Most Important, Unloved Cable...

Al's argument would be for not using copper based RJE of all UTP stripes however. 

It doesn't paint a picture for one really expensive, $233 a foot in my case, shielded cable vs $0.90 per foot shielded cable. 

I'll bring some assorted hardware that we can play around with or not. 

W: 

What is the player software you are using? What platform Win/Mac?

Thanks,
Mark

Wgutz would the first Saturday in November work for you?

Email me at [email protected]

Are you a bourbon drinker?

Best,
Mark

Old Scout is good. Anything from Williams stands up well. Got to try and get a few 5ths of Pappy.

I'll be heading out to Williams on the 11th of November. Looks to be a good time.

I wish Douglas could have be present today as we test this out blinded.

WGUTZ also has a pair of Sennheisers we can evaluate with. I've brought a 100 foot CAT6, unterminated CAT5 (approx 30 feet), my Emotiva DC-1, two computers, Cisco SG 200-08 L3 managed switch.

I had a great day hanging with William and geeking out. Went to his friend Gordon's and enjoyed some bourbon and his custom speaker system.

1st off: Williams system simply images and layers. Pin point accurate. Really good sweet spot. Did have some issues with a channel due to some cabling but that was sorted out post haste. 

I brought a 100 foot ribbon style CAT6 that was ~$13 delivered from Amazon, Cisco SG 200-08, BJC 3 meter 6a, Emotiva DC-1.

We did both sighted and blinded evaluation of the 5 meter DIY vs the 30 meter machined. Honestly I couldn't hear a difference on either his laptop or mine. William thought his laptop was more sensitive to cabling and I believe he thought mine was nullifying any cable differences or making any changes so minute as to being immaterial. 

On the blinded evaluation it was 6 of 10 correct. He did some switching blind for me and I was simply guessing. 

For me there was no real ahah! moment. If we spent 30 seconds without music playing, and regardless of cable used, when resumed it always sounded the best and then immediately looping the playback would diminish. Wait another 30 - 60 seconds and the first playback always sounded best. I think it's like any endeavor, you tend to do best after a bit of a break. 

William liked the DC-1 DAC. His Wadia 121 is nice and I REALLY liked the remote for it. Pure sit in your chair convenience. 

Just wanted to again say thanks to William for the terrific hospitality and it was a blast. If anyone else bumps into William out and about: Ask him about his rock collection ;-)

All I know is that someone that was sure they could hear differences in cabling only hit 6 out of 10.

They had a 3 meter Best Buy Insignia they they insisted was just all sorts of horrible. Brought that up and put it into my system and even sighted he was having great difficulty hearing what he previously thought.

Here’s a tidbit for Tidal users: Tidal caches the entire track so you can remove the cable and the track will play. If you have a reasonably fast connection you could have an entire track queued up in 10 seconds.

This only re-affirms my conviction that if anyone did have me out that they would be learning an important lesson about how much faith they put into their ears.

After this recent visit I'm even more certain in the validity of my position.

WGUtz has a custom, 5 meter, cryo-treated, cable. The other cable was a 30 meter cable costing $13 shipped.

He certainly had a highly resolving setup. Going through this in a persons own setup it certainly added weight to my previous findings and I’m much more comfortable now in wanting to test out in other peoples systems.

Wish it would have been for the $$.

I’ve also had this done with a $700 Nordost 1 meter, $340 AQ 1 meter, $330 Wireworld 3 meter. Please stop attempting to put your head in the sand over this fact.

I’m willing to do this again if feasible. But really not willing to eat travel costs to do so. But man we had a good time. 

WGUtz knows a ton about property management/leasing etc. I probably asked him a million questions about the subject. Most likely to the point of exhausting him on the matter :-)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. One test means nothing. Blind test, ABA, AB, what have you. A test cannot prove anything, but it certainly cannot prove that there are no differences among cables if the results are negative. Too many things can go wrong, even when everyone is on the up and up and trying to be thorough, etc. Geez, even disrupting the connections when unplugging and plugging cables during testing changes the whole playing field. Come on, people! No offense to anyone testing but don’t try to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.

