audio signal THEN it can have some effect.
Plus modern error correction algorithms exist.
What you did is creating a coil, so the signal itself is creating a magnet field and influences the signal that is right now in a different part of this stacked cable. If you had split up this stereo cable, your issue would be gone.
Makes sense since it's completely unshielded, with properly shielded cables even this would not be an issue.
Don't tell him that he be running the cable down the street next lol 😉
Pauly H I’d watch that video.
Yeah, I was curious if plugging back into the same end of the cable the first input was in, rather than looping round to the opposite corner on the same side, might have dropped less bits. Since it would be two parallel coils rather than a mirrored coil?
Yeah I concur with this
Sata and Ethernet audiophile cables... I just wonder: ordinary sata and Ethernet cables are good enough for banks transmit/write/read/receive billions of financial transactions every day, they are good for NASA to access billions of informations, good enough for the most awesome super computer deal with tons of data for its researches, but they are not good enough to play a simple audio file.
I think that most of the applications you described probably lean towards the higher end of the mid-range cables. As my IT tech father can attest, some of the normal to low-end stuff is fraudulently labeled junk that can't meet it's spec (I'm thinking of Ethernet: he got one from a store once that was labelled as ordinary Cat-5, but was actually Cat-3: fine for phone and probably some older networking, but not usable for 100base-T, nor anywhere near the 1000base-T that was rolling out to consumers at the time).
Though, it's not like you have absolute guarantees with anything.
There are people that debate about hard drive types too. People recommend surveillance drives because of their non-stop stream performance.
@@233kosta most players that are portable use Micro SD cards, but usually there's a decent sized buffer. That cuts lag when you skip tracks.
@@233kosta I was using Foobar2000, and it's great for Windows but the Mac version isn't as good in my opinion. (I haven't used it as much, so I may try again.) For Mac and Linux systems, I use Clementine. Foobar2000 does have a Snap pack for Linux, but runs over WINE, and doesn't work correctly with Linux partitions / directory structures.
I play with everything, so I usually try to find the best for each platform.
Expencive cables have better endurance and protection, so pay a bit more on that use cases is ok. But not that big as brainless audiophile fee.
Any self-respecting tech geek has tons of rca cables but you sure do have a lot of couplers!
A have a whole large drawer of RCA cables.
Lol i noticed that too and ever notice you always jave a ton of rca cables when you dont need one but when you do you can't find them 😂🤣
I have 3 white rca cables and no red ones
No I don't know how don't ask
I dropped my subscription to Stereophile Magazine many years ago when they started spouting nonsense about digital audio. "Color the outside edge of your CDs with this specific green marker to make them sound better!" Yeah.
I may try to replicate your experiment, I'm wondering if having the signal going through the stereo cable in the same direction (instead of doing a U-turn as in your setup) would make a difference.
Also, running the signal through the attenuator was an excellent idea!
Coloring your CDs with marker was actually a real way to defeat certain copy-protection technologies. You had to color them in exactly the right place - the aim being to color-out the deliberately corrupted data-disc table of contents that was made to jam up CD drives, so they would fall back to the valid audio-only ToC.
@@vylbird8014 Macrovision on DVD was a copy protect system, I wonder if the green marker will work on those
@@manFromPeterborough Nope. Macrovision on DVD isn't really 'on' the DVD: It's something the DVD player adds in. The DVD only contains a flag that tells the player it needs to turn macrovision on, so you can't color it out. Players have to obey the flag because it's a condition of the licence that manufacturers must agree to in return for access to the decryption key needed to (legally) play a DVD.
The "audiophiles" who hate you for pointing out some of their record deck fallacies are going to double down now. I've always wondered how quickly their heads would explode if they saw the (poor) quality of some of the kit and cables actually used in recording studios and broadcast kit to make/broadcast the media they obsess about the playback quality of.
M T can you just elaborate on what you mean?
M T I suppose I can’t exactly comment on headphones, as I don’t have enough experience. But with iems, this is 100% not the case. I will admit, that the sq/price ratio decreases as you go up the ladder. But to say that a >£1000 pair of headphones only gives an extra 5% is demonstrably wrong. You may not have experienced this as intensely due to the fact that your HD660 are renowned for how great they are for the price, but in other similarly priced models, the same can’t be said.
