Is the snake oil slowly retreating from the Hi-Fi industry?

[Armageus]

He says minimum while multitasking and listening to music is between 6GB and 8GB which is reasonable to me.

Listening to music takes almost no ram - 8GB is the sensible minimum for multitasking regardless of any background music


EDIT:
And again it's back to requirements, and once a minimum is reached then it's "good enough". Adding more RAM doesn't provide a "wider soundstage" or any other rubbish

 

[Journey]

I think I must have a really poor Ethernet cable connecting my PC to the internet since some of the comments in this thread seem to be garbled up non-sense. Anyone got a decent recommendation for a quality cable?

 

[str!xt]

Why are you so insecure though?

Insecure enough to edit my post kinda insecure?
I'm terrible, I spout crap given any opportunity to get some kind of validation that I have meaning.I come on these forums to get come clarity from people in the know, people like you, that my exuberant purchases have not all been for nought. Nothing seems to get past you does it Spoffle. You come across as a well educated individual and I would hate to get into an argument with you ^^

The power cable made no difference and you have nothing to substantiate your claim.

I don't really have to though do I ?
round in circles we go........
Do you own a hifi Spoffle, just out of curiosity? Do you have a vested interest in the subject matter? Or are you here with a big bag of spanners?

 

[james.miller]

Its not a strawman as I didn't misrepresented the original argument saying I agree its snake oil and the specs makes no difference after a certain point when just listening to tracks. I went into the other side of the specs to explain when it does make a difference.

I never said you did pottsey It wasnt you who started talking about GPUs, was it?

 

[Pottsey]

I don't disagree, but if you're in a position where you want to stream the highest fidelity music possible and a lack of ram will hinder that, then the simplest and cheapest option is to close some apps to free up some memory.

Why he didn't just say that in normal use the recommended minimum ram for streaming music through his cables is 16GB and a quad core cpu? Why say "more cores/ram means better sound"? Why aren't these minimum requirements stated in the product specs?

Here's a snippet from one of AQ's USB cables: "Is digital audio really just ones and zeros? We don't believe so, and once you've had a chance to listen to Diamond USB, you won't think so either..."
Yes, digital audio is just ones and zeros - they are deliberately trying to interject emotional attachment to digital audio so that subjective opinion can be used to describe the sound.

Just got to the core bit. Straight after the core comment he says Quad core gives you a leg up as it can divide its resources better. Which considering just before this he was talking about uncompressed AIFF files and multiple apps open at once I think is a fair comment. He is not talking about streaming from website or playing MP3 but rather running full uncompressed max quality audio files.

For the USB cable it gets rather complicated. He pointed to an external Engineer doing research into recorded packet jitter and how the Engineer ran multiple tests like opening up a web browser and the analyzer recorded the increase in noise across the USB cable. Very briefly he said some graphics cards in some cases did increase noise with recordable distortion in the packets by an analyzer ran by an engineer. I didn't bother reading the Engineers papers though a link was provided.

This doesn’t justify £1000 cable but it does confirm not to use the really cheap cables which I agree with because A) the cheap cables might not have the bandwidth for full uncompressed audio and B) it seems like some of the really cheap cables do create noise/interference. The reason I don’t use my onboard sound and use a soundcard is for the improved sound with less noise. I am still not convinced by the expensive cable but it does seem like the noise level is provable in the cheap cables and not snake oil. Not how true this is but he mentioned the USB DAC he has does not have error correction when transferring audio data. It seems like the electronical noise going down the USB power channels is being picked up by the USB DAC. He was not talking about a USB drive into a computer rather the link between the DAC and PC.

