Once again OZZY hits it on the head. Hard to believe that going from a 1M to a 1.5M would cause so much trouble. Here at Cerious we do not do things like most high end companies. We are first, and foremost, an engineering company. One that lets the sound ultimately dictate if a design is successful or not.
I can say with impunity that the conductors in the Graphene Matrix USB are the most sophisticated ever designed for a USB cable. The main data+ conductor is flat to 6 GHz with virtually no time error or energy storage. This is why it sounds so incredible @ 1 Meter. It also functions as a 9 gauge conductor so length should matter less with this cable than any other. The key elements of the "trials" have come down to 2 things:
1] the longer cable works perfectly with "less expensive" gear and 2] the exotic gear plays but with severe static. Both of these point to high end manufacturers "omitting" filtering in their digital circuits and input stages to "sound better". Apparently the bandwidth capabilities of the Matrix USB are causing problems, as hardware manufacturers "assume" they will never see an input reaching into the 6 GHz range. Lower end hardware assumes it must work with everything so they employ filtering to make it utterly stable, hence the instant locking and play.
As an engineer what is so fascinating is higher end gear decoding the digital signal, but having static pop through the output stage. If noise is present at the input the DAC should not know how to deal with it and either ignore it or treat it as dither and decode it as an error correction. Neither would result in "pops". This has to be a ground plane issue - one that we can only address by severely limiting the bandwidth of our cable which kind of defeats the purpose of making such a radical cable in the first place! That simply is not an option for us. I will continue to work with our Beta tester as I promised him I would figure out a way to make him a 1.6M USB and I do keep my promises (whenever possible...). If however we are confronted with the choice of "degrading" our Matrix cable to make it "more like everyone else's cable" or simply say it only comes in lengths up to 1 meter then that decision is an easy one. 1 meter it is!
Perhaps I can talk lprules1962 into moving his equipment closer together...
I can say with impunity that the conductors in the Graphene Matrix USB are the most sophisticated ever designed for a USB cable. The main data+ conductor is flat to 6 GHz with virtually no time error or energy storage. This is why it sounds so incredible @ 1 Meter. It also functions as a 9 gauge conductor so length should matter less with this cable than any other. The key elements of the "trials" have come down to 2 things:
1] the longer cable works perfectly with "less expensive" gear and 2] the exotic gear plays but with severe static. Both of these point to high end manufacturers "omitting" filtering in their digital circuits and input stages to "sound better". Apparently the bandwidth capabilities of the Matrix USB are causing problems, as hardware manufacturers "assume" they will never see an input reaching into the 6 GHz range. Lower end hardware assumes it must work with everything so they employ filtering to make it utterly stable, hence the instant locking and play.
As an engineer what is so fascinating is higher end gear decoding the digital signal, but having static pop through the output stage. If noise is present at the input the DAC should not know how to deal with it and either ignore it or treat it as dither and decode it as an error correction. Neither would result in "pops". This has to be a ground plane issue - one that we can only address by severely limiting the bandwidth of our cable which kind of defeats the purpose of making such a radical cable in the first place! That simply is not an option for us. I will continue to work with our Beta tester as I promised him I would figure out a way to make him a 1.6M USB and I do keep my promises (whenever possible...). If however we are confronted with the choice of "degrading" our Matrix cable to make it "more like everyone else's cable" or simply say it only comes in lengths up to 1 meter then that decision is an easy one. 1 meter it is!
Perhaps I can talk lprules1962 into moving his equipment closer together...