M T I’m hardly ignoring dr, I even admitted that when prices significantly increase, sound quality increases too, but nowhere near in the same ratio. Also, I don’t know where in my message I said the totl’s were a must, I just said that the difference between something that costs >1000 and >200 are significant. Again, this is simply from my personal experience.
Cian Duffy Dear god, if they found out about the poor kits in studios, they’d probably plan terrorist attacks or something
I saw a post by someone a few years ago that said "music lovers use their hifi to listen to the music, audiophiles use music to listen to their hifi" if it sounds good to you then it doesn't matter what anyone else think's and there's no need to spend vast amount's of money on that elusive golden sound that you hear about from companies wanting you to part with a lot of your cash
I've done similar experiments with TOSlink in the past.
Technics CD-player from 1993 -> cheap 5m TOSlink cable rolled up -> TOSlink coupler -> another cheap 5m TOSlink cable -> Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum eX (the external box had TOSlink input, and it supported bit accurate recording).
I then compared the recorded audio data to a EAC rip of the same CD, using the program "Compare It". It's a bit tricky since the files have to start and end at the same samples, but it can be done in Adobe Audition.
The results: The files were identical, even when comparing the recorded data to the original FLAC file (the one I used to burn the CDR for the test).
If you're not spending at least $300 on superior cabling, your equipment may be destroyed by digital audio virus executables (DAVE).
And, you have to buy a DAC that's more expensive than a reasonable economy car, or else the music might not decode correctly.
🤣🤣 creative AF
Also, u have a virus in computer power unit )
I think my psu got a virus from a song i had downloaded for free. Probably because i didn't use the special anti virus Norton audio cable that sifts out the viruses coming through the audio file
@@hairychesticles1 Thanks, this gave me a good laugh. Did you remember to download more ram while you were at it?
Very interesting video. Now do the same with TOSlink...
Edit: For a better sound quality there even exist TOSlink cables with gold "contacts"... The irony...
Fortunately I don't think too many people are fooled by that, because the sockets that a TOSLink cable plug into are made of *plastic!*
There are even people that think that gold plated connectors on HDMI cables make a difference to the sound and / or image.
Like, what would the gold "Contacts" even do on an optical cable?
@@Soonjai Well gold-plated HDMI cables are just... Plated with fool's gold. That's the trick (haha)
Check out technology connections's video, it's really good
Standard law of digital information transmission, it either works perfectly or it doesn't work at all.
@Anthony96922 As with for example CD's, once there is only a little bit of error flying around the music is unbearably broken. But with an old cassette or record having "issues" there might be a little hiss, or a crackling sound, but it's still okay. Digital audio has no room for error. You either get it 100% or it's useless
I d thin eeee y n someti i f dUHHHHHHHH o , mean.
@@dantevortex "Digital audio has no room for error."
That is just wrong. Even a brand new Audio CD has some bit errors - but due to additional bits used for error detection and correction these errors could be perfectly fixed so the output is still perfect. If the error rate increases due to scratches or dirt it comes to a point where errors are still detected but not corrected anymore. In this case a normal CD player tries to do best possible - interpolating samples which could not be correct by interpolating them from the previous and next sample - which is NOT 100% accurate but normally still not hearable at all. But of course if to many samples could not be read than there is nothing more left to interpolate unreadable samples.
So in reality an audio CD hat plenty of room for errors and can handle without any hearable effect until the error rate is to high.
I think you were experiencing interference as the digital packets went through the stereo cable side by side in both directions at the same time. Probably if you stripped the two wires apart so they aren’t touching each other for 25 feet, it might have continued to work fine. Or maybe twisting it like a pair of conductors in a Cat5 Ethernet cable. That might have canceled the inter-wire interference.
it sure did look like far end crosstalk
Yep, I was thinking the same thing. The crosstalk is causing the degradation more than the overall length.
yep 100% that's what was happening. This is why we shield cables when doing long runs with low signal noise ratio (tv aerial being the prime example).