SSD drive would anyone disagree when multitasking with uncompressed files an SSD impacts sound over a slow mechanical drive that is bandwidth limited? Again I think his comments are fair. One bit I didn’t fully agree with but is half right. He talked about not storing the music on the same drive as the OS because a lot of traffic goes back and forth while multitasking. Storing music on a different drive so it’s on a different bus increases bandwidth and cuts down on interference. I do the same thing for gaming and editing. I have an SSD for the OS and a NVMe for the games and editing for the same reason. If you listing to MP3 files or stream off the internet this would be a waste of time. But he is talking about giant uncompressed max quality AIFF music files and I have to take into account the age of the video so we are not talking modern SSD’s which are must faster then the old generation. So I am going with half right as it depends on the system, multitasking and type of files you are listening to. Also as a further note he says don’t use the USB DAC and the USB hard drive on the same USB BUS due to the heavy load. Having experienced bandwidth problems doing this for other things I agree. Not sure it would be a problem on a modern USB C system but his video predates that and he isn't talking small MP3 files.

 

[Pottsey]

I never said you did pottsey It wasnt you who started talking about GPUs, was it?

Sorry I misunderstood. That was my fault. Also I just watched one of the original videos which the other video was making fun off and apparently some GPU's are causing extra electronical noise which can be be proven and picked up with an engineer using an analyzer. In the conference video I watch it was not about upgrading to a better GPU instead about picking a GPU which doesn't cause interfrence.

Thinking about this its correct. The GPU forum section has over the years a fair few threads with people complaining about the noise level of the GPU both from the fans and rarely but often enough some brands having a high pitched sound under certain loads.

 

[spoffle]

Insecure enough to edit my post kinda insecure?
I'm terrible, I spout crap given any opportunity to get some kind of validation that I have meaning.I come on these forums to get come clarity from people in the know, people like you, that my exuberant purchases have not all been for nought. Nothing seems to get past you does it Spoffle. You come across as a well educated individual and I would hate to get into an argument with you ^^


I don't really have to though do I ?
round in circles we go........
Do you own a hifi Spoffle, just out of curiosity? Do you have a vested interest in the subject matter? Or are you here with a big bag of spanners?

You are a thoroughly unpleasant person. Look at how mad you get because people won't believe your extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence.

All this is is projection so that you can continue happily believing in insane things without any evidence to support your position.

 

[theone8181]

Sorry I misunderstood. That was my fault. Also I just watched one of the original videos which the other video was making fun off and apparently some GPU's are causing extra electronical noise which can be be proven and picked up with an engineer using an analyzer. In the conference video I watch it was not about upgrading to a better GPU instead about picking a GPU which doesn't cause interfrence.

Thinking about this its correct. The GPU forum section has over the years a fair few threads with people complaining about the noise level of the GPU both from the fans and rarely but often enough some brands having a high pitched sound under certain loads.

I seem to remember having a card that suffered from 'coil whine'. You could hear it on loading screens (as the card basically maxed out during to lack of difficulty rendering), now whether it would be picked up down a cable I'm not sure how much was electrical noise. I have found when I donated my old i7 2600k CPU to my work PC, if you have a mega cheap motherboard (as companies often do) it chugs sometimes even though doing excel and word docs shouldn't Max it out. So depends on certain components.

 

[enkoda]

Just got to the core bit. Straight after the core comment he says Quad core gives you a leg up as it can divide its resources better. Which considering just before this he was talking about uncompressed AIFF files and multiple apps open at once I think is a fair comment. He is not talking about streaming from website or playing MP3 but rather running full uncompressed max quality audio files.

For the USB cable it gets rather complicated. He pointed to an external Engineer doing research into recorded packet jitter and how the Engineer ran multiple tests like opening up a web browser and the analyzer recorded the increase in noise across the USB cable. Very briefly he said some graphics cards in some cases did increase noise with recordable distortion in the packets by an analyzer ran by an engineer. I didn't bother reading the Engineers papers though a link was provided.

