Sata 3 cable

[Ittaku]

12 minutes ago, Stereophilus said:

Also, don’t forget we are talking about a hobby here.  Reproduction of recorded music doesn’t save lives.  It won’t attract the attention of the Nobel crowd.

The bulk of the Nobel prizes are not awarded for life saving changes. If electrical transmission was turned on its ear it would definitely attract the attention of the Nobel crowd. See Nobel Prizes in physics.

 

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-physics/

[Stereophilus]

7 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

The bulk of the Nobel prizes are not awarded for life saving changes. If electrical transmission was turned on its ear it would definitely attract the attention of the Nobel crowd. See Nobel Prizes in physics.

 

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-physics/

The point is that the changes in audio reproduction won’t be turning the principles electrical transmission on their ear.  Nothing of the sort.  We are examining subtle changes in acoustics.  Minute changes in timing.  Whether a guitar sounds like a guitar.

 

Play a song recorded on cassette on a Walkman vs the same song recorded on CD played on a hifi.  That same song will be easily recognised, but sound different.  Nobody will win a Nobel prize for pointing that out.  We both know there are many, many reasons why they sound different.  

 

Analogously, IF an “audiophile” sata cable makes a recording of a guitar sound more like a guitar it won’t win a Nobel prize.  It will be a marketable product though, and stimulate or thinking as to why that might be so.

 

It is strange to me that ideas of different equipment changing the sound reproduced are so quickly dismissed based on “theory”.

[Ittaku]

 

I wonder why no one's pushing high end power cables for PCs yet?

Edited August 17, 2019 by Ittaku

[Stereophilus]

40 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

 

I wonder why no one's pushing high end power cables for PCs yet?

You may already know that some reviewers are advocating for this.

[Ittaku]

1 minute ago, Stereophilus said:

You may already know that some reviewers are advocating for this.

Excellent, my cup had already runneth over, and now this.

[Ittaku]

8 hours ago, Stereophilus said:

The point is that the changes in audio reproduction won’t be turning the principles electrical transmission on their ear.  Nothing of the sort.  We are examining subtle changes in acoustics.  Minute changes in timing.  Whether a guitar sounds like a guitar.

 

Play a song recorded on cassette on a Walkman vs the same song recorded on CD played on a hifi.  That same song will be easily recognised, but sound different.  Nobody will win a Nobel prize for pointing that out.  We both know there are many, many reasons why they sound different.  

 

Analogously, IF an “audiophile” sata cable makes a recording of a guitar sound more like a guitar it won’t win a Nobel prize.  It will be a marketable product though, and stimulate or thinking as to why that might be so.

 

It is strange to me that ideas of different equipment changing the sound reproduced are so quickly dismissed based on “theory”.

For a change in a sata cable which is so far upstream to affect audio reproduction trillions of logic circuits and multiple devices later it would have to involve a change to electrical transmission theory so great that it would turn the physics world upside down.

[bob_m_54]

If it could make a guitar sound like a trombone... now that would be something.

[was_a]

Well I have a linear power supply on the way (12V 3A) for my Netgear router, a $100 splurge for fun. This after replacing a garden variety flat Cat6 ethernet cable with a round, higher gauge / better shielded cord that made a rather big improvement to the sound of my streaming setup.

 

I don't mind 'playing' when the outlay is small.... If there was a $50 sata cable marketed as an upgrade over the $5 ones I'd probably have a go too!

[Addicted to music]

Thttps://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/SATA-3Gb-s-vs-6Gb-s-Cable-Performance-Revisited-183/

 

 

sata iii 6gb/s is around $8-10 for 50cm   Not $100s. 

 

Edited:  don’t let me stop you spending mega dollars on items to chance it getting  audio improvements, but I won’t be spending mega dollars on something I know won’t work,  my budget for SATA cables is no more than $10-15 max.

 

and the conclusion said it all:

 

Our results confirm that despite the faster hardware available today, there is still no performance difference between SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s cables. The SATA 3Gb/s revision only supports transfer speeds around 300MB/s, yet we saw transfer speeds up to 500 MB/s with each cable that we tested. This clearly shows that the SATA revision designator on cables is mostly just marketing and has no bearing on the actual performance the cable can provide.

This is not to say that all cables are created equally, but rather that you cannot base the quality of the cable from the SATA revision it is supposed to be compatible with. A wire is a wire, and as long as the gauge of the wire is adequate, the end connections are good, and the right metal is used, there is no performance difference between one cable and another. The place where some users get into trouble is when they are using a particularly cheap cable that has either bad connections or uses sub-par materials. Even in those instances, however, you would see problems with the drives dropping or not being detected long before you see any sort of decrease in performance.