I like how you know the age of your cables. Every cable has a story, doesn't it? I actually still use the very first audio cable I ever purchased and remember the location of the Radio Shack that I bought it from.
Speaking of cables, once I used a really long telephone cable (probably 50 ft or more) to run audio between two pieces of equipment on different floors of the house (I think it was a VCR downstairs and a computer upstairs) because it was the only cable I had that was long enough and I really didn't want to move the equipment. I had RJ11-to-four-prong adapters on each end, then used alligator clips onto RCA or TRS cables into the respective equipment. And it worked! Barely any hum actually.
Thing I love about Digital AV stuff is that it just works. Only benefit I've found to having better cables is they're not as likely to break (but thats not always the case especially if a brand is selling 60 dollar HDMI cables made for less then a dollar that breaks easily). Aside from a few cheapo cables, I've been getting by with $7 Amazon basics HDMI stuff.
Unless you have really expensive equipment that you can't take chances with broken bits getting stuck int he ports, cheapo HDMI, RCA or Toslink Optical cables will do the job at delievering 100% of the quality that your equipment can output (but may not last as long).
The only thing with HDMI is the standards have evolved so for instance the cable I had been using from my PC to my old receiver didn't work with my new receiver and it took me a while to figure it out. Cheap enough to fix but if you already have a lot of old cables it can be hard to tell which ones are still useful.
The only thing to watch out for is that many cables do not adhere to the newer HDMI specs, even when they claim to, especially on longer cables. If you're trying to drive something that needs HDMI 2.1, make sure a third party has tested and validated the brand's HDMI 2.1 compliance at the length you need.
Content like this is why I love this channel. Destroying bullshit audiophile claims with simple to replicate tests.
People buy expensive cables yet the internal cables of their equipment are the same as the $1/5m cables from hardware stores.
I can output DTS 5.1 from my Z170 motherboard to my SX-315 Pioneer, and am having zero issues using a crappy cable that used to be a left channel mono analog audio composite cable from the dollar store.
The wonders of digital encoding.
It sounds no different from the “bitcrusher” effect on DJ apps such as serato or virtual DJ with that crappy digital signal coming thru
That's probably very close to what's actually happening here. It's hard to tell without seeing the actual raw waveform down to almost the individual sample, but I'd imagine what's happening is that the degraded but still readable signal is delivering just enough for some sound to be reconstructed, but many samples are being skipped, making the sample rate lower and resulting in interpolation between sample points that's large enough that it's audible. Might be doable in audacity if someone wants to try and see if the effect is similar.
Oh using that inline volume control to simulate long line loss.. that was cool. Obviously easier to precisely degrade than with many many cables.
You could synchronize the various recordings to the same sample in the stream and export to RAW 16-bit PCM with no headers or timestamps. Then run a checksum utility over these raw files such as md5sum or shasum. You will find that the checksums are equal. This means that the received data is the same regardless of cable quality. Great video.
I've been wanting to do this for so long, to even prove that different CD transports output the same digital signal. But I don't have a soundcard that can do SPDIF recording and I don't feel like spending money to prove someone wrong on the internet, because they won't believe you anyway.
@@RedShift5 I have a video on my channel where I sent HD video (1080p, 60fps h.265) over TOSLINK. I would be shocked to find that different CD players emit different S/PDIF data unless they had some kind of filter or equalizer. There would almost certainly be a way to disable it if such a thing did exist. It's hard to convince the audiophools.
@@TheResistorNetwork there's a whole community out there that believes different cd players fed to the SAME DAC produces different audio. Google "which cd transport should I get" or similar. I don't think a lot of them understand how CD's and electronics work.
@@RedShift5 They don't. And when you confront them about it, they will only respond: "use your ears". I only wish they actually did that themselves!
no point in running a cryptographic hash over it, just compare the streams byte by byte.
This video made me realize that Dire Dire Docks from Super Mario 64 was made on a Yamaha DX7
Dire Dire Docks also sounds a bit like Van Halen's - Hear About It Later on some parts.
It's just the main sample, the DX7 preset "E.PIANO1". The N64 performs the track live from individual samples.
damn... you beat me to it lol
I don't think it was, I think most of the samples from mario 64 come from a Korg M1.
