Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

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Original Message

Itâ€™s just noughts and ones â€“ why the fuss?

Posted by Ryelands on May 19, 2009 at 09:22:00:
justsomeguy65765 wrote:

"THIS IS DIGITAL PEOPLE....... not analogue! I don't care if you paid $10,000 for your usb cable it's technically impossible to "sound" better than my $5 usb cable.

That this notion is commonly held by the public at large and, surprisingly, by some programmers does not make it any less false. Below is a shorter version of how I argued against it some months back:

A computer's internal processing seems to take place without errors but, in the real world, it either proceeds with occasional errors that are detected and corrected by CRCs, parity bits, etc or it corrupts data too severely to be (fault) tolerated, leading to a â€œcrashâ€.

External activity (output) is a different matter: it is a real-time process with no scope for any â€œsend-that-againâ€ feedback.

In designing high-end, computer-controlled machinery for manufacturing, engineers deal on a daily basis with problems over which audiophiles anguish at length.

Whatever the industry, such machines issue billions of instructions per minute to a plethora of devices under conditions in which errors of a ten-thousandth of an inch decide between a product and scrap metal.

To maintain accuracy, the control electronics, motors, transducers, power supplies etc. must be excellent and vibration suppressed to ensure accurate timing. True, the system is controlled by digital signals but any notion that â€œitâ€™s just noughts and ones â€“ why the fuss?â€ is simply ill-informed.

On a more modest scale, the same holds true for high-resolution digital audio. There is, however, an additional, and often overlooked, problem with PC audio: the â€œreal-timeâ€ processing of the output is performed inside a more or less stock computer.

Although PC audio bypasses real-time data capture (e.g. having to read CDs â€œon-the-flyâ€), RF noise, supply fluctuations and a myriad of other pollutants which are relatively unimportant in data processing (on a PC whose operating system is designed to handle almost everything except precision audio) can severely degrade sound quality. That needs to be addressed.

To configure a computer so that it preserves the integrity of the â€œreal-timeâ€ output is to enhance (more accurately, to preserve) sound quality. It is not always easy to do.

Designing USB cables so they approach the ideal electrical specification is a part of this process. The differences between a good and a stock USB cable is certainly quantifiable and often, even with some low-priced after-market cables, audible even to "cable sceptics" such as me.

Some time back, Gordon Rankin posted "eye patterns" that demonstrated the point rather well. True, some list members have sneered at them but there's not a lot one can do about that.

Best

Dave