This doesn’t justify £1000 cable but it does confirm not to use the really cheap cables which I agree with because A) the cheap cables might not have the bandwidth for full uncompressed audio and B) it seems like some of the really cheap cables do create noise/interference. The reason I don’t use my onboard sound and use a soundcard is for the improved sound with less noise. I am still not convinced by the expensive cable but it does seem like the noise level is provable in the cheap cables and not snake oil. Not how true this is but he mentioned the USB DAC he has does not have error correction when transferring audio data. It seems like the electronical noise going down the USB power channels is being picked up by the USB DAC. He was not talking about a USB drive into a computer rather the link between the DAC and PC.

SSD drive would anyone disagree when multitasking with uncompressed files an SSD impacts sound over a slow mechanical drive that is bandwidth limited? Again I think his comments are fair. One bit I didn’t fully agree with but is half right. He talked about not storing the music on the same drive as the OS because a lot of traffic goes back and forth while multitasking. Storing music on a different drive so it’s on a different bus increases bandwidth and cuts down on interference. I do the same thing for gaming and editing. I have an SSD for the OS and a NVMe for the games and editing for the same reason. If you listing to MP3 files or stream off the internet this would be a waste of time. But he is talking about giant uncompressed max quality AIFF music files and I have to take into account the age of the video so we are not talking modern SSD’s which are must faster then the old generation. So I am going with half right as it depends on the system, multitasking and type of files you are listening to. Also as a further note he says don’t use the USB DAC and the USB hard drive on the same USB BUS due to the heavy load. Having experienced bandwidth problems doing this for other things I agree. Not sure it would be a problem on a modern USB C system but his video predates that and he isn't talking small MP3 files.

Some good stuff there which I can't address all in one go but to start with:

An uncompressed 96KHz 24-bit stereo flac file uses about 600KB/s of bandwidth - USB 2.0 will max out at 60MB/s, a mechanical hard drive can manage 100MB/s, so there's masses of headroom already available even before processor power is taken into account. Surely the size of the file is irrelevant when it comes to streaming? Have I missed something obvious here?

Was the brand/price of the tested cable mentioned, as well as all the other components? Without knowing all of this, how can we be sure the test was fair? I'm struggling to understand what scenario would generate enough RF interference high enough to compromise the integrity of data transfer, unless of course audiophiles have a tendency to set up their very expensive equipment on top of particle accelerators or power generators?

And thanks for your time and input on this.

 

[SonicSW20]

An uncompressed 96KHz 24-bit stereo flac file uses about 600KB/s of bandwidth - USB 2.0 will max out at 60MB/s, a mechanical hard drive can manage 100MB/s, so there's masses of headroom already available even before processor power is taken into account. Surely the size of the file is irrelevant when it comes to streaming? Have I missed something obvious here?

You're not missing anything at all. For listening, its totally irrelevant.

I suspect that the self proclaimed "audiophiles" have read information regarding professional audio where you may be recording multiple channels at very high bit depth and sample rate in real time with the lowest buffer size the system can reliably handle - in that situation other devices on the same USB bus may cause a buffer underrun and ruin the recording. This is one of the reasons firewire used to be favoured for audio use. Less of an issue these days though.

 

[wesimmo]

Listening to music takes almost no ram - 8GB is the sensible minimum for multitasking regardless of any background music


EDIT:
And again it's back to requirements, and once a minimum is reached then it's "good enough". Adding more RAM doesn't provide a "wider soundstage" or any other rubbish

This is the key, the curve of performance due to power is very specific.

You have not enough, you have range where it doesn't work quite right, then it works and that's it.

If you under spec anything for the tasks you'll get sub optimal performance, but by definition, there's an optimum.

 

[Pottsey]

Some good stuff there which I can't address all in one go but to start with:

An uncompressed 96KHz 24-bit stereo flac file uses about 600KB/s of bandwidth - USB 2.0 will max out at 60MB/s, a mechanical hard drive can manage 100MB/s, so there's masses of headroom already available even before processor power is taken into account. Surely the size of the file is irrelevant when it comes to streaming? Have I missed something obvious here?