@@rzeka Surprisingly no! There's a spreadsheet called "NEWER VGM Sound Sources" and the sounds that we know of from Mario 64, come from a variety of places. Korg 01/W, Roland SC-88, AKAI Sound Libraries, etc
Those folks need some hidden valley ranch for their word salad in that catalog.
Nah, they prefer oil on the audiofoolery and vinegar on the sensible options.
SPDIF is a really robust signal. All that crappy cable, especially when coiled up like that must be acting like an antenna for every WIFI, Bluetooth, microwave or RF signal you can imagine and it still works even when 60ft beyond it's technical spec. That's also with multiple points of termination. Great demonstration.
what amazes me most is you still have a Philips DCC working
after mine and everyone elses packed up over 10 years ago.
I had Ralf (Dr. DCC) replace the capacitors and get it working again.
Great video! Would like to see more on this topic. By the way, I've seen audiophile SATA cables as well! If regular SATA cables were dropping bits along the way, our computers wouldn't function. I can't see how such a cable would be of any benefit to the sound quality.
Audiophile sata cables? Wtf?
I mean crappy sata cables may fail with some bits (and because of that the s.m.a.r.t. crc value), but the computer requests an entire data stream, if its corrupted and the system didnt crash it wont just use it like a analog device..
And worse! Tecnically unless you have like 12mb of ram, the files should load up entirelly on ram.
@@eduardoavila646 jcat.eu/product/reference-sata-cable/
@@Carambal81 "Cryo threatment", "vibration dampening", "better audio and video quality", this one could easily be sued due to false advertising.
I think that my faith in humanity has dropped quite a bit.
@Lassi Kinnunen True! We unfortunatly live in the age of the "electronic snake oil"
@Carambal81
"best sound and image quality"
"image quality"
Dude what?
This is the best video to explain what I have been trying to tell people for the last 15+ years! You da man!
60 bucks starting price for a coaxial cable ?? Not even when hell freezes over.
Sound like a FM station mixing with a dead air local station via E-skip. 0:00 I like the sound of analog AV cables. So satisfying to hear.
I've always made my analog/digital audio cable from aerial/antenna-cable fitted with RCA-Phono connections and it's fine.
Practically with 0 (ZERO) dB loss for the analog side.
Hell, I've even fitted them with snakeskin socks to make them look expensive. They can compete with $500 cables according to an honest source.
Stupid Audiophools while hypnotized by some extremely expensive golden unidirectional copper-crystal thingy-things, somehow manage to forget everything about the tiny and small copper traces on the PCB's (Print Circuit Board) inside their gear, where components are connected using melted tin/lead. Even the metal pins on the components are left out of the equation.
The most wacko of the kind spend their money on expensive power connectors, between their gear and the wall-230Volts/110Volts outlets.
As if the electrons after travelling hundreds of miles in copper wires between the powerplant and their wall outlets, all of a sudden would be so freakingly happy travelling that one meter/three feet in an expensive power cable until they reach the transformers, full wave rectifiers, resistors, inductors, transistors and resistors, not to mention the tiny traces of copper on the circuit boards, that they alone from that, will reward the phool and deliver the most spectacular, clean firm airy crisp sound ever heard on Planet Earth.
Well.........yeah..........
I've been getting that catalog for some reason. I never requested it that I know of. The crap in those catalogs are laughable. We saw a power cable that they were selling that used like 8 gauge wire for six inches that they claimed would provide you with superior power quality or some junk to your equipment. Houses in the U.S. are generally wired with 14 or 12 gauge wiring. Like that 6 inches of 8 gauge wire is going to magically improved the power from hundreds of feet of 14 or 12 gauge wire. Household wiring is a little thicker than necessary for a bit of a safety margin so I don't think that's the problem. Besides, it's generally not shielded in a metal conduit or twisted in route so it does pick up stray interference. Not to mention what it gets off the rest of the grid from poorly made electronics dumping noise back into the grid. A power filter should help with that, but high quality electronics should already have noise filtering as it, you know, rectifies the AC to DC anyway.
