News $500 Audiophile SATA SSD Cable With Superstar Crystals Listed

[bit_user]

Since NVMe makes little to no difference for everyday uses and consumes 4X as many chipset/CPU lanes per device while doing so, I don't consider NVMe superior.

What it did was to eliminate the high-end market that would've been served by a yet faster version of SATA. Such drives were better served by NVMe, so the SATA folks decided to stop at 6 Gbps.

I agree that SATA serves a useful purpose and I don't want to see it disappear from motherboards for quite a while.

Just a different interface for similar though also quite different purposes - NVMe for things where speed is prioritized over all else, SATA for expandability and affordable large-ish arrays. If SATA got a 12-16Gbps 4th-gen, even fewer people would have cared about NVMe. I wouldn't sacrifice 4xSATA ports for 1xNVMe slot.

First, the NVMe standard has grown quite vast. It's so big they had to split it into multiple parts. It handles a lot more use cases than SATA or SAS, most of them non-consumer.

NVMe 2.0 Specification Released: Major Reorganization

www.anandtech.com

Second, NVMe is much better at exposing and exploiting the native parallelism of the hardware, enabling multiple queues and substantially increasing the limits on queue depth. Again, consumers don't normally have workloads that can keep so many transactions in flight but perhaps DirectStorage might.

Third, if you're going to tell people that "12 Gbps should be enough for everyone", that would limit their SSDs to a mere 1.5 GB/s, whereas even a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drive can theoretically do up to 4 GB/s. There are use cases for speeds above 1.5 GB/s, such as working with large video files, copying around VM images or snapshots, ISOs, etc. Not mainstream consumer, but more in the power-user range.

Fourth, SATA has significantly higher transaction latency than NVMe. For lightly-threaded workloads doing lots of small reads, read latency can be a performance bottleneck, even when you're nowhere near reaching the throughput limit of the SATA link.

To really call SATA's goose cooked, there needs to be a cabled NVMe 4.0/5.0x1 spec for budget-oriented storage arrays.

I didn't and won't say SATA's goose is cooked, but I'd point out that U.2 defines a cabling standard. For budget storage applications, I expect SATA will remain king for the foreseeable future, but I guess if the NAS sector takes a hard swing towards SSDs then who knows?

 

[bit_user]

If it targets the same dumb "audiophiles" who claim that the best audio quality comes from vinyl,

Aside from the nostalgia or vintage aspects, vinyl gets most of its fans from the RAII pre-emphasis curve. I've read that common implementations of pre-emphasis and de-emphasis introduce high-order harmonics many people find pleasing, similar to the soft-clipping effect you tend to get with "tube amps".

You could make a digital filter which does the same, if that's what you really wanted. I'm sure record producers and engineers do that all the time, since most music is consumed by most people on digital gear.

FWIW, I have a few CDs with pre-emphasis. They use different EQ curves than vinyl, I'm pretty sure. They do sound quite good, but I think mainly because the point of it is to reduce quantization noise in the upper frequency ranges, which tend to be lower-amplitude and therefore more vulnerable. Mostly, it's just a mark of a good quality recording and mastering, or at least it was when recording quality was more varied.

 

[PiranhaTech]

I do find crazy things that affect audio quality. My DAC has both SPDIF and USB. It sounds better via USB, and some people said it might be because USB is simply a newer technology and less likely to have jitter. I was thinking they both were 1s and 0s. It also could be my particular DAC

I bought a directional analog audio cable... and I had it plugged in the wrong way. I had no idea that directional analog cables even existed. Plugging it in the right way did make it sound better. The cable, from Monoprice (mild premium in terms of cost), actually does have arrows. However, this is analog, not digital

This cable though: doubtful. If you have an audio player running on said PC and can increase the RAM buffer, that would be many times better than any SATA cable you can buy on the market. A 1 megabyte buffer is huge for this.

However, audio files that you would play on a good audio set up often far above 1 megabyte. What does this mean? Check out benchmarks... for magnetic hard drives. 60-120 MB/sec is common for a magnetic hard drive for a file like this. The audio file data is definitely able to arrive onto the motherboard on time.