Lets start with some logic:

1. When normally hearing differences in cables a cable swap is required. So nothing is being done that already hasn't. 

2. One test and the outcome only has value for the claimant. I've said nothing concrete about anyone else. I have said this emboldens my belief that others would perform about the same. 

3. I can concretely say that in the system we had that you personally could not tell when the connections were changed. 

So what is your confidence level in your ears only evaluation? 

Not attempting to do anything but learn what you did. I can’t read your mind and know what you did in the past or even what a “custom”cable is? What is it? No reason to attack and be rude. Your test is still ambiguous to me and others as we have no idea what the custom cable is. Simple to understand my point here right?

We evaluated a claim: That someone hears a difference in cable A vs B regardless of anything else.

I’ve posted in this thread before what cabling I tested with in the past. More than once. Sorry about snapping about that.

Custom cable in this instance is General Cable CAT6A and Siemons industrial 6A terminations and Cryo-Treament.

Honestly it doesn’t matter what the cable is. I wasn’t testing the cable I was testing the claim. Later in the day (we did the bias controlled evaluation around 3PM) we were just exploring what each of us listens to. I had my laptop logged in with his Tidal account and playing music back and while talking just kept switching out cabling without interruption. He said he thought my laptop rendered any cabling changes moot. Simply couldn’t hear a difference because the entire track had been cached by Tidal.

Same for JRiver (I had the buffer set for the default 6 seconds).

So we had the discussion of: If you have two devices and one changes it’s sound character based on the cabling, and the other renders it moot, and the one that renders it moot sounds good...

The other issue we had in setup is that the AQ DBS RCA cabling was really touchy. I thought AQ had lifetime warranty only to find out the last cable he sent in for repair cost $150. The REPAIR cost $150, not the cable. Yikes. So I consider that part of the evaluation compromised. When you have to play with the cable where the jacket enters the RCA plug assembly to achieve full output I’m not sure how you could consider that optimum.

I use a Cheap Terra Grand for $10.  Will be trying Wireworld. Based on my experience it takes time to really appreciate system changes.  I would say at least 3-5 days of various listening sessions.  

This is easily testable. I could setup a system were the computer is dual homed and remotely I could hit the switch and issue a 'shut' command on one of the interfaces in the LAG.

Switch>en
      Switch# conf t
          Switch(config)# int fa0/1 or fa0/2 (whatever the interfaces are)
               Switch(config-if) shut or no shut

That's it. I could remote in after two weeks and make a change, or one week, or 22 days. What have you. Just black box the entire thing. 
  

All of of this is so system dependent as to make your test rather limited in conclusions. Nothing wrong with your test or trying, but what is true in that one system is often not perfectly transferable to another system. Just the way it is.  

If the Ethernet connection is implemented properly then it won't be an issue. If you have a device that is susceptible to just 12 out of 328 feet of cabling you have a problem IMO. 

Even it if I take what you say @ face value I still believe blinded testing is going to change the perception radically. 

The test has no value for the claimant either.but you are free to believe whatever you want to.

The results are what they are.

My questions are: When would you be willing to sit for a bias controlled evaluation?

How are you able to interject on behalf of the claimant?

How do you know it had no value for the claimant?

How do you know their custom cable with all it's treatments isn't the equivalent of others in the industry?

How do you know what their system sounds like? I do. 

Here’s the crux:

It’s patently ignorant to support numerous sighted evaluation but pan bias controlled evaluations even when we only have a few instances so far.

It’s a single instance farther in the correct direction than any single one of you have actually made it.

Again, feel free to have me out with a client / server and your USB DAC and downstream chain. Just cover my travel expenses if you can’t hit 18/20.

Honestly, if it takes two weeks for a ’change’ to be ’noticed’ there are other things at play mentally.

This is the problem with the world population. Some ’hundreds of thousands’ (and more) and into the millions as scattered across the earth, say the earth is flat. That is a humongous blip of statistical significance.

Fixed that for you. I thought better context could be provided in couching your response in easier to relate terms. 