I get extra phono buzz from LP120 at random parts of the day, it maybe a plasma TV or light dimmers somewhere up the road, I'm at the last pole on the overhead wire. That buzz is that strong it is audible at 2/10 and can be heard on the dead wax
I used a 50 foot piece of cable for years for a digital signal. Worked fine, even still have it because it's very handy to have an RCA cable that long.
There are boxes of "junk" (used, untested)cables at the electronics shop near me in Japan and i always dip in there for cables when I need them. Never had a problem with any of them so far and I pay something like $1 a cable compared to whatever new cables run for. i heard the same kind of claims about "quality" HDMI cables too and learned it was also a joke.
Probably you have more loss of signal in the connectors than in the cables themselves...
Yes, that is definitely true. Most of the signal loss is in the connectors and couplers.
@@vwestlifeYep, In any electrical installation, the connections are the weak points!
Insertion loss? I'd be interested to see some electrical measurements of your long cable / coupler setup vs one of your short, relatively decent cables.
@@belperite It would be interesting to test 100' of cable VS 100' of a "composite" cable/coupler setup to compare losses by the couplers themselves.
Gotta use WBT Nextgen 0102Ag RCA connectors, man. Actually, screw that. You have to use XLR! Go balanced!
In college, I worked for a big chain electronics store. The commission we’d get on selling a brand new ps3 was a third of what we’d get for pushing the gold plated super-amazo monster hdmi cable with it.
BRILLIANT
you nailed it
Digital is ALL or Nothing, unles you go crazy and connect loads of cheap cable for a massive length
always has been and always will be !
regardless of if you used a £1 cable from the poundshop or a £1000 cable from the Audiophile-Nob-Head-Shop
what actually happens on these massive lengths of cheap cable is the I/O on/off timing pulses eventually can't be handled by the cllock of the DAC you are using.
I admired your dedication in adding the length.
Damn it, all those cables do is transmit binary data which is then converted to analog audio. You can use the most craptastic thrift store cables ever and they work no problem. I have bought gold plated cables but they were cheap and cool looking. All gold plating does is make them less likely to corrode.
That distortion sounds a lot like what a CD player does if you slow down the spindle motor.
Hi Max, any change on you getting back into repair videos? Learned a lot from them !
or disc rot from a laserdisc.
Sounds more like a dirty eye
All the audiophiles worried about the cables and here I am re-engineering the crossover in my speakers.
Indeed, I've got a decidedly ordinary old home theater amp, but changing the speakers(got some big 90s Wharfedale speakers very cheaply) certainly made a big difference!
I almost yelled out in joy when you connected the other half of the stereo cable.
I wish you would have read their catalog line about the receptacle they were selling on the facing page. Probably a $9 commercial receptacle they are hawking for over $100. Cracks me up every time!
i for one swear by my gold-plated triple shielded directional toslink cables.
But are they water resistant to 50m?
@@volvo09 no but they are cryogenically frozen when not in use to preserve freshness.
But is it made from unobtainium?
@@UtkarshAmitabhSrivastava no but Local TV chef Larry Larsony-Smith certifies it to contain 250% more
T H E V O I D than previus generation.
@@Stjaernljus OH Wow! I've heard that it sounds even better than the unobtainium, it automatically converts music to 5 D surround and adds negative distortion. You are one hell of a lucky guy/girl.
In fact the sound is so clear that you can listen to the voices of the workers who put together the HiFi in factories. (Yes the sound gets embedded in the capacitors but you can't hear them with coat hanger or even HIGH QUALITY AUDIOFOOL CABLES).
You could make a pretty decent industrial track by sampling all the distortions.
So that's how you get past the TH-cam autoflag: run the audio through 35 yards of coax cable.
I love it when The
Cure plays a Yamaha DX7, but that cd was horror-able!
It's the revenge of the "Doogie Howser" and "Law and Order" TV theme songs.
I checked this album out there 2nd album is better then this one
If you think about it, this kind of bitcrush distortion makes sense. Digital signals are streams of fast signals that are either 0 or 1 - so if an input signal is something like 0.9 or 1.2 it obviously rounds it down to 1, and if it's something like 0.1 or -0.2, then it obviously rounds down to 0.
