USB Magic

Posted by: Guido Fawkes on 05 September 2012

When you push music through a USB cable, the data, which arrives in blocks, includes narrow bits which represent the high frequency portion of the music. Within the current USB cables, these bits are largely lost because the cable isn't fast enough to cope, the sampling continues but the narrow bits are largely ignored because they are seen as errors. 


Any views? 

Posted on: 05 September 2012 by George Fredrik

Snake oil?

 

It's either bit perfect or not, more or less!

 

ATB from George

Posted on: 06 September 2012 by Lumos

I am sure that your question is rhetorical but this really is like asserting that if you take a photograph of an elephant and post it in the mail, the postman could not deliver it as it would be too heavy. Once the music is sampled it is just data, and is not analogue 'bits' that bear a physical resemblance to the original data. Each 1 and 0 is identical and arrives at the bus's clock frequency.

 

Ian

Posted on: 06 September 2012 by engjoo
Originally Posted by Guido Fawkes:

When you push music through a USB cable, the data, which arrives in blocks, includes narrow bits which represent the high frequency portion of the music. Within the current USB cables, these bits are largely lost because the cable isn't fast enough to cope, the sampling continues but the narrow bits are largely ignored because they are seen as errors. 

 

Any views? 

 

Who wrote this crab ? 

Posted on: 06 September 2012 by Geoff P

Reads as rubbish to me.

 

Anyway most of us here are half deaf old sods. High frequencies??...can't hear em personally 

Posted on: 07 September 2012 by Guido Fawkes

This is from Hi-Fi World October 2012, P73 and is apparently why a £298 USB cable from Tellurium Q makes the music sound so wonderful - it is the one cable that preserves the narrow bits. I'll have to take author, Paul Rigby's, word for it as I always found the Wireworld Ultraviolet was as far as I wanted to go in the USB stakes. I have never heard anything from Tellurium Q.  

 

PR writes some decent music reviews, but I wish he'd leave kit reviews and his attempted scientific explanations behind .... this magazine has now got rather silly. The sad thing is people still take notice of reviewers and buy in to these myths. I see no point in subjective reviews and wish magazines we stick to describing the functions (Paul does a very poor review of the new Sonos kit, saying it won't support 24/192 sample rate ... it doesn't support hi-res at al, but somebody might read the review and think it does), measurements and maybe a brief attempt to describe the sound. 

Posted on: 08 September 2012 by DaveBk

I remember many years ago presenting to a conference on IT security - one guy asked if I could explain why 128 bit encryption was good... I kept a straight face and replied, "because the message is  broken up into 128 bits, much harder to put back together than only 40 bits..." I got a few laughs, but a surprising majority jotted it down in their notes nodding in agreement. 

 

It's just too easy to convince folk with utter bo11ocks....

Posted on: 08 September 2012 by Mr Underhill

....which is why, of course, DES is no longer used! 56 bits are just too easy to stitch back together.

 

I shall steal this line and use it as my own - plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. (Mr Underhill 2012)

 

 

M

 

Posted on: 08 September 2012 by DaveBk

It's not stealing... Consider it a gift.

Posted on: 09 September 2012 by m0omo0

I love the idea of narrow bits. Must be 1s shirley ? Do they come in narrower time intervals ? Will Naim's putative reference DAC feature antigravity suspension and bend the space-time continuum to suppress jitter ?