[bigshot]

There is one actual fact that can be gleaned from that review... Now we know which one of their sponsors pays the most in advertising fees and which one pays the least!

 

[Roly1650]

 they skillfully avoid giving too many details about how the experiments were conducted:
was the guy changing the cable visible during the listening?
how many people?
how many swapping of cables? or was it a one time run for each and guess whatever you want?
were the subjects allowed to speak to each other before giving the final judgment? was it a collective judgement?
and when there was a problem with consistency between 2 groups, how come we don't see a trace of doubt in the results? oh let me guess they all did perfect and came up with the exact same ******** 100% of the time...

ahem well let's not waste time on trivial stuff, instead let's write 5 lines of poetic nonsense from people on LSD, about how bass now tastes like the warmth of the yellow danube because of a ******* USB cable.
great sense of priorities here.

Yes, frustrating for sure. But the aim of the hi-Fi press is to obscure and confuse on behalf of their advertisers, not provide worthwhile information and very successful they are at it to.

 

[esldude]

They show the eye pattern for USB, and talk about the lower or higher jitter evident on the transition edges.  However, unlike SPDIF where edges are used to recover timing, USB only reads the middle 20% of the eye.  And it only reads it for bits, for data, and no timing is implied.  The timing only comes in once the DAC clocks that data out.  Which is of course where it could change the analog output which we have no evidence of in these goofy "tests". 

 

[nick_charles]

   they skillfully avoid giving too many details about how the experiments were conducted:
was the guy changing the cable visible during the listening?
how many people?
how many swapping of cables? or was it a one time run for each and guess whatever you want?
were the subjects allowed to speak to each other before giving the final judgment? was it a collective judgement?
and when there was a problem with consistency between 2 groups, how come we don't see a trace of doubt in the results? oh let me guess they all did perfect and came up with the exact same ******** 100% of the time...
 
ahem well let's not waste time on trivial stuff, instead let's write 5 lines of poetic nonsense from people on LSD, about how bass now tastes like the warmth of the yellow danube because of a ******* USB cable.
great sense of priorities here.

 
 
I'm sure that the testing was single blind and was proctored strictly , it is just that it is all wrong. All that the tests showed was that reviewers reported hearing differences in USB cables, the tests did not indicate in any way whether this was true. Assuming that the listeners knew that the cables were changed between sessions they are primed to hear differences. Had the testers occasionally thrown in a few A followed by A sequences then we might tell if they even heard the same thing when it was presented twice. At no point were the listeners explicitly asked if they could hear the difference between two cables in a direct test i.e same/different (The infamous kettle lead experiment shows us that people can easily hear differences between the same things !) or this is A this is B. Of the 10 cables tested 5 gained recommendations but there appeared no correlation between the technical performance of the cable (the ability to carry packets of data with no timing errors) and the subjective reviews - the best technically speaking cable scored only 75% even less than a cable that had borderline USB 2.0 performance and not much better than a cable that did not even meet the USB 2.0 standard - how incompetent a designer do you have to be to manage that feat !
 
I agree that they could have provided more details such as order of cables presented how many reviewers listened at each session and so on...but even so overall these tests are of zero value !

 

[castleofargh]

oh I didn't even mention the "technical explanations" part because there is no relation with what they talked about and supposedly used as rating results.
and yes we don't know if they switched each time the sound stopped, but that would have obviously triggered false positive so seeing how they seem to love pretending to have it all under control, I bet they just listened all song with one cable, stopped, placed the next one... in one pass without any trick or re-use of one cable. so people could run wild without any danger of making a fool of themselves.
 
about the rise delay, well if it's good enough not to get errors then it's only a matter of when the values 1 and 0 are triggered right? for all asynchronous DACs it doesn't matter at all as it will be stored and reclocked. and for the rest, if the delay is constant it also doesn't matter so I don't really see the point of this measurement. is there something important I don't understand?

 

[dvw]

   
about the rise delay, well if it's good enough not to get errors then it's only a matter of when the values 1 and 0 are triggered right? for all asynchronous DACs it doesn't matter at all as it will be stored and reclocked. and for the rest, if the delay is constant it also doesn't matter so I don't really see the point of this measurement. is there something important I don't understand?

 
I don't think too many people get this. The concept of different clock domain was ignored over and over again.
 
Personally, I think this is just a shoot out/review and can not be taken seriously. If it is for technical review, they should at minimum include a generic USB cable.

 

[ab initio]

As far as the measurements are concerned, all those cables transmit the data equally correctly. The variations discussed in the article are a direct measurement of the uncertainty in the auditioners'  abilities to hear. The flowery prose describing the exact same sound from all of those cables is among the most absurd BS I've ever seen.
 
Cheers

 

[ab initio]

   
  Personally, I think this is just a shoot out/review and can not be taken seriously. If it is for technical review, they should at minimum include a generic USB cable.

 
The did have a 10 buck cable in the mix. It actually has the best electrical characteristics of ALL the cables, yet somehow doesn't receive the top marks.... hmmmm....

 

[x838nwy]

Possibly the best tweak. Ever. Simply awesome response to a question of how it works.

THIS IS A MUST SEE:

http://app.audiogon.com/listings/tweaks-machina-dynamica-clever-little-watch-wearable-technology-2014-08-29-accessories-22042-mosby-va

 

[ab initio]

Possibly the best tweak. Ever. Simply awesome response to a question of how it works.

THIS IS A MUST SEE:

http://app.audiogon.com/listings/tweaks-machina-dynamica-clever-little-watch-wearable-technology-2014-08-29-accessories-22042-mosby-va

Yup, sounds legit!

 
Cheers

 

[castleofargh]

one time to rule them all. suck it einstein I've got a watch!!!!

 

[Head Injury]

Possibly the best tweak. Ever. Simply awesome response to a question of how it works.

THIS IS A MUST SEE:

http://app.audiogon.com/listings/tweaks-machina-dynamica-clever-little-watch-wearable-technology-2014-08-29-accessories-22042-mosby-va

Sound improves proportional to the number of watches in the room? SOLD!
 

 

[castleofargh]

 

Possibly the best tweak. Ever. Simply awesome response to a question of how it works.

THIS IS A MUST SEE:

http://app.audiogon.com/listings/tweaks-machina-dynamica-clever-little-watch-wearable-technology-2014-08-29-accessories-22042-mosby-va

Sound improves proportional to the number of watches in the room? SOLD!

that's an obvious marketing lie. if one watch liberates us from jitter and other system clocks, it would also get rid of the influence of other watches. the only way to ensure a good result is to get them in odd numbers and to to put them in the path of our speakers to make a time railgun flowing straight to us.

 

[bigshot]

Analog watches make the sound warmer than digital watches. Roman numeral faces on watches are better for classical music than numbers.

 

[MusicFiMan]

Hi Friends,
what do you think if these cables below.
i want to upgrade my momentum and I don't want to pay too much on a cable that won't make much difference at the end.
 
 
 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pure-Solid-Silver-Sennheiser-Momentum-HD598-upgrade-cable-by-Lavricables-/181398504188?pt=UK_Computing_Sound_Vision_Audio_Cables_Adapters&hash=item2a3c3182fc
 
 
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Silver-Plated-Audio-upgrade-Cable-Sennheiser-Momentum-Headphone-Earphone-/281224828374?pt=US_MP3_Player_Cables_Adapters&var=&hash=item871a8434f5