News $1,250 Diamond-Branded Ethernet Cables Lure Audiophiles With Silver and Carbon

[Admin]

AudioQuest’s pricey Ethernet cables are another lure for Audiophile computer users, and they come with some grand claims about sound quality, clarity and dynamism.

$1,250 Diamond-Branded Ethernet Cables Lure Audiophiles With Silver and Carbon : Read more

 

[logainofhades]

I question the sanity of anyone willing to buy this.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

150% more expensive than the Audophile Rocks SATA cable, and it doesn't even have crystal spinkles on top?
Pass.

edit: Then again... it's called "Diamond", so... I'll take three.

 

[helper800]

I wish I were in such a situation that 1250 dollars for an ethernet cable was no problem...

 

[pointa2b]

Ethernet frames have cyclic redundancy checks built into them which detect corrupt data, so how is this at all needed? 🤡

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Headline correction "Lure Gulible (or idiots)". Your choice of words. Not sure what clown would spend that much on a cable.

When will people learn.. The only reason a cable might seem to improve audio is if the cable you had prior was bad. Aka poor quality materials, bad shielding, worn connector, etc..

 

[Giroro]

On the bright side, they're never going to sell one.

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

Obvious. The 1's and 0's need proper cushioning upon transfer.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

In a word...NUTS!!

 

[chaz_music]

As hardcore audiophile and occasional musician, I am often loured into reading articles like this to see what is up. I often have to fall back on reason using my engineering skills and checking the intersection of marketing hype with true expectations, and the hype very very rarely makes correct sense. Often the marketing boils down to marketing claims that can be held up in court.

Yes, court. The major technical claim here sounds like they are claiming that there would be reduced Ethernet packet loss.

Just recently, I had a Windows system drive image that copied badly and had to re-copy it. Even the tried and true Ethernet CRC checks occasionally fail and you get data corruption. In my rather large SOHO network, I have gotten errors like 1 in 10^18 bits (better that a HDD), and worse on WiFi. So when sending critical file copies, I use tools like Goodsync and Teracopy to verify the final written data, and they both do catch errors. Teracopy is great, but Goodsync has gotten too expensive for the average user and they went to a subscription model (boo).

The causes of a bad network transfer are many, so don't think of it as simple: bad cables, bad data switches, dirty RJ45 connectors, WiFi errors, local power glitches and outages occurring (think: UPS transfers), solar flares, cosmic rays, local lightning strikes, and other transient activities.

So these guys with their cable are technically correct. I would trust that they can prove that they reduce bad data packets from getting through. Without their products on a continuous audio feed, you probably can get once every month a data glitch that results in an audio fart. Someone with OCD will find that annoying and want to buy their cable to fix it. If it makes the buyer happy, I am all for our capitalistic economy.

Note that in the music world, there are tons of existing products that are "over the top" now such as using Teflon capacitors, ultra low THD amps, never using Class D amps, and horror of horrors, never listening to MP3 files (ah, even high bit rate MP3s). The last one really makes me laugh because of all of the blind studies that show nobody on the planet can hear the difference in 320kbps MP3s. There are literally hundreds of proper scientific studies that show nobody can hear a difference between a 320kbps MP3 and CD.

And another note: 300 years ago diamonds where considered a useless, colorless rock that nobody wants. Especially since they tend to have no color. So 300 years later and clever marketing strategies, we pay incredible amounts for diamond jewelry. And it is expected, too. Not a lot different from the pet rock product a few decades ago.

 

[InvalidError]

Ethernet frames have cyclic redundancy checks built into them which detect corrupt data, so how is this at all needed? 🤡

CRC doesn't recover errors, it just tells the ethernet MAC that the frame is bad and should be discarded, then the upper layer protocol needs to figure out that the packet got lost and re-send that data. As long as you don't have packet loss due to CRC errors, then no amount of blowing smoke up your ass with fancy/fancier cables will make ethernet audio any better or worse than it already is.

 

[bill001g]

They are trying to pretend they are fixing a problem that is common. Ethernet packet damage is extremely rare. The switches where I used to work would keep track of the number of errors it detected on every port. I would see the reports that has over 30,000 ports from multiple buildings. The vast majority of ports had zero errors even over a years time. You would sometime see a error here and there on a port when someone unplugged a cable. I think there was only 1 cable that constantly got errors and they had to replace in the many years I had access to these reports.

 

[Integr8d]

I question the sanity of anyone willing to buy this.

It’s simple. These products take advantage of a common human flaw called obsessive compulsivity. There a people who have such myopic views of things that it becomes hard for them to distinguish fact from fiction. The view is so strong that it overrides the rational part of their brains. So they are >compelled< to buy the products.

You can feed them all of the technical reasons that it won’t make a difference. They won’t hear any of it. They will believe, above all else, that it >will< make a difference. And what’s even crazier is that they’ll believe that they can detect that difference.

