Cryogenically frozen plugs, hundred quid HDMI cables and now...

weegie.geek

rrf494g wrote: »

Not exactly true

There is a level of distorting audio and of corrupted video that is "corrected" by the final stage of the process - the brain. So that as an AV signal starts to distort in minor ways, the brain will try to correct it, to what "it knows" it should be. Of course, as distortion becomes greater and greater, the brain will lose control of this filter and the distortion will become conscious to the viewer/listener.

This is claptrap, but this is a prime example of why I've mentioned that these things have to be able to be measured. If your brain can filter out corrupted gops, and indeed fix them like you say it can, there's something wrong with your brain.

Before the distortion becomes conscious the person may experience a "disatisfaction" with the picture/sound because it is literally "hard work" for the brain to keep up this reprocessing. When this background distortion goes away, the person finds the experience more relaxing. (This may be the reason that some (sensible) reviewers come up with weird expressions for the improvements they perceive with various cables)

This is the A/V equivalent of homeopathy or something. You're talking utter nonsense.

Again, I am not saying that expensive connecting cables are always needed. Any cable that passes a true signal with no loss/distortion is of course, good enough. However, getting to that state may not be as simple as some have been saying.
regards

I guess it depends what you class as expensive. I'm saying they simply need to be adequate. There's an HDMI standard. If your cable meets the standard, that's all that matters. If it meets the standard then your data gets to the other end without problems. Cryogenically freezing it, irradiating it and selling it in a hand-made box for 300 quid isn't going to make your picture or sound better than a ten quid cable that meets the same technical standards.

The same is true for SATA cables, there's a standard. If the cables adhere to the standard then they're as good as any other sata cable that adheres to the standard.

In fact, the only way one SATA certified cable CAN be better than another is if it has those clips to stop it falling out. Why that isn't part of the standard is beyond me. It's so easy to knock the cheap ones out of place slightly without noticing it.

googler wrote: »

With the responses here, I'm not surprised Mr Steward decided to take down the responses to his blog.

Me too, nobody wants to be torn a new one on their home turf. Especially if that home turf is used frequently for shilling other snake oil cables and the like. Heaven forbid some actual truth ends up on his site along with the voodoo he chunters on about.

So far, he's been referred to as a 'moron',

If he believes a SATA cable can make his music sound better, a moron is what he is.

I've been termed a 'village idiot',

In your attempts to defend his fairy stories you have come across as a bit of a dolt, I have to say...

and in the further reading referred to above, Mr Steward is on the receiving end of more insults, including someone who thinks he should be jailed until he provides a scientific explanation.....

Jailed is a bit much. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. At least all he's doing is encouraging people to waste money. It's not like he's telling them to take magical memory water instead of the cancer meds someone's doctor prescribed them.

I agree that some of the people giving him death threats are more worthy of ridicule than he is. It doesn't mean he's not a numpty.

At the same time though, if you're going to say demonstrably nonsensical things, backed up by *anonymous* Hi-Fi engineers, then you're going to get torn into.

!!!!!!, what's everyone so annoyed about?

They're annoyed about a man who either knows he's talking rubbish, or is uninformed enough to believe it, putting forward the A/V equivalent of Woo as if it's absolute fact. He should know the science behind what he's talking about, especially as he calls himself a journalist.

If he's a journalist he should be informed about what he's blethering about. People who don't know the truth might believe him because of his journalist credentials. He's misleading, not informing people.

With the amount of crap out there in the world, the truth can be a rare thing. I'd let him away with saying fancy analogue cables make his music sound better. I wouldn't let him away with saying that one SATA cable makes music sound better than another SATA cable, because it's just not true.

Can't anyone discuss the topic with insulting the other side? Why all the name-calling?

Hmm?

"The other side"? The side where people talk nonsense and try to pass it off as fact? There's nothing really to discuss about the topic. He's wrong about SATA cables. We're right. It's just a fact.

He's insulting our intelligence by maintaining his position that a SATA cable made his music sound better, and the worst part is that there are uninformed people out there that will believe it and spend christ knows how much on a cable that will perform every bit as well as a 50p cable.

