I'll have two at that price
iank - 13/6/08 at 01:41 PM
Got to get myself a £250 cable for better digital transfer.
http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp
P.T. Barnum would have been proud.
NigeEss - 19/6/08 at 10:56 PM
If your hardware is top notch then it's worth it.
My speaker cable at home cost £100 a metre and noticably better than the previous
cable at half that.
Sometimes it seems extortionate but it's actually worth it.
iank - 19/6/08 at 10:59 PM
quote:
Originally posted by NigeEss
If your hardware is top notch then it's worth it.
My speaker cable at home cost £100 a metre and noticably better than the previous
cable at half that.
Sometimes it seems extortionate but it's actually worth it.
There is a potential for improvement with an analogue signal - but it's always overplayed and covered with so much pseudo and plain incorrect
science I'm sceptical.
But this is a DIGITAL cable. Trust me all those ones and zeros don't know or care what it's made of.
MikeRJ - 19/6/08 at 11:43 PM
quote:
Originally posted by iank
But this is a DIGITAL cable. Trust me all those ones and zeros don't know or care what it's made of.
Just because the signal only has two levels, it doesn't mean it can't be distorted. This seems to be a very common fallacy. Ethernet can
get away with cheap cabling because the transport layer (TCP/IP) means corrupted packets are re-sent. You don't have that luxury with digital
video/audio because it would introduce too much latency.
We pay something like £300 for a meter of fully characterised and terminated coax in work because we are dealing with 40gbit/s signals; do you think a
bit of old TV coax would do the job? Even at 10gbit/s, a signal travelling a couple of inches on a standard fiberglass PCB are massively
distorted.
Try using some of the cheap chinese HDMI cables which are more than a few meters long, chances are it either won't work at all or you will get
stuttering and broken picture as many have found the hard way.
Trust me, digital signals need as much or probably more care in cable design than analog.
If you want to point and laugh, direct it at those delusional people that think a gold plated mains socket and matching gold plated power cable
actually improve the sound of their hifi, or that cables need "burning in".
[Edited on 19/6/08 by MikeRJ]
Jasper - 20/6/08 at 11:10 AM
Well, the guys at the Gadget Show reconned that if a cable sends just a digital signal it doesn't matter on the quality of it. They even did a
test on it .... identical HD DVD player and big screen TV, tried a very expensive HDMI cable and right next to it a dirt cheap one, no difference what
so ever. The had the same argument, it's digital so it's just zero's and ones .....
iank - 20/6/08 at 11:23 AM
quote:
Originally posted by MikeRJ
quote:
Originally posted by iank
But this is a DIGITAL cable. Trust me all those ones and zeros don't know or care what it's made of.
Just because the signal only has two levels, it doesn't mean it can't be distorted. This seems to be a very common fallacy. Ethernet can
get away with cheap cabling because the transport layer (TCP/IP) means corrupted packets are re-sent. You don't have that luxury with digital
video/audio because it would introduce too much latency.
We pay something like £300 for a meter of fully characterised and terminated coax in work because we are dealing with 40gbit/s signals; do you think a
bit of old TV coax would do the job? Even at 10gbit/s, a signal travelling a couple of inches on a standard fiberglass PCB are massively
distorted.
Try using some of the cheap chinese HDMI cables which are more than a few meters long, chances are it either won't work at all or you will get
stuttering and broken picture as many have found the hard way.
Trust me, digital signals need as much or probably more care in cable design than analog.
If you want to point and laugh, direct it at those delusional people that think a gold plated mains socket and matching gold plated power cable
actually improve the sound of their hifi, or that cables need "burning in".
[Edited on 19/6/08 by MikeRJ]
Sorry I think you're getting confused by working in a completely different frequency range. The problems get exponentially harder the closer you
get to real RF - 40Gbits is well into RF rather than analogue effects, and I agree the signal turns to mush if you don't terminate correctly up
at those heady frequencies.
So everything you say is quite correct for multi Gbit connections, but this is NOT be a 40GBit or even 1G bit connection.
The proof here is that £10 cables work successfully with this protocol at that bandwidth without 1000's of bit errors or retransmits. If they
didn't all the cables would cost silly money as they just wouldn't work otherwise. Audio is even more sensitive to errors than video
(strangely) and people would notice immediately. So what does the extra quality of this cable give you? A bit less jitter on the edges? Maybe, but
the clock must surely be encoded into the datastream so that jitter doesn't matter in the slightest humans can't detect sub nanosecond clock
jitter IMO.
So I contend that this cable falls firmly into emperors new clothes sales techniques all high end audio relies upon. It's as bad a the bloody
makeup adverts.
I work with USB2 all day every day, So 0.5GBit links can run very nicely down a 1.5 meter £1 shielded cable from Taiwan (closer to a wet bit of string
than the stuff you have to use) without any problems at all. I have a pair of headphones running isochronous transfers (no error re-transmits on
those) over USB along with my mouse, keyboard and the occasional usb stick with no problems whatsoever.
Mr Whippy - 20/6/08 at 12:02 PM
what on earth do you people listen to that requires such purity in the sound?
for me a what volume the speakers start coming apart is far more important 