From here, the data gets streamed into RAM before it's shipped off to your DAC

tlrd; fancy SATA cable unlikely to have an effect due to audio getting packed and/or buffered into RAM

 

[helper800]

I do find crazy things that affect audio quality. My DAC has both SPDIF and USB. It sounds better via USB, and some people said it might be because USB is simply a newer technology and less likely to have jitter. I was thinking they both were 1s and 0s. It also could be my particular DAC

I bought a directional analog audio cable... and I had it plugged in the wrong way. I had no idea that directional analog cables even existed. Plugging it in the right way did make it sound better. The cable, from Monoprice (mild premium in terms of cost), actually does have arrows. However, this is analog, not digital

This cable though: doubtful. If you have an audio player running on said PC and can increase the RAM buffer, that would be many times better than any SATA cable you can buy on the market. A 1 megabyte buffer is huge for this.

However, audio files that you would play on a good audio set up often far above 1 megabyte. What does this mean? Check out benchmarks... for magnetic hard drives. 60-120 MB/sec is common for a magnetic hard drive for a file like this. The audio file data is definitely able to arrive onto the motherboard on time.

From here, the data gets streamed into RAM before it's shipped off to your DAC

tlrd; fancy SATA cable unlikely to have an effect due to audio getting packed and/or buffered into RAM

I wish these sound zealots would do a double blind study with a premium set of cans and a nice DAC on both computers except one has all the 'audiophile' crap on it while the other is just the cans and DAC. The one with all the crap should have everything including the oils they put on the analog cables and everything. Put a salt lamp in the damn PC too, mind as well.

 

[Deleted member 1353997]

These are going to be the best ones and zeroes you've ever heard. Just after they've been decompressed, naturally. Might I interest you in some audiophile CPU and RAM to keep your decompressed ones and zeroes shielded until they reach your ear? Only USD 9999.99. I swear I'm making losses selling them to you for this cheap!

 

[PiranhaTech]

I wish these sound zealots would do a double blind study with a premium set of cans and a nice DAC on both computers except one has all the 'audiophile' crap on it while the other is just the cans and DAC. The one with all the crap should have everything including the oils they put on the analog cables and everything. Put a salt lamp in the damn PC too, mind as well.

Don't get me started about their arguments against 24-bit audio

 

[timbo80]

I seriously want this thing... just as a decorative piece. I like the creativity of it. : D
I worked in a bakery, and the "wood stoppers" with crystal sprinkles rival the beauty of what our professional cake decorators could make on a full-size 12" Oreo cake.
This thing looks like something I would have built the first time I took Klonopin.

lolol...... I figured. it was a bath salts creation, but i suppose benzos and booze could also be the culprit?.

 

[helper800]

Don't get me started about their arguments against 24-bit audio

Wait... They argue "against" using 24-bit audio, over what, 16-bit audio?

 

[PiranhaTech]

Wait... They argue "against" using 24-bit audio, over what, 16-bit audio?

Basically the argument is that you don't hear the difference between 16-bit audio and 24-bit audio. There's signs that a lot of the arguments are copy/pasted from other people.

Maybe they see it as an easy way to troll. Maybe several people want a justification to avoid replacing their audiophile gear or re-acquire their audio collection. (mine is maybe $500 because I want to avoid that rabbit hole). I do see some people actually believing the argument though.

One argument those that gets them to agree with you

• Them: "The 24-bit audio sounds better because it has a better master."
• You: "In other words, I should buy the 16-bit version that has the worse master because you cannot hear the difference between a 16-bit version and a 24-bit version? I should buy the inferior master for this reason?

There's at least 1 dynamic range compression website that can help you tell.

 

[helper800]

Basically the argument is that you don't hear the difference between 16-bit audio and 24-bit audio. There's signs that a lot of the arguments are copy/pasted from other people.

Maybe they see it as an easy way to troll. Maybe several people want a justification to avoid replacing their audiophile gear or re-acquire their audio collection. (mine is maybe $500 because I want to avoid that rabbit hole). I do see some people actually believing the argument though.