I wouldn't even say it was namecalling. Nobody's saying that Malcolm Steward is a poopy-pants. They're describing him accurately, albeit perhaps a bit colourfully and dramatically at times.

The man believes that SATA cables can make your music sound better. He believes this, despite having a background as a "technology writer" and a "journalist", dating back to the early 80s.

He believes something that can be demostrated to be nonsense.

In spite of actual scientific evidence that he's been presented with, evidence that is common sense if you understand how the tech works (which shouldn't be difficult to grasp for a technology writer, right?) he CHOOSES to believe a fallacy.

What part of that isn't idiocy?

And calling him an idiot is the nice option. He's either an idiot or he knows he's talking crap, but chooses to mislead people. If he's lying about expensive things making your music sound better, he's not an idiot. That would make him scum.

I wouldn't be surprised if he's a stooge for one of these companies who sells 80 quid kettle plugs, but we have no proof for that. We have proof that he's stupid, so that's how he'll be described, most likely, until any evidence comes to light that suggests otherwise. Any journalistic credibility he had (for an AV journalist at least) is gone.

kwikbreaks

No I'm sorry weegie but you are wrong.

My PC was fitted with a nasty cheap transparent grey SATA cable so I swapped it out for a proper red one and now my PC runs 100% faster and what's more the disk is much quieter with far less harmonic overtones when it is seeking.

Unfortunately as is well known in audiophool circles red SATA cables are totally unsuited to hi fidelity lossless (naturally) music playing so I have to use a different machine for that.

JasX

kwikbreaks wrote: »

No I'm sorry weegie but you are wrong.

My PC was fitted with a nasty cheap transparent grey SATA cable so I swapped it out for a proper red one and now my PC runs 100% faster and what's more the disk is much quieter with far less harmonic overtones when it is seeking.

Unfortunately as is well known in audiophool circles red SATA cables are totally unsuited to hi fidelity lossless (naturally) music playing so I have to use a different machine for that.

I'm now very worried having copied my entire .mp3 collection between hard drive caddies using a non-gold plated or double screened USB cable..... I swear they've never sounded the same since, no doubt Mr Steward will be doing a big expose on that problem within the next few weeks too and have a suitable premium cable product to recommend to safeguard against it :cool:

kwikbreaks

The sad thing is that your post and my own are no more rubbish than much of the other lore associated with AV cables (and even mains cables !!!!!!) which get posted on blogs and pontificated about on forums devoted to such matters.

weegie.geek

It's disturbing that spoof posts like that would be indiscernible from the things people like Malcolm Steward say if it weren't for you thanking my post and you saying "audiophool".

dealer_wins

Well if £10000 cables improve audio quality then I think that airports and railway stations need to upgrade their's, then maybe I will actually be able to understand just a little bit of what is being announced for the first time in my life!!

rrf494g

Two examples (of many) of how the brain reprocesses information

I have a DLP projector for my home cinema. It produces a picture on the screen that is fine when I watch it. Some people see "sparklies" when watching a DLP projector. Such people are advised to buy an LCD projector. The picture is the same, it's just the processesing in the brain that is different. Some people integrate the rapid flashing of different colours into a stable shade in their brain - some people find that to be a "step" too far and "see" sparklies. (check out the many references- google "dlp projector sparklies")

Is the sparklie "in" the picture, in the signal - of course it is. Do most people see them - N0.

A second example is well know to salesmen of HD televisions. It takes place when an direct A/B comparison is made between a standard TV and the same programme on an HD TV. Many people if they start off watching a standard TV then switch to HD see a noticable (but not massive) improvement. When they switch back they see an enormous deterioration. They say that the standard picture has got much worse than when they first saw it. After a while of watching the standard picture it "becomes" reasonable again. The brain has picked up on the reprocessing.

What has happened is that the work the brain was doing to "sharpen" the standard TV picture, switched off when the HD picture was available. In this relaxed mode, when the standard picture returned it looked rubbish.

