A $10000 ethernet cable that makes music sound better

[nic2k4]

This is just too funny not to pass along. What's worse, the cable has been reviewed and they agree that it sounds better!

[newpball]

The real joke is that those idiotic reviews are mostly made by (late) middle aged men whose hearing has already become sub par.

The reviewer is about 60 years old:

[jagabo]

All my switches are Linksys SE2800 (£39) Gigabit types.

Obviously a $20000 switch will improve the audio quality even more.

I guess the manufacturer got the review they paid for.

[hello_hello]

I doubt age has anything to do with it. Someone who's spent a lot of time listening to audio and evaluating various equipment.... who might be thought of as an audiophile.... is far more likely to have well trained hearing, even if they aren't ten years old.

Mind you it does seem to prove it's far easier to hear a difference than it is not to hear one when making comparisons.
Nobody in their right mind would claim you can change the quality of a digital file when copying it from a NAS to a PC by using a different ethernet cable. It either copies to the PC or it doesn't. But use the same PC to play audio stored on a NAS and somehow it makes a difference to the quality? This guy seems to think so. http://www.audiostream.com/content/audioquest-ethernet-cables

Isolate your speakers from seismic activity for a better sound.
http://www.the-ear.net/features/ready-rumble

[Keyser]

Nobody in their right mind would claim you can change the quality of a digital file when copying it from a NAS to a PC by using a different ethernet cable. It either copies to the PC or it doesn't. But use the same PC to play audio stored on a NAS and somehow it makes a difference to the quality?

That's ridiculous. Copying a file from the network to your PC or playing that same file directly without copying it is basically the same thing. In both cases you're transferring the data to the PC. Claiming that the quality of the cable can have some kind of impact on sound quality makes no sense at all.

Of course, since audiophilia is nothing but a religion (hence dogmatic), you cannot expect to make any sense of it.

[ndjamena]

It's looks as though the idea that they're putting forth is that somehow misreads are delaying the processing of certain sounds in barely perceivable ways that nevertheless degrade the quality of the audio. That would be what caching is for. If they're equipment is so terrible that it can't cache several seconds of 24 bit 7.1 PCM in advance and their Gigabit Ethernet (or even Fast Ethernet) is so error prone that it can't manage to reliably pump through 10mbps then they really ought to have been informed that there are better places they could have spent that $10000 than a cable.

[Keyser]

If they're equipment is so terrible that it can't cache several seconds of 24 bit 7.1 PCM in advance and their Gigabit Ethernet (or even Fast Ethernet) is so error prone that it can't manage to reliably pump through 10mbps then...

...no cable in the world is going to change that.

[Hoser Rob]

The real joke is that those idiotic reviews are mostly made by (late) middle aged men whose hearing has already become sub par.

The reviewer is about 60 years old:

Maybe some people are pissed because the only people who can afford it are 60 years old.

But yes, it's just one more example of people having more money than sense. High end audio is full of snake oil.

[jagabo]

Note that your ability to hear high frequencies falls off as you age. At 60 the author probably can't hear anything above 10 to 12 KHz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHosAyfhSpA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxcbppCX6Rk

Be sure to watch the HD versions because the lower res videos have their audio run through a low pass filter leaving nothing above 15 KHz. Even the 720p encodings don't have anything over 18 KHz.

[pandy]

I miss one thing - rubidium/cesium atomic clock to provide reference timing - hilarious... foolquest in lead...

btw instead 10k for piece of copper i would go for fiber optic... galvanic isolation as a bonus.

[fritzi93]

I'm not surprised. Get a load of this thread at AVS:

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/92-community-news-polls/1460665-have-you-heard-exotic-au...d-quality.html

657 posts and counting.