With you moving volume down, that 1 gets "quitened down" to 0.9, 0.8, 0.7 and so on, sounding just fine with it rounding up to 1, until 0.5 where the noise results in each 1 getting randomly rounded up or down (but 0 is still 0 so the audio is still partially intact), and then below 0.5 where it just rounds down to 0 where it's not heard.
That player could tell that something is really bad with digital signal and would instantly cut out audio when it sees malformed audio data coming in, as it can just check the actual value before rounding it to 0 or 1, and if it's something below 0.6, it can assume the signal is bad and tell the user to check it. This way, it simply never gets down to the volume levels where 1s would get rounded down to 0. Meanwhile, a PC's card can't just easily tell the user that the input signal is bad, or they didn't bother designing such a check, so it just pumps whatever gets in as audio into the system.
I guess that's also why the stereo cable started doing the exact same thing. I think it's reasonable to assume that because it's exactly the same data going through both wires that are directly one to another there was some interference which caused either a enough noise or a significant enough volume drop to cause exactly the same effect.
With digital, the equipment will also usually try to compensate for timing mis-matches by adjusting it's own clock to match the incoming signal. With a bad enough signal, you can wind up with the clock stopping at the wrong speed, or even swing it's speed up and down constantly, producing any number of wrong interpretations of the signal.
All those female-female couplers will significantly degrade signal on their own..added with the length of "cheap" cable you added, the signal still is strong enough for any error correction, until its breaking point...nice! I used a 17 foot RCA cable from a cheap Scosche car amp kit and it cleaned up analog signal path and dropped noise from my PC to a remote amp drastically after previously using several old "hi quality" 6ft Radio Shack RCAs and couplers to do the same thing! But yea if you need to go long distances(50ft or more) then maybe higher quality cable could be the solution, but even those will only get you so far...thanks for sharing!
If you get that last long stereo cable and actually split it into two separate ones, it would probably work. The way you are connecting it right now, means the signal goes all the way to one end and then returns through the other half of the cable which runs inch for inch in parallel to the original. This causes massive crosstalk.
If its a sheilded cable it should have worked
@@dlarge6502 It was shielded audio lead
That's why you can have internet over some old crappy thin phoneline cable, digital signal doesn't care too much.
Very bad example, for ADSL there is a ton of processing going on the signal to determine the channel. Your cheap plastic router is going through an activel training phase on connection with the DSLAM in order to determine the quality of the cable and to decide on the bands to use for communication and using bad cable will actually degrade the throughput.
Thank you, I enjoy all your videos very much. Thanks also for introducing me to Colors In Motion, via another video. Keep up the great work!
The real question is where does someone get so many couplers?
You can buy them by the dozen on eBay or Amazon.
China
4:07 I mistook that for the super Mario 64 underwater theme
That actually acts as a pretty good distortion for guitars or synths.
That track you played from the CD "Colours in Motion" sounds similar to Dire Dire Docks from Super Mario 64 for the N64.
'The Gamer With More'. More of what?
You, sir, are the James Randy of audio! Thanks for taking the time to make these videos.
You are absolutely brilliant! You always come up with original content that is both interesting and enjoyable.
Good video as always , I was never fooled by the fancy overpriced cables back in the day , especially as most people only needed 6 foot or less cable at most for their needs .
I was at a friends house a while back and he was showing his new sound equipment. We started to detect a crackling sound in the left channel. Long story short, he was using 30 year old cables of dubious quality. After buying mid-grade shielded cables the sound quality was noticeably improved. The cables were not expensive, but made a difference. It is important to get copper cables, not the copper coated aluminum. Great video demonstration.
Hydrogen Audio represent! Admin kode54 here.
E: Also going to guess a possibility that the audio passing twice through that same paired cable can also result in RF interference between the two cable lengths.
