Audioquest Cat7 cables
Posted by: Jonas Olofsson on 10 December 2012
Thank you in advance.
//Jonas
Digital design includes a lot of analogue ... techniques, but they are very well understood. Everyone's PCs run with unchecked/uncorrected memory systems for example and they work 99.999999999999999999999999℅ reliably - or close to that!.
Everything else is right by design.
This is quite difficult (i.e. impossible) to do! Things like RFI and poor circuit design just make it even more difficult..
There is no magic in digital audio - despite what people might say. Good design and meticulous attention to detail really do matter, but despite what people might claim or say, the interactions and their effects on systems are reasonably well understood.
What I'm saying is that if this interference is getting in enough to make audible differences, the player design is fundamentally broken. If this is the case, you shouldn't be looking to a band-aid of cabling, but more at your choices of player purchase because if that does make a significant difference, you have bigger environmental problems.
That or you are imagining it and it is a placebo... (Now who is being bombastic
)
PS.I had 90℅ of this written 3 hours ago, but got sidetracked. Apologies if the post looks out of place, but I'm on a tablet at the moment, so will just post what I have...
Two quoted statistics: - verifiable? No.
One contradiction : - If effects are relatively well understood how can differences be reported? No, quoting the 'placebo effect' is not sufficient as those who trial a product out of curiosity, rather than necessity, are not susceptible to placebo (as it is understood in medicine!)
So you cannot lay claim to scientific justification for your reasoning. It may still be right, but it's certainly not scientific.
And since we now seem to have an 'understanding' that digital audio is never just a collection of bits but involves 'a lot of analogue' then the design/functioning of ethernet cables must, to some degree, have analogy to speaker cable design/functioning.
Audioquest cables may or may not work. I really don't know and I would be sceptical of purchasing them as a value upgrade. However anyone who dismisses them as snake oil purely on the basis of their own theoretical knowledge (never mind someone else's) or on the basis that they cannot hear any difference (whether in the context of their own system or not) simply cannot be taken seriously scientifically.
Andy P
Do they need to be? Does knowing the exact failure rate of data in PC DRAM actually add anything to my credibility or are you just nit-picking for the sake of it? I'm also not sure what the second statistic is either or is it the 90% 3 hours ago? If it is that, I think you're arguing for the sake of it....
I suggest you go and look up what the Placebo effect is (a perceived improvement based on no effective change). It is precisely this the target people are most susceptible to. And yet not one person who hears a difference even acknowledges that it could be this, they have heard a difference, so it must exist, and not be a figment of their imagination.
Are you reading the same posts I am writing? My reasoning is based on my experience - as someone who does this sort of thing for a job. But don't let that put you off making wild claims - after all, that's exactly what the cable manufacturers are doing...
Well, they're both made of conductive material..... so they are similar there, but they have completely different design parameters. But your drawing of parallels with the issues encountered in designing speaker cables and applying them to digital transmission, show you don't have a good grasp of how digital audio systems work.
So don't take me seriously or scientifically. I don't care if you do or not. People will continue to be hoodwinked and get very upset by people like me who will tell them to their face they are being hoodwinked - especially when they can't argue me down with the manufacturers pseudo-science.