The result could be predicted. Confront the voodoo priests with the experimenttal facts that show they were wrong and they will try to change the rules of the game. As for Geoff and Theo, they of course have a financial stake in perpetuating such deception.

I've been surprised that the most vocal of differences are also the most adamant that they simply be trusted without any instrumented verification to further credential the claims made. 
 

Nothing is being claimed as a scam. I understand the fundamentals of how Ethernet works. I've tried out three boutique cables vs one that I made. 1 person here had the intellectual humility to simply hear without knowing what is in situ. 

All I'm asking for is someone, anyone, provide some proof as to their ability to hear these differences and have that difference follow the expensive cable. 

It's not to much to ask. 

I was just having a drink with my buddy the Invisible Pink Unicorn the other day talking about the audacity of people not believing me and the 100's of thousands of people that know him. I understand that while you may not be able to see my Invisible Pink Unicorn buddy, it's only because either your eyes, your glasses, or both suck. 

He exists, you just need to believe me. 

Why Pink? Quite offensive, I’d say. : )

Don’t color shame my Invisible Pink Unicorn Buddy. He’s having a hard enough time with the naysayers that would like some evidence other then my and a few 100 thousand other peoples say so.

I can leap tall buildings in a single bound but it wouldn’t be scientifically significant even if you asked me to prove it to so I don’t bother with it. Need a rather large N of people jumping buildings for my claim to be even relevant. 

I’m still waiting for my phone call from machine dynamica to make my system sound better.

Maybe the The Teleportation Tweak is being updated for compatibility with SMS.

Been beating the subjective audiophile with the Generic Zip Cord of Logic since 1999(tm)

The same argument has been leveled against power coming in off the grid and how could a high quality power cable in the last couple of feet “rescue” an already polluted AC source.

While I agree the same argument has been leveled, the people the level the same points about a power vs Ethernet don’t know what they are talking about.

Unlike power, every port that data passes through is a reconstruction. 

I haven't seen anyone be a proponent of junk. 

Bottom line is $1/foot for a certified Ethernet cable from Blue Jeans is all you need to get the most out of your streamer.

$232 a foot more is not going to buy you a single iota improvement. 

The fact is you can do 10GBe (1250MB/s) over 15 year old CAT5e up to 37 meters on a lot of swtiches now. I could theoretically transfer my entire 2000 album collection in seconds. 

I have learned to ignore those that just cannot hear differences and then make the mistake of assuming the same for all others and all other systems. Audiophiles around the world know better and really don’t pay attention to these rather few dogmatists.

So when can we do this in your setup?

I did over the past week. Ethernet cables and the power supplies to our computers, usb cables, modems, routers, usb cards etc. Amazing how everything’s matters in digital. Everything.

You did what over the past week? Have me out to keep you honest?

Just let me know when you want to go on camera with your mythical hearing abilities.

I have a question regarding Ethernet cables, aside of what all of you are discussing. My cable has to be about 50’ from my computer to my pre pro or DAC. does the length of the cable effect the sound quality?, ( as in HDMI too long is not inherently good)

The standard is 100 meters/328 feet. A solid PHY can drive it ~380 feet with out BER starting to show up.

That’s for 1GBe (~110 MB/s or 1 CD every 7 seconds). Crusty old CAT5e is good for 10GBe at 37 meters with a lot of switches (~1250 MBs/ or 1.7 CD’s every second).

In my testing of 315 foot generic CAT5e (Hypertek) at $.30 a foot and a 3 foot Nordost Heimdall II at $233 a foot (so 7000% more expensive) on a both a server/client computer to USB DAC and server computer to $4000 Cary Audio DMS-500. No one when blinded could tell a difference.

When I recently went out to WGUTZ in Denver and he listened blind he only hit 60%. So basically a coin flip. Otherwise he was positive of differences. The generic cable was a 100 foot $13 flat ribbon style from Amazon. His was ~20 foot custom, cryo treated, with Siemons industrial terminations.

Any of them doing this with Ethernet? You know that is THE topic at hand.