It's just a plugin for digital audio workstation software that lets you recreate string sections for whatever you're working on. Ironically, the samples are 48kHz/24bit, far too low for Mr. @analogsurviver. Must be why he's calling it "fake".

That and price-performance. To get those deep lows you need to shell out.

No.

Imagine making and selling a product based solely on the possibility it "sounds" better than a competing product and offer no tangible reason as to why. Tell me, has anyone ever given a negative review of a cable on this website? A negative review of a DAC (from the sound perspective, not from...

Human cognition has nothing to do with the very mechanical, and very well understood apparatus that is our ears.

No. No they don't. If they are they're lying to you.

Being convinced and being correct are two different things. This isn't politics, we can arrive at real, physical truths. 1. No. 2. No. Material: No. Physically impossible. Either material carries the same signal the same way, and in a headphone cable, the driver is likely going to be way...

My only issue is that they won't give the test a fair shake (in this case I doubt it's possible) and it will only further reinforce a bias towards cables making a difference because of the money they spent.

What phenomena do you think we cannot measure? We can measure bass, we can measure treble, and we can measure dynamics and impulse response, all to a further degree than the human ear by many, many orders of magnitude. Audio signals are *fully* understood from a physics standpoint. There is no...

While admirable, I don't think it's worth the trouble...I'm not even sure it's possible to do this blindly since you'll need to remove the earphones and reinstall a cable each time. I'll rely on the objective measurements and the physics to tell me that cables, most of all headphone cables (or...

That Klark Teknik one looks beautiful. I love that clean industrial look.

1. Make s*** up. 2. Sell to rubes with too much money. 3. No ???, just literally profit.

Don't forget, the more expensive and exotic the materials, the "better" it sounds. Except silver sounds "bright" because it's a white metal and copper sounds "warm" because it's a brown metal.

To be pedantic, there are test probes out there that cost thousands of dollars, but they are also for measuring signals in the GIGAHERTZ range, or digital signals exceeding tens of gigabits per second and sometimes contain active (powered) elements to them. But this drives home the point that...

It's at least a 1000% markup. Most of the expense is in the custom metal housings for the off-the-shelf USB connectors they're using. It's not like they're manufacturing actual USB connectors, that takes very expensive machinery and doesn't make sense to make in small quantities.

Not helpful man.

The thing is, DSP design is expensive and takes real skill (I've done it. It's very, very difficult work). People who make audiophile USB cables are probably not even engineers.

It's bit shifting the PCM signal up or down. When above 100%, the signal integrity can be compromised because it can shift signal data into clipping and beyond, so generally speaking, I don't recommend it. What it might do, given the software, is level set the signal so 200% is now the...

This really is the fundamental issue. Since people often do not understand how things work, people come in to sell them "fixes" to problems that cannot physically exist.

Do you think recording studios use $700 digital cables to connect their digital interfaces to their computers? If not, how is it possible that they manage not to get any errors in the recording of the music you listen to?

Why do you have to type out the entire name of the cable each time to mention it?

Paul McGowan is an embarrassing hack. As is the Chord engineer, something Watts, who claims people can hear "oscillating noise floors" down to -300dB, which I'm reasonably sure is the sound pressure you might measure at subatomic particle interactions.

Hey I'm totally on board with the notion of electromechanical systems needing some "break-in". But your amplifier doesn't need break in, and neither do your cables, DAC, or anything else. Systems that are have a changing response over time should be regarded as "crap".

So your cable is acting as a low pass filter? That doesn’t sound good.

Testing? No one is testing cables. It's settled science.