Hi there,
yes I did read there description and here is my take on it: it shows the typical signs of snake oil. They use correct technical terms in a way, that is absolutely wrong. What do I mean with this? Let's have a look:
[Note: Since most of my points are quite technical in nature, I'll try to simplify them as best as I can. Some more intricate details might get lost that way, so keep that in mind.]
In essence this is the same what I talked about in my last response. It's technical correct (in a way at least... that part about "fragile digital audio signals" is more meant to evoke emotions than anything else) but the first paragraph is just the lead in for the next part.
Now we start to leave the realm of technical correctness and enter the world of hogwash. Since they concentrate on "jitter", let's first talk about that. Yes, jitter is a real world effect in digital signals. It describes the offset between a data signal and the related clock signal. The clock is used to determine when to sample the data line(s) to see what value is currently on them (a 1 or a 0). If the shift is large enough, the receiver might not sample the intended signal and thus receive a bit error. This predominately happens in systems, where the clock signal is transmitted between the sender and the receiver via a separate clock line. Having a bad cable/connection in this kind of situation can lead to the clock signal and the data signal running out of sync on the way to the sender. To mitigate that, USB doesn't use this kind of clock distribution. Instead the receiver extracts the clock from the data signals it gets from the sender. This is done in a synchronization phase before the actual data transmission begins. Using this technology, jitter can only come into play when the sender or the receiver run into some kind of problem. The cable has no effect whatsoever on this.
Well that gave me a good chuckle... before I had to cringe at how dumb this actually is. Most people tend to think that because digital signals are represented as a square waveform, they really are that square. In fact, they are not. Or as one of my professors put it "in the end, even the digital age is analog". The following picture represents something called the eye of a signal:
(Source:
http://ics.nxp.com/products/nx/usb.switches/)
You get these by overlaying multiple signal samples and as you can see, there is no square wave to be found. Digital signals still have to conform to certain physical aspects of the analog world and thus you can't make a signal jump from one voltage level (which these graphs represent btw.) to another without some rise time in between.
To accompany for the many real world factors, that influence the signals in the real world, standards include minimum/maximum ratings for certain aspects of the signal. These include things like voltage levels, rise/sink times, over/undershooting (the ripples you can see in the picture above) and many more. If you factor all these things together, you get the hexagon you can see above. As long as the signal stays out of that zone, it's considered good and the receiver can reconstruct the intended value. As you can see, there is a lot of space around that hexagon. This means that the USB standard includes quite a large buffer for errors on the signal transmission (like any good engineer would
).
Oh man, that got longer (and a bit more technical) than I expected... I hope you're still with me
As a closing argument I want to stress again, that even if their cables lead to a better signal on the receiver side, that will not improve the resulting audio signal. As long as the ones and zeros arrive in the intended order, you get the same sound. The result coming out of the analog side of the DAC is absolutely unrelated to the sharpness of the signal on the digital side (as long as it conforms to the rules of the standard).
And to that forum link you provided: a little part of me died when I read this post there.
This is the placebo effect at its best. I can't begin to describe how dumb this statement sounds from the technical side. But as we say here in Germany (roughly translated) "believes can move mountains". If one believes in something, his perception will adapt to that and I don't want to argue against believes. All I'm saying is there is no way in the technical side of things to make different digital cables change the sound or picture quality.