 

Edited August 18, 2019 by Addicted to music

[was_a]

This looks sensible and appealing.

 

Sata cable

 

sata

 

Although the sellers are charging are vastly different prices!

 

Same but cheaper

 

 

 

Edited August 19, 2019 by was_a

[Addicted to music]

1 hour ago, was_a said:

This looks sensible and appealing.

 

Sata cable

 

sata

 

Although the sellers are charging are vastly different prices!

 

Same but cheaper

 

 

 

@was_a

 

those filtration on the cable are basic ferrite suppressors and they act as a low pass filter...  usually when manufacturers  fit these on they are suppressing noise from the the product it’s attached to to pass EMI RF accreditation standards.     30yrs ago we were fitting these ferrite cores to DC motors with standard brushes as they where causing grief to digital processing....  if you want speed it’s best to leave them off or out!   Here they don’t even tell you what freq they suppose to suppress.   

You can buy them with and without and trial the speed test yourself to see if it gets to 600gb/s...   Notice on that link I provided, I don’t think any of those SATA cables they tested have ferrite suppressors on them, and yet they are getting up to 500gb/s.

[was_a]

Right, so perhaps not so sensible! Thanks for that

[Cloth Ears]

On 09/08/2019 at 11:04 PM, prymortal said:

There are some dimwits who think its just 1's & 0's but boy are the wrong: power+transfer, signal, degradation & bandwidth e.t.c. so the longer the cable the better build you want,

Yep, I'm one of those dimwits. You pay anything more for transfer of anything digital and you get pretty packaging. Unfortunately, it IS only ones and zeroes, the power/bandwidth/etc being encoded in the afore-mentioned binary data.

People are perfectly happy to make purchases over the internet on the other side of the world (which is a lot further than the other side of your room) and I don't hear any cries for super cables or connectors for those transactions.

Feel free to denigrate people who know what they're talking about...

[was_a]

Well not so fast...

 

I read some advice (link below) on buying well-shielded Sata cables and keeping the lengths as short as possible.

 

AudiophileStyle

 

I followed this advice and bought three $8 cables from an eBay seller (link below) and installed them on my desktop PC last night.

 

Sata 30cm

 

The result? A big sonic improvement. Don't just take my word for it - pay $20 or so and see for yourselves!

[andyr]

1 hour ago, Cloth Ears said:

Unfortunately, it IS only ones and zeroes ...

 

I thought the old "only ones and zeroes" theory was blown away in the 90s ... when it became obvious that some transports - which don't even transmit or process these ones and zeroes - sounded better than others?

 

Andy

 

[Ittaku]

24 minutes ago, andyr said:

I thought the old "only ones and zeroes" theory was blown away in the 90s ... when it became obvious that some transports - which don't even transmit or process these ones and zeroes - sounded better than others?

But the ones and zeros still don't change, so it is correct, it's just the interpretation of what exactly that means that people still don't seem to get today. Never fret about the reliability of the delivery of the ones and zeros. They will always be correct. Never fret about transport of the ones and zeros when they're being shunted around anywhere outside of the digital to analog conversion stage. Take great care in what else is delivered with the ones and zeros to the device that does the final digital to analog conversion. Take extreme care with what generates the final ones and zeroes and their timing before the final conversion stage. Sata is a shunting stage.

Edited August 27, 2019 by Ittaku

[Cloth Ears]

One of my favourite quotes is from Richard K Morgan in one of his Altered Carbon series of books:

'The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.'

 

With a little paraphrasing:

'The human ear is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can hear differences where there are none.'

 

What creates the ones and zeroes is not what I'm arguing. For example, an earlier post mentioned transports (presumably referring to CD transports). What came out of a transport was ones and zeroes, but what is on the CD is not. On the disc are a series of pits and 'non-pits' (lands) which determine a series of ones and zeroes - these are then EFM decoded and error-checked using CIRC parity checking. Any of these can be corrupted by bad implementation, lack of proper reading/re-reading, or by nasty scratches (although a lack of proper data generally decodes as those annoying clicks). But once the ones and zeroes have been created, it would take a seriously bad transmission line (i.e. massive oxidization) to cause any loss of those ones and zeroes. And the CIRC parity checking still applies - 25% of the ones and zeroes are for checking the correct result at the other end.

