USB to SPDIF converters shoot-out : EMU 0404 USB vs. Musiland Monitor 01 USD vs. Teralink-x vs.... - Page 13  

You just saved me $500 as I was thinking of getting an exotic speaker cable that costs around $500 per pair.

Do I have your permission to put this in my sig

$500 buys a lot of [insert favourite music media type here]s

As long as you don't put my name, sure thing. I hope that wakes up other people who are thinking of getting an exotic cables w/o knowing full details of what they are getting into.

Cool. I guess I will have to give a try myself before making preconceived judgement. ;-)

will do.

Indeed, electrons are entirely indifferent to the cost of the cable. However it is possible to make speaker cables that *might* make an audible difference thru extreme and highly dodgy design see....

Speaker Cable Face Off 1 - Measurements — Reviews and News from Audioholics

My take on this is, if I want a tone control I can use the bass/treble controls on my amp or buy an EQ

slim.a I can confirm that my CryoParts USB cable sounds better than a standard USB cable when connected to my Buffalo.
I don't have any equipment to measure the variables just my ears.

As far as I am concerned the only measurements really worth making are at end-user parameters such as FR, Noise , distortion and so on. It may be interesting to speculate about the effect of other electrical properties but if they do not lead to potentially audible differences it is a bit pointless. However more important is whether any two cables are actualluy audibly different under strict conditions. In the article I linked to Gene DeSalla said the differences might be audible and this is where the "different" cables are really extremely different. It is always possible to make cables audibly different just wang in a huge resistor and that will do the trick. The question is whether any two "normal" cables of comparable gauge will be sufficiently different to be distinguishable. It is here that strong evidence is so far lacking. Strong evidence has to mean unsighted lsitening tests as sighted tests are just completely unreliable.

I am not convinced that DeSalla has an agenda, if you look at Audioholics they talk about hugh end stuff , they are not some hairshirt objectivist cult like MatrixHiFi. But, even if he does the differences form these extremely different cables are still very very small indeed.


With respect if your comparison was sighted , without careful level matching and with a long delay in switching between units then all sort of bias and expectancy effects come into play.

I found that whe I compared my external DAC with my CD player using a switch box that the level difference was sufficient to make the difference obvious, even unsighted, the hotter DAC always sounded better. However when I adjusted the average levels to within 0.1db these obvious diffefrences disappeared in unsighted testing.

I have measured directipnal effects in analog cables, they were very small (0.001db or so) but they did exist and were consistent, bit 0.001db is not audible. I would not call crazy I would say mistaken and also unverified.

While 4ns is indeed really bad jitter in absolute terms there is so far no strong evidence to suggest that the diffetence between this and less, even sub-ns jitter is at all audible. No manufacturer has ever been able to provide blind listening test data to support the audibility of jitter of such levels even thye most pessimistic data from Benjamin and Gannon place audibility at around the 20ns mark for worst case i.e correlated jitter.


Again, it is trivial to make a cable audibly different but you have to do it deliberately and always when you do this you make the cable worse by introducing FR errors. Cables are normally flat to at least 20K, even lamp wire is flat to 20K. As for (yet to be identified) I am sorry but this is magical thinking, and even if there were other unidentified electrical properties it would not matter as we can already measure FR, noise and distortion and so on perfectly adequately.

I have serious questions about this article, I will fill this section in with my next edit.

Er, no the response is within 0.05db at 20K, even according to the crude graph which I had to blow up to 3000% to view`properly, 20K is a point at which human hearing is incedibibly insensitive in any case and the drop to 40K is a mere extra 0.1db hardly something to lose sleep over and irrelevant for audio anyway !

That is not how I see it. Both square waves are in fact rounded, but don't take my word for it. Load the graph up into any image editor and zoom it up a bit it is patently obvious that neither wave is square at the leading edge. But so what, this is a 9Khz square wave , how much square wave content is there in music anyway - hint none normally.


Fig 3 is an obvious bit of image doctoring, the grid lines have disappeared in several places !, If I mathematically process tha data I used for my cable tests the gridlines did not disappear. There is even a bad pixel at 106:120 !. But wait there is more. In the processed graph the curve of the cheapo cable descends down to 106:118. In the undoctored graph the curve never gets below 106:109. The curve has been shifted down by 9 pixels.

A 6% phase shift at 20K is irrelevant it is not humanly detectable.

The 1 microsecond transient response test, that is 1 cycle of a 1Mhz signal, that is relevant to audio frequencies that top out at 20K how ?



Music has frequency, time and amplitude characteristics. Analysing it is straightforward.

Actually that is untrue, each instrument has physical properties such as the precise shape and size of the soundbox, the resonance of the materials used and so on that make for the differences between them.

Slim, I will just answer one point on which you absolutely wrong and then leave it at that.

No, both Benjamin and Gannon (98) and Ashihara et al (2005) have empirical listening tests ,they may mention models but the papers themselves contain the results of actual listening tests wth humans, this is important because the models predict *much* lower thresholds for audibility. But it turns out that human hearing is just not that good in terms of that kind of discrimination.

Musiland update

Well I finally got the firmware upgraded and the 1.0.5 drivers installed , I have to say I was not impressed by the seeming inability to wholly uninstall old drivers. I must have done 15 uninstalls and I never managed to go back to the older drivers again.

Anyway it is up and running again and working fine so far using ASIO in FooBar, I will reserve final judgment until I am sure it is stable.

When I am reasonably sure it is stable I will do some A/B with the HDTV.

So far it sounds great.

It is reported by Radio frequency Engineers that SPDIF cables needs to be 2 meters or longer on a properly terminated 75 ohm line, shorter than this leads to all sorts of cable reflection problems. These reflections will be heard! This could account for some of the perceived differences between cables.

Edit: this is not a recommendation for buying expensive cables - just simple engineering & no magic ingredients!!

Edit Again: I should have also said that making the cable as short as possible will also work with non-ideal SPDIF (RCA connections etc.) - 12" is possible short enough