One argument those that gets them to agree with you

• Them: "The 24-bit audio sounds better because it has a better master."
• You: "In other words, I should buy the 16-bit version that has the worse master because you cannot hear the difference between a 16-bit version and a 24-bit version? I should buy the inferior master for this reason?

There's at least 1 dynamic range compression website that can help you tell.

So their argument is that "you cannot hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit so why does it matter?" Yet at the same tell me they can hear the difference between having and not having put literal snake oil on their 3.5 and 6mm plugs and ports, glue fake gemstones onto the PCBs of "HiFi" network switches, and their special 5000 dollar wannabe 3.5 pound iPods that are like brick phones for music on the go.

 

[EJ42]

Sorry, but sprinkles are for winners.

 

[Cyber_Akuma]

I remember I foolishly used to think that after so many audio and video connections and cabling started to go from analog to digital that a lot of this hundreds or thousands of dollar cabling nonsense market would dry up. After all, while you could try to make an argument over analog signals despite how far they had gone into unnoticeable snake oil territory, digital has no such issues. There is no mechanical turntable or magnetic tape or whatever that can effect quality or a signal from such mechanisms being sent over analog. It's stored digitally and transmitted digitally, signal either gets there or it does not, there is no "conditioning" of the cable to somehow make the 0s and 1s better. And even with a bit or two being flipped there is error correction to fix that so the end result is still getting the result you are supposed to.

I thought for sure after everything went digital this snake oil audiophile market, at least for cables, would dry up.

... I was wrong.

... I was VERY wrong.

 

[USAFRet]

I remember I foolishly used to think that after so many audio and video connections and cabling started to go from analog to digital that a lot of this hundreds or thousands of dollar cabling nonsense market would dry up. After all, while you could try to make an argument over analog signals despite how far they had gone into unnoticeable snake oil territory, digital has no such issues. There is no mechanical turntable or magnetic tape or whatever that can effect quality or a signal from such mechanisms being sent over analog. It's stored digitally and transmitted digitally, signal either gets there or it does not, there is no "conditioning" of the cable to somehow make the 0s and 1s better. And even with a bit or two being flipped there is error correction to fix that so the end result is still getting the result you are supposed to.

I thought for sure after everything went digital this snake oil audiophile market, at least for cables, would dry up.

... I was wrong.

... I was VERY wrong.

I've talked to people who will state categorically that is there is an audible difference (improvemenet) in audio files that are stored on an SSD vs stored on an HDD.

 

[voyteck]

Basically three things in a modern audio rig really "sound": room acoustics, speaker and listener placement (requires measurements) and, to much lesser extent, loudspeakers. OK, they need some juice so the amp should be strong enough not to get overdriven but that's it. The rest is either placebo, the loudness effect (louder almost always seems better and lower resistance means louder), distortions (the harmonic ones are pleasant for human ear), or simply bad design (with excessively high output impedance combined with too low input impedance even cable capacity can come into play, which sometimes happens, particularly at... high-end).

 

[JTWrenn]

It's hilarious how much people spend on super cables that usually do nothing. Was this listing made by Silence Dogood?

 

[TheOtherOne]

Why don't I find these suckers to sell crappy stuff at 1000x price margin? ¯\(ツ)/¯

View: https://media.giphy.com/media/HndKRxV1KIaCrHqWA7/giphy.gif

 

[jkflipflop98]

If you really ARE an audiophile and you're here wondering if this cable really works or not, the answer is "no". It does absolutely nothing. That's why all us tech nerds are bashing on it.

 

[bit_user]

I do find crazy things that affect audio quality. My DAC has both SPDIF and USB. It sounds better via USB, and some people said it might be because USB is simply a newer technology and less likely to have jitter. I was thinking they both were 1s and 0s. It also could be my particular DAC

What about the sampling frequency? If you force it to 44.1 kHz in both cases (assuming that matches your source material), the I doubt you'd notice a difference. However, if one path involves resampling and the other doesn't, that could explain it.

I don't think it has anything to do with jitter. There should always be a buffer to smooth out jitter from either source. As long as the clock in the transmitter is remotely stable, I don't really see where there'd be a problem.