Of course, all of this <Mod Edit> falls apart when you perform a proper study. And that’s when the people who makes these products start hemming and hawing.

 

[adrian84481]

Sounds like a product for all those wanting "the best". Hard pass, I'll stick with my "less than best" Cat6 cables.

 

[razor512]

Those are great Ethernet cables considering that they can do things that normal cables cannot. For example, how many Ethernet cables do you have that can instantly make both your wallet and bank account lean instead of fat?

A full wallet is a heavy burden, and normal Ethernet cables cannot do much to fix that, but these audiophile Ethernet cables can can go a long way in lightening your load as you continue to carry your wallet around.

These Ethernet cables can also potentially save you some energy since it takes less energy to render less text, and with these cables, each time you check your account balance, there will fewer numbers to render, thus saving some CPU time, and potentially saving you a few bits of bandwidth.

Overall, with the audiophile Ethernet cables, you will enjoy the same audio quality that you get from your current Cat 6a cables, but with the added benefits of the outcomes listed above.

 

[chibiwings]

I question the sanity of anyone willing to buy this.

This is cheap with this kind of specific market. Heck PC hobby is dirth cheap compare to the these so called "Audio Enthusiast Market" but Extreme PC enthusiasts' sanity any different?

 

[SDMA]

CRC doesn't recover errors, it just tells the ethernet MAC that the frame is bad and should be discarded, then the upper layer protocol needs to figure out that the packet got lost and re-send that data. As long as you don't have packet loss due to CRC errors, then no amount of blowing smoke up your ass with fancy/fancier cables will make ethernet audio any better or worse than it already is.

That is what I was going to say. CRC failure only results in discarded packets.
He may have been referring to TCP, which implements error correction. Most streaming services stream music via UDP at the transport layer but not all, so that is out of the question too.

 

[passivecool]

move along, folks. nothing to see here at this socio-ecological train-wreck-site. worthy neither the pixels nor the neurons.

 

[Friesiansam]

HiFi is awash with grossly overpriced snake oil crap and, companies making extraordinary and, totally baseless claims.

Take a look at this thread from the What HiFi forum: https://forums.whathifi.com/threads/this-fuse-costs-£4200.125517/

 

[Thor]

We all know that the rich have gold or platinum ears and have a divine hearing. In addition, unlike the simple mortal, they never go to the bathroom, not to mention their infinite "generosity". This is why they are always richer, moreover "God" himself the rewards of their "goodness".

There is certainly an Nvidia card in gold or platinum with lots of diamonds. When we know how these riches are obtained, we can only continue to venerate them as gods, as we have been doing for millennia.

 

[cryoburner]

Sounds like a product for all those wanting "the best". Hard pass, I'll stick with my "less than best" Cat6 cables.

I would think "the best" ethernet cable would be more than a couple feet in length. : P

AudioQuest’s Dielectric Bias System (DBS) is also worth closer inspection for signs of cod science. This battery powered feature is claimed to prevent signal slowdown, which would be "a real problem for very time-sensitive multi-octave audio," passing through your Ethernet cable. Just in case your ears don’t alert you the very moment the DBS battery goes flat, AudioQuest has installed a test button and LED for battery checking purposes.

My initial assumption was that this was going to be a signal booster or something. But no, apparently one end of the battery is just connected to a wire running through the cable, and the other end is connected to the cable's shielding, supposedly to create an electrostatic field that "saturates the molecules of the insulation". Whether there is any meaningful science behind that is debatable, but I think one can safely say that it will make zero real-world difference on a 2.5 foot cable transferring a digital signal.

Really, for such a short length, I can't see this cable performing any better than an off-brand $5 cable of similar length. For digital signals, cable quality is generally only going to make a difference at really long lengths. And even if some interference would occur, the audio equipment should be performing error correction and buffering of the data to prevent that from making a difference to the output.

 

[micksh]

So, this covers Ethernet cables, but what about Wi-Fi?
I remember a joke from early 2000s, when home Wi-Fi became popular.
A company called Monster, who made overpriced cables, started to sell Wi-Fi air purifiers, so signal would be cleaner. Where are they now?

 

[bit_user]

I'm about to get sick of these articles really fast. If you don't want to keep seeing them on here, I suggest you do like I'm going to, and don't click them. Not even briefly.

We should expect better, from this site.

P.S. don't buy Cat 6e cables, either. There's no such standard. Such a name is meaningless. The progression of cable standards goes: Cat 5 -> Cat 5e -> Cat 6 -> Cat 6a

 

[Lafong]

Insouciant, yet slightly demanding?

Obtuse with a hint of decadence?

Vaguely triangular without being intrusive?

 

[umeng2002_2]

Audiophiles are like PC gamers that don't game on their $5,000 rig.