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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: USB cables

Why doesn't somebody just fix it? Because nobody knows what the problem is. All the obvious primary effects have long been taken care of. Secondary effects have been hypothesized, tested, determined which are causing problems and those dealt with, and still its not perfect. We are now in a situation where whatever is causing the issue is not obvious, and is almost certainly something difficult to measure.

So someone comes up with a wild idea as to what it might be and tries to see if its possible to measure with existing test equipment. They come to the conclusion that it can't be measured by what's currently out there. So you go to a test equipment manufacturer and they say it will cost 20 million dollars to build such a piece of test equipment. The problem is we don't even know if the hypothesized effect is what is causing the issue. That's a lot of money just to find out if it is or is not the problem.

So what happens is people try and use existing test equipment that was designed to measure something else and see if its possible to coerce it into measuring what YOU want to measure, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.

What frequently winds up happening is that you give up on trying to measure whatever it is and try and figure out a way to mitigate whatever it is (assuming that it exists), then build, that and listen, did something change? This process can take a long time and a lot of money, so you don't get to try out too many hypothesis per year. This process can take a long time to find the issue.

As an aside on this, my day job is designing chips that handle HUGE data rates. I can't tell you how many tera bits per second we are talking about, but it's a LOT of data. The cable that goes between boards that these chips are on costs $150,000, I kid you not. When you are working on the edge cables just plain cost a lot.

But I know you are going to say, but audio isn't going anywhere near as fast, so expensive cables are not necessary, BUT as Steve mentioned the level of the cable effects which are AUDIBLE are MUCH lower than the level which renders the link inoperable. These levels are in the same ballpark as what renders a link inoperable in the chips I work with. Why are such small levels audible? That's what we don't know yet. We do know that test equipment to work at these levels is extremely expensive, way out of reach of most audiophile companies. This makes going to the next level very slow.

It will happen, but it's going to take a lot of effort and wild goose chases to figure out.

John S.



Edits: 04/12/12

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  • RE: USB cables - John Swenson 22:59:11 04/12/12 (2)

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