I once used my mom's sterling silver butterknife and stuck it in a 120Volt receptacle. Once I recovered, I then used a coat hanger made of plain junk steel wire. I definitely got the biggest effect with the butter knife. I guess it is possible that I was used to the effect on the second attempt and did not fully appreciate the subtle differences in the ringing in my ears, but I have to go with the butterknife on this one. The other thing I remember clearly is Mom's shock when she found out that one of her butterknives was badly tarnished and slightly shorter than the others. She never forgave me.

I'd say go for the blind test next... LOL

Funny story, it brought back some memories (the painful kind).

Yeah, well, anybody who buys into the bunk that somehow a ultra high priced cable will sound better when carrying digital data is truly BLIND to the engineering realities of how electronics work.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I would say intentionally ignorant, as in this case the end result is easy to demonstrate.

Will a file copied from one computer to 2 separate external USB drives, using 2 different "grades" of USB cable, arrive at it's destinations as different files?

Maybe if my son wants his short story to sound "warmer," we should use a silver cable to copy it after he writes it :p

Oops...

[gingerly retracing steps out of the minefield...]

Never mind me please.

My post wasn't directed necessarily at you, but at those who believe that such things as silver cables making a difference in purely digital transmission will make an audible difference.

Successful digital transmission only depends on the receiving end being able to tell a 1 from a zero, and there is a very definite theshold for that. There is not a "sort of 1 or sort of zero" state. Either the data is correct or it is not. If it is not, there will be obvious audio dropouts.

I fibally ordered that cable! This one wasat the RMFA and was big Hit!

More to come.

Liz out

I didn't want to jump on this discussion, but I was curious to find out if things are really this simple.

I am mostly familiar with the typical network computer telecommunications protocols and associated schemes. Since I didn't initially believe Altec's statement that bits are simply dropped, I decided to poke around the Internet to learn if something similar to the type of error correction that goes on in the telecommunication world is done with digital audio signals. I found quite a bit about AC-3, PCM and DSD. For instance, there is an extensive amount of error correction done in the CD player itself. However, I saw very little mention of transmission errors and much more concern about encoding/decoding "quantization" errors, which seem to be more audible.
Here is the Wikipedia entry on PCM which talks a little bit about error correction schemes.

In computer telecommunications, let's take Ethernet for example, we use schemes like manchester encoding to ensure the integrity of the transmission at a very low level. As Altec points out, things are apparently much simpler in the digital audio transmissions we are dealing with here - this surprised me initially, but it makes sense since this is a point-to-point asynchronous exchange (a "bitstream", now I get it). It looks like all the work is left to the encoding/decoding process to deal with data integrity at the payload level. In which case, all things being equal, I don't personally think the type of cable matters at all, any more than the type of optical transmitter/receiver does - but that's my opinion, you are entitled to yours. This could bring us into a whole new argument as to which encoding scheme is better, but that's another thread. I found this paper (in pdf format) which summarizes some of the important concerns in one single document.

In any case, my ears cannot tell the difference and this whole 1s and 0s talk makes me glad that I left my computer science background behind and went with Information Systems for my PhD.

USB to a Great, designed DAC is the best!

I've finally figured it out. You're the Sarah Palin of the audio world.