The Absolute Sound "review" of USB cable reads suspiciously like a press releaste

@wynpalmer4  

Two questions:

1.  Can a 1 be mistaken for a 0 at the usb receiver if the waveform is degraded enough?  

2.  If the DAC is receiving a degraded waveform and the data recovery circuitry is working hard to sort through it, does this circuitry not increase the electrical noise in the DAC?  If so, is it negligible or does that just depend on the DAC design?

My approach is to try to provide the cleanest signal possible from streamer to DAC within reason, if for nothing other than peace of mind.  This does not include cables made from unobtainium however.

Just thought of another:

I upsample all of my PCM content to DSD 512.

Is the data recovery fast enough to handle a poor signal with that much data coming through? 

My approach is to try to provide the cleanest signal possible from streamer to DAC within reason, if for nothing other than peace of mind. This does not include cables made from unobtainium however.

No need for unobtainium or exotic metals as long as you adhere to USB 2.0 regs, which require:
copper wire of the appropriate gauges,
a real aluminum sheath and not some aluminum vapor deposited onto some cheap, thin mylar sheet covering 100% of the cable, 
a copper sheath covering 65% of the cable,
and able to meet transmission rates.

Think of all the meat you buy and realize that not one major meat packing company meets USDA requirements, yet the meat has the USDA stamp of approval on it.

Same goes for USB 2.0 compliant cables. Do your due diligence and you'll find companies that'll gladly appraise you of what's inside their cables, meeting or exceeding standards, that won't break the bank.

All the best,
Nonoise

Just a FYI.

The reason redbook format has such low resolution, because at the time, you know back in the early digital age, the CD storage could not hold as much information as it does now.  If redbook was to have the same resolution as SACD, the size of the disk would be huge which made it impractical for portability (for example a hand carried player).

1. Can a 1 be mistaken for a 0 at the usb receiver if the waveform is degraded enough?

It can get complicated. For CD, their is error correction. If a byte comes in with error, and if the error is not catastrophic, the error can be corrected. But if the error is catastrophic enough that cannot be correct, the next layer of defense is the missing data will be interpolated. Because the music data stored in the CD is interleaved, interpolated is possible. For example, if there are 20 consecutive bytes of error, they do not comprised a continuous stream of musical data, because of interleaved, the 20 bytes come from different segment of music. Based on CD spec, you could potentially drill a small hole on the surface of the CD and it can still work. Most of the differences you hear from different CD player probably not because of error because of power supply design, noise, the output stage, and of course JITTER.

I am not quite familiar with USB protocol but I CANNOT imagine that it would not have error correction and interpolation, and that the data is not interleaved. If USB has all this characteristic, I don’t see how what I said above would not apply to USB as well. Again, I don’t think most audible differences you here is from bit error because it is just a small percentage of all the variables. Now if you hear scratchy sound or spikes like a damage cd, well that’s different.