I bought a directional analog audio cable... and I had it plugged in the wrong way. I had no idea that directional analog cables even existed. Plugging it in the right way did make it sound better.

IIRC, it just has to do with which end has the shield attached. I think the reason they sometimes don't attach it at both ends is to avoid ground loops. If your equipment is all plugged into the same circuit, should be a non-issue. Maybe per-outlet power filtering that you find in some surge-suppressors would act a little like the components sitting on different circuits?

The cable, from Monoprice (mild premium in terms of cost), actually does have arrows. However, this is analog, not digital

The most I would ever spend on cables is from these guys:

Blue Jeans Cable -- Quality Cables at Reasonable Prices

They've even made custom cables for me. Their articles section has a lot of good info:

Index to Articles -- Blue Jeans Cable

for magnetic hard drives. 60-120 MB/sec is common for a magnetic hard drive for a file like this. The audio file data is definitely able to arrive onto the motherboard on time.

The OS does read-ahead, unless the app specifically requests it not to. But, a lot of players also do their own read-ahead. The bigger bottleneck (though not so much, these days) is decoding.

Games & live performance are vastly more demanding of latency. Playback of recorded media is trivial, by comparison.

tlrd; fancy SATA cable unlikely to have an effect due to audio getting packed and/or buffered into RAM

A higher-quality SATA cable could be useful for enabling longer cable runs, as others have noted. However, you only need a cable that's good enough to avoid errors. Anything beyond that is just wasted. Once the signal quality is good enough for the SATA controller not to encounter errors, there's nothing the cable can do to further improve the bits.

The whole thing about digital systems is their resilience to noise. That's how they can scale up to such immense complexity as the modern PC. If you didn't have noise isolation at many different points, inside a PC, then they flat-out wouldn't work.

Don't get me started about their arguments against 24-bit audio

It's great for sound recording and mixing, since it has so much headroom and dynamic range. Bits are cheap enough, why not even go to 32-bit floats? With just 24 bits, you can even do silly things like digital volume control, and then get rid of your preamp.

BTW, for consumer playback, it's not 24-bits so much as the 96 kHz that's key. And the main reason was that you could use cheaper anti-alias filters with a really wide transition band.

 

[Geef]

what appears to be a steel braided flexible toilet connector

Some people just like to <Mod Edit> on their system.

 

[bit_user]

I wish these sound zealots would do a double blind study

I prefer testbench measurements, myself. Just remove all subjectivity from it.

I've talked to people who will state categorically that is there is an audible difference (improvemenet) in audio files that are stored on an SSD vs stored on an HDD.

🤣

 

[Amdlova]

I WILL TELL MY STORY, IF you have a pcie sonar or a creative card to me I will be happy. Some time I Go I have purchased from ebay a asus strix raid pro. With a dumb pci-e to usb sound card never got it to work. My motherboard has the Realtek 662 and I want a better audio. Man the asus sold me the snake oil on the box says 112 db/Snr but when it works. All the time I got bad ripple on the audio... some people says this has bad drivers, others says it's because the usb.. but this is the worst fifty dollar spend. I feel sad when I see those rip-off

 

[slurmsmckenzie]

Price reduction. ... $799.95

I'll take eight! ;-)

 

[donner]

Don't forget they claim no need to plug the cable into an actual SATA SSD, just plug it into the motherboard. Which makes complete sense when you are trying to fleece people with more money than sense. Anyone who would even consider this cable has most likely ponied up for big M.2 SSDs. So, the seller needs to claim these cables help even when just plugged into the motherboard.

 

[mikeebb]

I got a small crate filled with approximately 800 sata cables. Wonder if I should just clean them up a bit, put a small pool noodle on them, call them HiFi and sell them for 50 dollars each on ebay?

Not enough zeros. Has to be at least $250. If you do like this guy and add flashy cladding, $500 easy, maybe $1000. Audiophiles...

 

[Viking2121]

Whats next? A 6 foot steal braided Ethernet cable with super crystal technology to increase your internet speed and drop ping times? lol