Again I make the point that a digital signal can be corrupted to some extent and remain viewable/listenable in some circumstances. If the signal is used as a set of digital instuctions (ie a program) then every bit is likely to be significant, and any corruption may cause a failure of the program. If however the data stream represents a picture or a sound track then quite considerable corruption can take place before the result is un-viewable or unlistenable.
regards

tomsolomon

RobTang wrote: »

Science has nothing to do with any asserations, the SATA specifcation is a human made standard, these isn't any guessing we wrote the rulebook. Its not like we "discovered" SATA like we "discovered" gravity.

For all you know a scientist may have been sat in his lab one night and a hard drive could have fell off a shelf and landed on his head......

busterkeye

I think you should get more!!!!!!

weegie.geek

rrf494g wrote: »

Two examples (of many) of how the brain reprocesses information

I have a DLP projector for my home cinema. It produces a picture on the screen that is fine when I watch it. Some people see "sparklies" when watching a DLP projector. Such people are advised to buy an LCD projector. The picture is the same, it's just the processesing in the brain that is different. Some people integrate the rapid flashing of different colours into a stable shade in their brain - some people find that to be a "step" too far and "see" sparklies. (check out the many references- google "dlp projector sparklies")

Is the sparklie "in" the picture, in the signal - of course it is. Do most people see them - N0.

Hardly the same as what we're talking about here. If those sparklies are there, they're there. Some people might not notice them, but they exist. Those are artifacts introduced by the method of converting that digital information into visible light.

They're nothing to do with the method of transporting the digital data around. I'm not sure why you're mentioning this. It seems irrelevant in the context of what we're talking about. You may as well be talking about different deinterlacing hardware in different TVs or something equally irrelevant. An HDMI cable feeding 1s and 0s to a DLP and then a LCD projector will feed the same data, bit for bit.

In your case, some people don't notice the difference between thing X and thing Y, but they're measurably different. Data being transmitted over two different SATA cables are measurable identical. That's kinda the point of it. The fact that the data will always be the same at the other end.

A second example is well know to salesmen of HD televisions. It takes place when an direct A/B comparison is made between a standard TV and the same programme on an HD TV. Many people if they start off watching a standard TV then switch to HD see a noticable (but not massive) improvement. When they switch back they see an enormous deterioration. They say that the standard picture has got much worse than when they first saw it. After a while of watching the standard picture it "becomes" reasonable again. The brain has picked up on the reprocessing.

What has happened is that the work the brain was doing to "sharpen" the standard TV picture, switched off when the HD picture was available. In this relaxed mode, when the standard picture returned it looked rubbish.

Nonsense. People might get used to the new sharpness and definition, and consider it to be the norm. Their brain isn't processing anything differently, they're just getting used to it.

Again I make the point that a digital signal can be corrupted to some extent and remain viewable/listenable in some circumstances. If the signal is used as a set of digital instuctions (ie a program) then every bit is likely to be significant, and any corruption may cause a failure of the program. If however the data stream represents a picture or a sound track then quite considerable corruption can take place before the result is un-viewable or unlistenable.
regards

Nobody mentioned unviewable or unlistenable, but you've hit the nail on the head, perhaps without realising it. Corruption. The bitstream becomes affected by a substandard cable, and it isn't the same sequence of 1s and 0s as it was before it was fed along the dodgy hdmi/sata cable. The difference is that HDMI, while it has error correction, can't ask for retransmission of garbled packets. It can try to fix it using parity bits and the rest of it, but if the packet is unrecoverable, there WILL be visible breakup on the screen.

SATA enabled devices, on the other hand, will spot that the data didn't make it to the other end of the cable in one piece, and will ask for it to be retransmitted. If it can't be retransmitted faithfully and the buffer at the other end of the cable becomes depleted, there will be a breakup of the picture or sound or whatever. It won't make the bass flatter and the detail less sharp, there'll be noticeable artifacts. The data doesn't make it to the other end of the cable in one piece.

This is not the same as a shiny new cable making your music sound better. If a better SATA or HDMI cable makes your movies or music look or sound better, it's not that this is an awesome cable - the cable you were using before is broken. This new one that works better is just a working cable. Not a special magical cable, just one that isn't broken. With a deficient cable you'll get audio/video breakups and dropouts. With a working cable, it'll work just as well as any other working cable.