E2: I watched the whole thing this time, rather than commenting while I was still watching it lol. I see it's just the DCC having the smarts to cut off on signal degradation rather than playing the resulting audio.
what
Hey, as an electrician I think you are onto something! Signal, that is passing through the same paired cable in the opposite directions could cancel itself out, ecpecially if the cable is coiled. I've seen inductive interference filters that are working on the same principles.
interesting, LMAO. It is not just the increase of resistance in very long runs, there is also an increase of capacitance as well. Parallel wires (insulated) close to each other ( as in a cord/cable) act as a capacitor as well. BTW: those expensive cables are a ripoff, but people are too gullible to not buy those.
capacitance would play a role if it was couple kilometers at 1MHz (for example adsl), but 20m at 100KHz? :)
Some audiophiles may claim that this test doesn't count due to the use of low end speakers and a computer, and that someone with good ears can tell a difference on a high end system. I would personally call such a claim BS, but let's just for the fun of it assume it's correct. In that case there's one more argument for not buying insanely expensive cables: They will reveal the flaws of for instance the cd media (which for a fact exists) even more.
This a great test, and a great video. It clearly proves the point: Don't waste your money on snake oil.
Stay awesome mate, and keep the cool stuff coming.
Yep! And those audiophools that convince themselves that their $100+ digital audio cable is SO superior to normal RCA cables never seem to consider the standard of the components; the main board, the copper traces on that board, and internal wiring inside the components being connected.... those will have more influence over the resulting quality than 3-feet of over-priced oxygen-free, pre-sexed, and gold plated cable outside!
The wires inside our electronics are usually tiny. Why use better wires to plug it all into each other?
You just invented the cheapest bitcrusher effect pedal :D
Regarding the part at 3:50 where you show the CD: The album title is actually "Gentle Journey" and the group who recorded it is Colors In Motion. As per Spotify, it was released in 1991. Thought I'd let everyone know just in case anyone's interested.
Yes, I got the artist and title reversed, but Spotify is wrong. It's from 1995: www.discogs.com/release/4606609-Colors-In-Motion-Gentle-Journey
i have that CD, its from 1991. there were only 2 albums from them and their up on spotify. i remember hearing it as a kid on the radio.
An absolutely brilliant video!
But even better - Thank you for introducing me to the awesome group Echo Movement.
They remind me of a much much mellow version of 311.
Thanks a ton for the video, bro!
Reminds me of the $100 HDMI cables.
Or gold plated TOSLINK... what!
jamie marchant
Those are made for the special kind of idiots
Ha! $100. They sell HDMI cables for $10,000+
www.pocnetwork.net/technology-news/the-most-expensive-hdmi-cable-in-existance/
It seems to me these $100 cables (which couldn't truthfully promise better signal quality) often focussed on durability. "Woven Kevlar construction". It makes me wonder if people are buying them to hook up a TV in their living rooms or in trenches in an active war zone.
The digital audio coaxial cable companies hate this guy.
Someone has been watching Technology Connections lately
LOL "Spiddif"
Should have used a Handy Dandy Media Interface cable.
@@CaveyMoth should have used gold plated optical cables
@@bookshelffury It's funny because I'm an audiophi- [coughs] I mean audio enthusiast, and my optical cables aren't even gold plated.
That last cable that's doubled up, in opposite directions, you made a common-mode choke.
If you had sent the signal in the same direction through both halves, it probably would have worked.
Seems like the distortion is more down to running the signal through the same cable twice. The distortion reminds me a bit of the sound of ring modulation.
I forgot Silver had one valence electron, but you don't really see silver-coated cables pushed these days. Wild to see that the "Monster cables" business model has been around for decades
4:07 sounds like super Mario 64’s under water theme
I was looking for this comment
I've asked around at audiophile forums, but I've never got a satisfactorily logical answer as to why a high end CD player is any better in terms of music quality than a cheap portable Walmart special - Especially if the CD player is outputting digital. I realize that there can be differences in DAC quality, but I'm thinking that's largely negligible and psychological too. Speaker quality is undoubtedly where you'll get the biggest variances in sound.
When using the stereo cable to pass the signal from 1 channel then the other, you're introducing crosstalk. Thats a big no no for digital
Cables don't produce sound, audio cables or otherwise. They only carry a signal which of course cannot be altered by any sort of cable.
That's as stupid as saying your car gets better gas mileage on sunny days compared to on cloudy days.
I should try this too one day, my motherboard also got a digital audio in (Coaxial, although I've seen the same mobo with TOSLINK), but here is the catch, I don't have any equipment that takes digital coax audio in anymore (I used to).
