Is computer audio a bust?

I was going to ignore the last post to me, I cannot bring myself to do it, saying there is an error in my logic was very incredibly wrong, so I will attemt to get you to understand again, I have a $25.00 RCA interconnect made by-for vincent audio that came with the digital player, Then I have and use a $15,950.00 retail balanced 1-meter interconnect, I gurantee you there is a HUGE difference in performance between the two cables on my digital player, I also have a $3,000.00 balanced interconect 1-meter, The most exspensive cable is a Tara labs Zero Gold with HFX grounding station, The next exspensive cable is a Tara labs The One cable, To my ears the zero cable makes the model called the One sound broken, now I got that out of the way, The most exspensive USB cables made are very inexspensive and the performance is about the same as the vincent RCA interconnect, there is some USB cables that are $300.00 under $1,000.00 period, ask your self why is that?, lets see here, USB is NOT for audio, it is for data, and the usb termination is way to small for a world class cable to be terminated with, Tara Labs sales a usb cable, it's not much money at all, so At the end of the day, It does not matter if you have a live band cabled to your system through a USB cable, this is not logic, It is a astonishing FACT, by useing the usb cable even with a live band, the out come is so inferrior because the cable cannot reproduce performance as close to the real thing as possible, I understand that some computer audio is better than my cd-player for a source, My fact here is that with the cables I have on my player versus comuter audio's best with a usb cable used for audio, there is absolutly no way possible for the sound out come to be better than what I have, if that were possible, the cable companys would go out of bussiness, that would be saying my cables are worthless, get a $25.00 usb cable, that works better, LOL!, I also understand computer audio can sound very good, and may give user perks such as a menu to walk around with, that's great, I get it, But as I said before, I am tring to get the best sound possible, to be in the realm of world class audio, I cannot achieve that with such inadequete very poor cables such as usb, if you cannot understand this, then I am lost for words and give up, best of luck to you.

We understand what you are saying, Audiolabyrinth, it's is just than some of us don't accept your arguments about cables and find them irrelevant to this topic.

And best of luck to you, too.

Audiolabyrinth - S/PDIF and USB cables run the gamut and the price is no indication of the sound quality you will achieve IME. I make a S/PDIF cable that is closely matched to 75 ohms, uses silver and expanded Teflon and only costs $250. No customer of mine has found a better cable, and they have tried. Based on my experiments, I believe that it is the termination of the coax to the plug connector that is most critical, not so much the plug-jack interface. The termination of my 75 ohm cable to the 75 ohm BNC is virtually flawless.

The USB cable is another thing however. There are a lot of companies making exotic versions and most don't match the 90 ohm spec. With new XMOS-based USB interfaces on a number of DACs (I'm doing one as well), I have found that the cable makes an even bigger difference. The signal integrity and power delivery are both important for XMOS interfaces.

Gordon Rankin claims that the error rate is high on many USB cables, and this shows up in SQ degradation. I believe that the SQ is mostly impacted by the power in the cable based on my experimentation, at least for XMOS based interfaces. I have a software tool now that logs errors over USB that I can use to compare cables. I have several USB cables and I'll be testing these over the next month or so to see which ones cause a lot of errors.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

That's good stuff from AE.

For every grey haired old audiophile there are 100 kids listening to music on computers. And which one do we think is headed for extinction?