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Knuckledragger

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“ This [$600] USB cable is simply revelatory in its combination of ease and refinement on one hand, and resolution and transparency on the other. Although capable of resolving the finest detail, Diamond USB has a relaxed quality that fosters deep musical involvement.”

 

 

 

Now the frontier has moved once again. Is digital audio really just ones and zeros? We don’t believe so.”

— From the company that brought you the £6,900 Ethernet cable, how about a 5m USB cable for £1,259, featuring the same battery-powered placebo LED Dielectric-Bias System?

 

 

 

One of the most accomplished and musical HDMI cables we’ve ever heard.”

 

 

http://wathifi.tumblr.com/

 

 

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I read about the $10000 ethernet cable, what a bunch of fuckery and bullshit that is, simply defies the Ethernet standards let alone any sort of compliance made by engineers decades ago.

 

The thing is if you're a uneducated bloke with deep pockets walking into an audio store to buy stuff, chances are the salesman will make sure you walk out the door with one of those cables.

Edited by DefQon
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I quite like this one:

 

 

The Silver SuperKord-500 SD II™ is the most advanced mains cable we have developed, in our opinion capable of making a profound improvement to the performance of your system. The scale of upgrade is the largest we’ve experienced with a mains cable – resolution, dynamics, faithfulness to the source, musicality – are the best we’ve seen and heard in our Hi-Fi and Home Cinema systems.

[…]

[We] developed a clever way of terminating every single wire optimally, using a series of perforated discs which electrically terminate each of the separate woven conductors – 24 in the case of the Silver SuperKord Signature-SD II™ – tuning and enhancing the already impressive performance of the woven cable. The discs are housed in wooden pods that can be seen towards each end of the cable.

— £5,500 for a 1m mains cable.

 

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^^^

 

Logic, bitches!

 

 

 

Putting the price into context – our opinion

On the face of it, our Silver SuperKords may look very expensive, but put the cost of them into context. Say you have a system with a £5,000 CD player in it, which you love the sound of. But what happens when the upgrade bug bites? You might find that to upgrade your sound, you might need to invest in a player costing upwards of £10,000. Now, in our opinion, upgrading your £5,000 CD player’s mains lead to a Silver SuperKord SD II will bring about an even bigger upgrade than upgrading your player to the next model… and it’s cheaper. In that context, surely the Silver SD II SuperKords offer extremely good value for money?

These cables should be considered as a component in their own right.
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http://www.russandrews.com/product-Silver-SuperKord-500-SD-II-1564.htm

 

In the "Technology" tab....

 

Actually kind of cool, Craig.  And it's not YOU pricing it so high and lathering on the marketing.....you contributed some design tech.  But fuck, at that price you should get something more for royalty!

Edited by skullguise
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Basically it is all down to RFI control - both into and out of the connected equipment.  Works from around 100kHz up to 1GHz and more, and has an attenuation (in EMC lab conditions) of up to 40dB as compared with a kettle lead.  Oh and there are no ferrites, which themselves are non-linear and generate harmonics, and no series components either.  Works mainly in differential mode, but also has a useful effect in common mode too.

 

Basic rationale is that the mains environment is exceptionally noisy now.  Cheap switched mode supplies in fluorescent, LED lighting and CFL's, networking over power, which is now squirting 100-300MHz straight into the domestic wiring at watt and several watt levels with a range of 300 metres, and wifi, cell phones, digital cordless phones etc which all couple into the mains wiring.  Once that garbage gets into a piece of audio equipment it gets rectified in semiconductor junctions.  How bad is the effect?  Well at the extreme end, when your cell phone cranks up the power to locate a cell, we'll all have heard zzt-zzt-zzt from an audio system (even broadcast audio) - and that is high hundreds of MHz getting rectified in your 20Hz to 20kHz audio system.

 

Problem is also that that conventional power filters (like the ones on the back of IEC connectors) are only required to be good to 30MHz, and that is where the specs stop.  After which they can actually increase the signal level as the multiple components in there go into self-resonance.

 

Only reason I rolled over on a low royalty (about £30 per cable) was that it will launch in the US directly from Ray Kimber sometime this year, so the market should go up significantly as compared to just the UK.  Only a very few (one or two) of the silver variety sell each year over here, which is kind of not surprising. I'm not about to get rich quick with this for sure.

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Indeed, but I only have evidence from my ears for the copper SD cables - the 100, 300 and 500.  Because I was so convinced about this (and so was Mrs S), that when I did the work on measuring them at 3C http://www.3ctest.co.uk/I chose to waive my fees and have three 500 SDII cables instead (about $7k's worth in across the pond money).

 

Just to give you an idea, the 500 has a stack of three circular circuit boards at each end (that is what is in the pods).  There is a pic somewhere on RA's website to show this.  The individual boards and surface mount components are provided by the board house (mains rated parts have to be wave soldered according to the specs of the parts).   It then takes six hours to take the boards, the raw Kimber cable, plugs and sockets, pods etc and assemble and PAT test each cable.  There are a total of 96 wires to terminate in the 500.  The pods are potted internally with flame retardant goop, just in case one of the parts fails and goes incendary.  The devil is most certainly in the detail when you have 240V ac mains (in the UK).

 

The whole assembled cable then goes through a super secret and shit process code-named "X", which gives the same sort of benefits as cryogenic treatment, but without using cryogens.

Edited by Craig Sawyers
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Yeah, there really is some bollocks talked for sure.  One of the highlighted bits of jargon in particular took my eye

 

All dielectric (insulation) slows down and smears the signal traveling inside the conductor, and when insulation is unbiased it slows down different frequencies at different energy levels by varying degrees

 

Which is of course total nonsense.  A data cable (in fact all cables) has a characteric impedance.  Drive it from, and terminate it with that characteristic impedance and you will get complete fidelity.  You would have to use some pretty god awful dielectric (highly lossy) to degrade a signal in any significant way.  I've done a LOT of measurements of various cables, and connectors, using Time Domain Reflectometry, with a 25 picosecond pulse rise time (around 12GHz effective bandwidth) and a halfway decent teflon insulated coax with a non-inductive termination shows no degradation in pulse fidelity from DC to 12GHz.

 

I also don't subscribe to the silver cable thing at all, by the way.  Copper is pretty darned good enough.  There are no measurable difference on a digital cable between silver and copper using the above technique.

 

The only caveat is that is sometimes a good thing to *reduce* the rise time - the faster the edges, the wider the spectrum, and the higher the probability that those very high frequency components will get where they didn't ought to get. So you start with a good cable (from TDR testing) and then electrically slug it to reduce the spectrum generated by the edges.

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Speaking of WAT!? I enjoyed this gem which landed in my inbox today in regards to another ephemeral "upgrade" -- in this case a firmware revision for a popular DAC. Emphasis mine:

 

 

 

Speaking of bass, it also went noticeably deeper, with more detail and a flatter response, and sounded more powerful overall. Also, a mid-bass emphasis I had not realized existed before, was gone.

 

???

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