Really interesting though.
You can probably find a converter. At least in the case of S/PDIF, it literally uses the same encoding as TOSLINK: the TOSLINK stuff is arguable best for either isolating grounds, or using Mini-TOSLINK to fit TOSLINK in the same socket as a TRS or TRRS cable.
Beware that there's a little bit of stuff that uses TOSLINK cables for non-TOSLINK purposes! TOSLINK cables are just like RCA cables: generic-purposed!
@@absalomdraconis if I had equipment that could use S/PDIF over TOSLINK I would've bought a converter already, but the catch 22 being that I have no equipment that can use SPDIF currently (aside my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe which happens to have a RCA jack for S/PDIF, I'm not really sure if it's a input or output, maybe I'll find out when I get my cMP 5,1 which already has TOSLINK connectors, it should be a matter of buying a converter then.)
Besides the unmatched impedance, having a digital signal go past itself twice in unshielded cable will induce an artificial reflection confusing the clock in the spdif signal. What you are hearing is a multi-bit shift where the values are being overlayed, cancelled, and losing clock. Since the red side and black side of the 25ft paired cable work fine separately, simply separating the left and right unshielded cables the full length, will clean up the signal. That is why single unshielded cables work fine but when 2 of them are next to each other and unshielded, the signal will induce a phase shifted one in the other cable, but since its a loopback, you are just artificially inducing reflection into the same signal. Two shielded cables of the same length in the same side-by-side setup will not create this same effect.
This is the first time I've actually seen someone *use* S/PDIF. What a world.
So true! And still neve seen anyone use optic fibre audio cables (idk what they are even called)
I had everything required for it for years but never bothered to set it up and oh boy was I missing out...
With that coiled dual RCA cable you probably built a nice delay line without knowing. The effect was utilized in some older oscilloscopes amongst other things.
Same thing going on with HDMI cables: I still can't see the difference between a cheap £4 pound cable and a £40 pound cable..
I can be a factor with higher bandwidth requirements. Like if you have HDMI 2.0 hardware and an old cable, it might not want to offer the proper throughput.
that's the only thing that "could" happen
Audiophools are everywhere. Companies like AudioQuest prey on these hapless idiots. Jitter can be measured, but any decent shielded coaxial cable that's rated for 75 ohms will work perfectly for SPDIF.
I remember when I was a kid i wanted to hook up my pc in my room to the tv in the living room. I didn't have quite enough cable, so part of it was literal speaker cable taped to the RCA ends of two other cables. Worked just fine. My pc had no issue lol. I learned from a young age that a lot of times, cable is cable. doesn't matter what it's for as long as it's hooked up how both ends expect them to be.
The actual data that is encoded in Digital Audio includes some error-correction bits along with the bits that carry the audio information, this enables the CD playback system to automatically correct for any loss of data that might be caused by a scratch on the surface of the CD, it is capable of correcting data loss caused by a 4 or 5mm hole drilled literally straight through the CD.
Presumably that happens within the CD player circuitry though, not after it's transmitted. I'm not sure, but from what I could find, the PCM data sent from a CD player doesn't have error correction data in the signal.
Remember that service that will 'break in' your cables for you? lol
can't beat a practical demonstration, thanx
I don't know how but I somehow got subscribed to that Audio Advisor magazine. I had a good laugh when looking through some of their audio and power cable claims.
SPDIF can carry raw pcm audio samples where a little noise is just like dust on a vinyl record. But it can also be a compressed format, then you may hear bigger skips.
yeah he should try it with DD Live! or DTS 5.1
Do I assume that the page you flipped from (in the catalog) has audiofool-grade electrical outlets (that connect to one's regular house wiring)? And maybe ultra-premium power cords, as well? :þ
Yes, of course!
On DAB we get the "bubbling mud" effect on weak DAB signals on stations that are encoded with the original MP2 codec, on DAB+ which uses the AAC codec, those stations start echoing on a weak signal.
Also, not every DAB radio supports AAC or DAB+, there are older radios that only support the older MP2 codec and not AAC, which means these radios can't tune into to stations encoded in AAC.