I chuckle endlessly about audiophile grade digital cables. A bit either gets there or it doesn't.

Plenty of retards out there with too much money. The thing I don't understand is how they can charge $500 for a 5' cable. There is no way in hell its worth $100/ft. I bet the cable is no different than any other cable besides the fancy ends and cable housing with the name brand stamped all over it.

I use a $25 HDMI cable and I fail to believe a $100+ cable would look or sound any better over 3ft. Even over 20ft it wouldn't be noticeable if there was a difference at all.

I have a business idea. Lets sell audiophile grade air. Laboratory developed and mixed assortment of gasses for optimal sound dispersion and distortion damping properties. A couple hundred bucks for a compressed tank (enough to fill a whole room, of course). It may smell a little poo, but that's due to the phenominal accoustic properties of the included blended gasses, methane, but hey, hardcore audiophile sound requires hardcore comprimise, and sometimes, a clothespin on your nose.

Seriously? You know who Catman is on m.n right?

He is like the Hustler equivalent, just not quite as funny and good at what he does.

Doesn't ring a bell.

Just searched on his username, and it looks like he posts mostly in Politics, Water Cooler, A&E, Int/Ext, etc., but avoids the Power Forum. That would pretty much explain why I've never heard of him.

Pseudo-sig makes sense now.

Gotta say, 11,500 posts without doing anything useful has gotta be close to some kind of record. What's Hustler's postcount again?


edit: damn, NA6C beat me to the Hustler joke.

The joke is he is an excessive audiophile purist, while who has the right ideas sometimes, is one of those self-righteous types who thinks the only worthy car stereos are made by Nakamichi and McIntosh. He treats anyone who disagrees with him in a very condescending (thinly veiled) manner. He seems to live to 'rule' the Audio forum, and a lot of people take whatever he says as gospel. He is infamous IMO. Not famous, infamous.

In fact, the reason I have my sig image is because I called him an elitist penis; I got some m.n love for that. Hustler is much more amusing. And unlike Hustler, I'll bet Catman is a douche in person.

I would not be surprised if he has some of those plugs in his house.

He's not a purist, he's a snobby zealot that only believes in his own ideas and his own methodology.

Not to mention, why the hell would anyone invest in audio for a miata, if you have the top down you cant hear shit as it is.

Yeah, I kinda figured all that out just by looking at his "About Catman" blurb:

High end audio. TATTOO's, Hard core HEDONIST,Swinger,whips/chains/leather

And his listed homepage:

www.CatmanIsGod.com/kittyc.jpg

which, when clicked on, takes you straight to this:
http://www.catmanisgod.com/kittyc.jpg



There's a reason I confine myself just to the Power forum at Miata.net.


(Frak. Now I gotta change my avatar after seeing that.)

TMDS (The signaling used over HDMI):

The transmitter incorporates an advanced coding algorithm which has reduced electromagnetic interference over copper cables and enables robust clock recovery at the receiver to achieve high skew tolerance for driving longer cable lengths as well as shorter low cost cables.

So basically, HDMI was designed for short $2 cables. The audio portion is a little more susceptible to error, but it depends on what transport you're using. I would assume most use LPCM which can get errors more easily. It may have slight artifacts on cheap cables. Passing TrueHD to your receiver to decode is probably better (assuming the decoder and DAC are good).

CAT5 is extremely tolerant. People actually use CAT5 (or 6) for a cheap audio cable. Twisted pair is great at reducing noise. I'm not sure how their transport system works, but I would guess it's in UDP packets which are not usually retransmitted. If you lose one, it can be a problem, but as long as a cable is built properly, it's usually the hardware that screws up a packet from what I've seen; not the cable. Especially of a short length like 5ft. You could coil that into a ball and it'd still be flawless. A decent CAT6 shielded cable with quality connectors ($10 max) is all you need.

For power, you really need a conditioning box. If you can get a perfect 60Hz sine wave and do phase matching with all your hardware, and have enough grounding to keep the devices happy, you're set. Is even the best ear in the world going to notice slight power issues? Probably not. Most interference comes from inside the actual device producing sound. I know with our RF test equipment, they cannot get rid of every little interference, so they actually incorporate an out of phase signal to cancel the internal interferences out. An audiophile system would probably do the same.

super media store . com

No, eHDMI was more than just a name- they had everything. Super-cheap component cables, VGA cables, SVHS cables, audio cables, network cables, along with unusual switches and adapters.

you guys are all talking old news.

SDI.

3GB/s over a single wire.

Agree on the first part

Absolutely disagree on the second part, but I wouldn't require a brand name to do it. Except maybe Audyssey (and therefore Alpine... but that's another story).

Disagree on the first part, agree on the second. :p

That's interesting. We've been using SDI for inside-plant transport for nearly a decade in the broadcast & production environment. Didn't realize it had come to the consumer market.

SDI is good stuff. Pretty tolerant of long runs, no equalizing or timing corrections needed, uncompressed, uses standard connectors. We typically don't embed the audio as it makes routing and switching in mixed-signal plants a pain in the ass.


Believe it or not, we use plain ole' CAT5 cable pretty much exclusively for all of our wiring jobs in radio stations these days. Quabbin makes a single pair stranded CAT5 that's great for in-studio patching and back-wall cross-connects (I loathe the unjacketed stuff the phone guys use- nowhere to put a label) and for our inter-room runs we buy 25 pair, terminate 'em with RJ-21s, and plug 'em directly into Krone blocks.

Back in '00 when we first started, there was a lot of concern from old-timers in the industry about the cables' resistance to external common-mode interference. I got a couple 300' lengths of various CAT5 cables, along with a 300' length of Belden 8451 (the "standard" shielded audio cable for decades), and took them all to my apartment, which was a couple miles from the WLW transmitter site (50,000 watts at 700kHz). We threw all the cables over the roof of the building, and then ran a full set of performance tests on each one (S/N, freq. response, THD, etc). The conventional untwisted shielded cable performed the worst of all of 'em.

Since then, it's been UTP all the way. The stuff is just friggin' awesome.


Now that's what I'm talkin' about! Thank you, sir.

monoprice is the shit! Great products and awesome customer service.

I had seen a test done similar to what you did, except they used it for home theater speaker wire and compared it to a bunch of the normal and high end wire out there. The only thing that did better was some ridiculous cable that was solid silver with gold plating and something like 5 layers of shielding and 8 conductors. At like $50/ft, I'd stick with CAT6. I can get a 1000ft spool for $50.

How much power can you pump through the CAT5?

It's a function of current, not power, and it depends on the length and the load impedance. CAT5 is 24ga (some of it is 23ga) so just find a conversion chart and solve for amperage by finding the square root of (watts / ohms). The nominal resistance of 24ga is between .03 and .05 ohms / ft.

The simple answer, however, is that you can pump as much power through it as you want until it starts getting hot enough to either melt or set something on fire. There are no absolute cutoffs when it comes to "acceptable" power loss in a transmission line for the sort of application you're talking about. Any absolute figure that someone quotes you (unless it is referenced to either a specific rise in temperature or a specific voltage drop) will be purely arbitrary.

We don't use it for speaker cable, just for line-level signals. The most power we'd transmit down one would be an AES/EBU (AES3) signal, which is ~5 volts RMS into a 110Ω load, so ~45 milliamps, or ~230 milliwatts. (Wow, I never really did the math and realized how much power there really is going through an AES3 transformer!)