 

Your ears may fool you into thinking that there's some changes to USB or other digital transmission, brought about by a cable change. But that's all it is.

 

I've seen similar results in wine-tasting (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis), so it's not unique to the ears.

[andyr]

1 hour ago, Cloth Ears said:

What creates the ones and zeroes is not what I'm arguing. For example, an earlier post mentioned transports (presumably referring to CD transports). What came out of a transport was ones and zeroes, but what is on the CD is not. On the disc are a series of pits and 'non-pits' (lands) which determine a series of ones and zeroes - these are then EFM decoded and error-checked using CIRC parity checking. Any of these can be corrupted by bad implementation, lack of proper reading/re-reading, or by nasty scratches

 

 

Aah, CE - am I correct that what you are saying is that a CD transport is not just a "transport" ... it must also have circuitry in it, which produces a series of ones and zeros from the pits & lands on the CD surface?

 

So whatever differences people could hear between different CD transports were probably due to how well this (EFM decoding & CIRC parity checking) circuitry performed its task - not to the 'transport' side of things itself (ie. how smoothly it spun the CD)?

 

Andy

 

[Guest Muon N']

IMO, the ones & zero thing is a simplistic view of something complex.

 

Many used to say software players all sound the same because It's all ones & zeros, nearly every one now knows this is incorrect...........though there are still some hold outs.

[was_a]

Well I'm content to let the ones are ones-zeros are zeros brigade believe what they believe! A LONG time ago I realised that in audio playback, EVERYTHING matters. 

 

I believe in sensible tweaking i.e. small dollars spent in sensible places. 

 

My streaming setup just received a HUGE boost with the addition of a $100 linear supply that replaced the walwart 12v DC adapter to my ethernet router; the addition of  3m cat-8 ethernet cable; and three 30cm shielded SATA cables (see a few posts above). An outlay of $150. And what I call sensible tweaking!

[needlerunner]

Well I'm content to let the ones are ones-zeros are zeros brigade believe what they believe! A LONG time ago I realised that in audio playback, EVERYTHING matters. 
 
I believe in sensible tweaking i.e. small dollars spent in sensible places. 
 
My streaming setup just received a HUGE boost with the addition of a $100 linear supply that replaced the walwart 12v DC adapter to my ethernet router; the addition of  3m cat-8 ethernet cable; and three 30cm shielded SATA cables (see a few posts above). An outlay of $150. And what I call sensible tweaking!

Stop it. You are making way too much sense. To most people cables do offer some sonic improvements.

I replaced my std turntable interconnects with $100 ones. Negotiable improvement.

I upgraded my speakers cables and spent another $250. Again an improvement. So improvement all round on a modest budget. And please don't insult me by saying my ears think it sounds better because l have spent money. What a crock of....

My point is that you don't have to spend thousands on cables to improve the sound.
But a good quality cable with good shielding and good quality connectors fitted properly is going to sound a lot better than a $8 cable.

And economies of scale. You are not going to use a $8 on a 10k or more system...are you.

[was_a]

Yes...And in my experience, even with an expensive system ($30K +) so-called high-end cables are most often a waste of money. Particularly when the listening room has not been acoustically (or digitally!) treated. A high-end cable will often merely change the sound in some way - not upgrade the sound in the way that better speakers or headphones will.

 

As you say, for a $10K + system an $8 interconnect will hold it back. But a well-constructed $80 one could be very good indeed!

 

 

 

 

Edited August 27, 2019 by was_a

[Ittaku]

29 minutes ago, needlerunner said:

Stop it. You are making way too much sense. To most people cables do offer some sonic improvements.

I replaced my std turntable interconnects with $100 ones. Negotiable improvement.

I upgraded my speakers cables and spent another $250. Again an improvement. So improvement all round on a modest budget. And please don't insult me by saying my ears think it sounds better because l have spent money. What a crock of....

My point is that you don't have to spend thousands on cables to improve the sound.
But a good quality cable with good shielding and good quality connectors fitted properly is going to sound a lot better than a $8 cable.

And economies of scale. You are not going to use a $8 on a 10k or more system...are you.

Except that you're talking about analogue cables, and these definitely can and do make a difference. Don't lump all cables together...

[was_a]

1 minute ago, Ittaku said:

Except that you're talking about analogue cables, and these definitely can and do make a difference. Don't lump all cables together...

Oh dear....

 

[Ittaku]

Just now, was_a said:

Oh dear....

 

Please don't call me dear, I don't know you that well.