The Great USB cable debate poll

I don't either and am well aware of what the soft sciences are. Just pointing out that there is a reason they are the soft sciences and that reason boils down to what is accepted as evidence (i.e. how rigorously the scientific method is applied) and the types of evidence that can be gathered and how, and objectivity (you know those pesky objectivists). Anecdotal evidence is exeptable in soft science. It is not in the natural or hard sciences.

Hard science says people with 1000 dollar USB cables got taken for a ride. The defence of such cables is anecdotal.

 

USB is an industry standard the specs of which are universally agreed upon, cables have to pass a compliance test to show they meet the standard and at what length in order to be certified. Be wary of buying something that doesn't have a passing compliance report or proper certification. I think if you avoid the really cheap forgeries from China you should be ok. If everyone is trying to meet the same specs then how can they perform different unless they are non compliant?

If someone claims to have better than spec compliance the burden of proof has to be on them to produce the test results and show how it is better than the industry standard specs, I have never seen this. Seems like a simple issue to me. So I voted NO with the assumption that people are using compliant cables.

http://www.usb.org/developers/compliance/

 

Me don´t understand, what on earth are You then relying on, if You believe this is soft, nothing?

 

I'm not throwing ABX into that basket. It certainly is part of the hard science tool box and has been, no debate. I am saying that the variables being tested include ears and brains, which are a bit more murky than a blood marker, etc.

 

The whole idea is of course to take care of biases, I´m not saying the method is perfect, and it´s very time consuming, but everything else is way, way more susceptible to influences that should not be there. You can never make distinctions when small differences are present, as the bias itself will be much larger.

 

It does remove some obvious bias, but the remaining bias is still, IMO, much more than negligible. As long as there are no measurable electrical differences, IMO, any claim exists in an area of perceptual differences which could be attributed to an almost endless list of biases or theoretical hard parameters that are not yet measureable. It may be that in order to consider a USB cable, you have to look at the entire system, and in doing so will never be able to isolate the effect of the cable itself. I'm not saying ABX is bad, just that I don’t personally see it as giving conclusive results in something as subjective as this. Essentially, emotion or electrochemical set can so change the way we listen that the music, tones, etc. chosen would seem to introduce a bias that would be ever present, not to mention the playback equipment. I have read that visual comparison under very strict conditions is the only sense perception that can generate reliable data, but I don’t have a reference for that.

 

I believe it´s much less complicated, it´s more like; can we detect a difference, and if so, is it significant and repeatable. If we can see the test object it will always be repeatable, and let us not fall in that trap.

 

Sorry I'm not replying in opposition as requested but just chiming in with my own experiences of human limitation. The most recent being a few days ago comparing the same song in both 16/44 and 24/96. Sure enough the 24/96 had subtle yet clear superiority. The decay of cymbals, the reverb trails, etc. A little more icing on the cake. Then I glanced at the numerical data at the bottom of the Foobar player. The two files were exactly the same. D'oh! Listened to both songs again and the extra icing was scrapped off.
My first revelation was years ago comparing cables using a CD player with dual RCA outputs. I clearly liked the pricer Nordost more than the less expensive Nordost. When I went 'round the back of the player half an hour later I found I had the two pairs of cables mixed up.

I don't know why people take belief in their perceptions so seriously. It's super easy to be wrong.

 

Again, though... How many companies are making those products vs. the number selling higher end USB cables? One or two small fringe groups selling that kind of stuff is one thing, these are big companies we're talking about though. High profile.

 

The Matrix HiFi test was a good example about the benefit of such tests. They have value, and when it comes to a significant expense, should probably be a part of the buying decision process. "Significant" is going to vary for everyone, but it's worth at least considering.

http://matrixhifi.com/ENG_contenedor_ppec.htm

 

What claims are made by the expensive USB cables. I was on audioquests site and could find none other than this blurb to cover their butts

"Cable design is all about damage control. No Cable can make your system sound or look better, they can only cause damage to the original signal. AudioQuest’s perspective has always been to design cable that DO NO HARM!"

Anyways that is a pretty week defense. What your basically saying is that if you were being bilked the government would swoop in and save you. Since they haven't these products must be legit.

 

It really is super easy, I have done the same mistake several times, and I always thought the component that should sound better always did so, even if the files were the same. Funny thing about bias, you are not protected, and you hear what you should hear.

 

I did the samething with Beggers Banquet I had the 24/88 from HD Tracks, I bought it by mistake meant to get the 24/176. So I then decided what the hell and got the 24/176 a couple of days later. Had the wife cue it up and sat back and thought "much better wow listen to that detail". Well turned out the wife played the 24/88 file. So I had her switch them back and fourth and I couldn't pick which one was playing better than 50% of the time. We did the math at the time and I think we figured I was around the 47% mark lol. Much later I read on this forum that since they were based on DSD masters there was really no difference between the two, other than cost of course.

 

I agree that it is super easy to fool yourself, but my own experience is most often that I don’t prefer the more expensive item. I tend to like certain designs and go for the version that hits the marks and is least expensive. It is because the mind is so powerfully persuasive that it can actually cause misperception and incosistent perception that I don’t like testing based in perception. If someone tells me they don’t hear a difference, I'm just as likely to disbelieve them as the person who does.

 

If they don´t hear a difference they don´t, if they hear a difference they do hear it. That does not mean that there actually is a differnce, or is not.

 

Yes, better stated this way, although it gets to the root—when we say hear some of us think of a static reality distinct from the brain. If I believe I see my cat run into the other room, and then discover that the cat is somewhere else asleep, one could say I actually saw the cat or one could say I imagined I saw the cat. That, to me, is pretty much rhetorical.

To the point of music, it may well be that we can only focus on certain details to the exclusion of others, and our perception of what is better may be more related to what we are focusing on at a given moment than what exists in a larger context.

 

Yes I agree, but maybe we can train ourselves to focus on a lot at the same time, without really focusing on something special, I don´t know. Visually we can do this, to a large extent.

And it is really about repeatedly identifying something, and when we do this we know there is a difference.

 

Absolutely. I have no doubt that we all have a variety of ways of listening that share similarities and can be taught and learned. Anecdotally, because of stress or distraction, I can’t always access them all. That’s why it takes me a while to make observations. It seems I can’t fool all of myselfs all of the time.

 

I believe I usually concentrate at a rather narrow frequency span at a time, if I want to hear differences, finally the whole picture.

 

No mind for the best listening and emotional engagement, or specific frequencies, or focusing on the verbal aspect if there is a vocal, or on an individual performance in a group, or the hall/decay, or thinking about arrangement and structure. On and on. How would the formality of a testing situation change my ability to hear? What if I was distracted by differences between the test system and the one I have at home? How does familiarity with the recordings change the way I hear on a foreign system? Is my memory of a familiar recording added by my brain to what I am listening to right now?

 

I´m thinking instead becoming a filatelist.

 

For whatever it may be worth - I checked with an engineer who works for ABC in NYC.

All USBs they use are bargain basement - used for data transfer for storage of material for use at some future point in programming, not for live feed.

Actual transmission is fed by...drum-roll please...plain old 75 ohm coaxial carrying 17 independent digital program signals - in HD, no less.

 

But that is video...irrelevant here due to the mystical properties of digital audio.

 

The Ethernet cable lines in all video facilities carry sound and picture -- often sound at 24-bit/48kHz, but not always. Files are files: either they work and all the bits are there, or not.