Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
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What I find scary is not that this sort of stunt is *still* being tried, but that enough people will fall for it to make it a nice little earner :(
"This is ridiculous!"
"Have you listened to it?"
"No! You think I'd spend £250 on _that_?"
"Then you are not qualified to comment"
[thumpy FX]
waitaminnit!
digital signal right? not analog... I'm not an expert, but!
For digital signals, aren't all the error correcting handled by the ends of the transmission (sender > receiver) and thus there is nothing to worry about in the middle because the system check the signal is passable enough. Three is only an issue when there is so much error checking going on in a very bad bit of copper that there isn't enough time to pass the good signal onwards into the system.
Am I wrong here?
You are so right. I did once have a ridiculous argument with a hi-fi nut over optical interconnects, where he said that very expensive ones were better than cheap ones because they had 'lower jitter'.
Jitter exists and is a problem in digital transmission systems - it's the degree of uncertainty as to when a bit starts and ends, and is one of the things that can set the maximum data rate of a system. If it's really bad, it can cause corruption - and there's even some evidence that really quite small amounts of uncorrected jitter in an audio stream can have audible effects.
But that's uncorrected jitter. In any digital system worth its salt - and certainly in any audio system - jitter is corrected for in a number of ways. But still, the audiophile nuts seize on it as an excuse to spend more money.
For me, the killer argument is that for most of the signal chain between the artist and the listener - all the stuff in the recording studio, specified by professionals - the cables are bog standard off-the-shelf good quality ordinary. Even if there is an issue here, then replacing one tiny part of that with a stupidly expensive bit of nonsense won't help. But of course, there isn't an issue. Nobody outside the gilded circle of audiophiles gives it a second thought.
Nobody? That's not quite true. Have a look at the Amazon page for this product and check out the comments...
Hi Rupert
I m new here and am at the rookie stage, ie just starting to look under the bonnet of windows and solving problems.
Anyway about the audio leads, it strikes me that if you have a system with mediocre leads leave it all the way through with the same quality leads, the same maybe being true for higher quality leads and connectors.
I m just wondering.....thinking of the mediocre leaded system, if you then just plonked a set of high quality leads in the middle of such a rig, wouldn t it create an electrical traffic jam thus creating more noise when the signal hit the low quality leads again? So in effect you may end up with even worse quality audio.
regards roger