Was the brand/price of the tested cable mentioned, as well as all the other components? Without knowing all of this, how can we be sure the test was fair? I'm struggling to understand what scenario would generate enough RF interference high enough to compromise the integrity of data transfer, unless of course audiophiles have a tendency to set up their very expensive equipment on top of particle accelerators or power generators?

And thanks for your time and input on this.

He didn't go into great detail on components and no brand or price mentioned on USB or GPU. The recommended PC mentioned was a small sized unit called an Intel Zoom, I7 Quad core, 8GB upgraded to 16GB for multitasking. £800. The cable and GPU he didn’t go into detail or recommend anything in the conference I watched. (He did other conferences but I don't really fancy watching 6 hours more). Only a short bit about pick carefully due to interfrence where he pointed to an Engineers research. There was a link on the projector going back to the Engineering work which I never looked at.

I don’t have a USB DAC and while the interfrence seems to be real I don’t know how true it is that the noise can be heard via USB from it. Though I do know the GPU interference is real and can be heard but it is also very rare and only a handful of GPU suffer from that. The USB cable I am taking with a pinch of salt. Just because the interfrence can be measured it doesn't mean humans can hear it. I have no way to confirm its real in that we can hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEztALnHhQg In case you want to watch it yourself and check I am not getting the wrong picture. Around about 16min in for the jitter/noise stuff.

 

[Grim5]

I found the snake oil https://www.headamp.com/products/kimber-kable-axios-copper-headphone-cable?variant=28220606382144

 

[CageyH]

Why would you want to use USB for audio? You can have an inherently noisy signal, apparently.

By the way, I don’t class myself as an audiophile, but I have a reasonable system on which I enjoy my music.
If streaming I use my Z97 Asus Maximus Hero, an i7-6700k with Zalman FX70 cooler. 16Gb ram (because it was a little bit more expensive than 8Gb). I have a passively cooled GTX760, and an Asus Essence STX II sound card. OS is on one SSD, and music on another. It is all fitted in an R5 case. I connect it to my system either using a coax cable from the STX card to my DAC, ot a coup,e of home made RCA cables.

Is it the best thing since sliced bread? Of course not, but for a PC built mostly using parts that were lying around, it sounds pretty good to my ears, and to be honest, that is all that counts.

I personally don’t like buying audio cables, as you pay a lot for the marketing and dealer margin etc. Everybody in the chain makes a bit, so you pay a lot for pretty basic cable. Learn to solder, and you can make some pretty good cables for not a lot of cash outlay.

 

[gailjon]

I found the snake oil https://www.headamp.com/products/kimber-kable-axios-copper-headphone-cable?variant=28220606382144

For all that I don't believe the hype and hyperbole around products like this, if I was a millionaire I would be using things like this just for the sheer, wonderful, ridiculousness of it.

 

[Gray2233]

Why would you want to use USB for audio? You can have an inherently noisy signal, apparently.

I used to run an STX myself, I got rid of it when I upgraded to a USB DAC/AMP setup. Great bit of kit but I wanted something more, and the gaming features weren't necessary for my usage.

Higher end PC based audio tends to connect via USB when there's a DAC involved, if someone is getting a noisy signal from zeroes and ones I don't know what to tell them.

 

[gailjon]

For the 'noisy' USB issues there appears to be a solution!

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/ifi-takes-noise-out-usb-audio

Got to love the second comment - I couldn't agree more with the poster.

 

[CageyH]

I used to run an STX myself, I got rid of it when I upgraded to a USB DAC/AMP setup. Great bit of kit but I wanted something more, and the gaming features weren't necessary for my usage.

Higher end PC based audio tends to connect via USB when there's a DAC involved, if someone is getting a noisy signal from zeroes and ones I don't know what to tell them.

Higher end PC based audio tends to use Reclockers and network players like the SOtM SMS-200ultra. My basic level PC is nowhere near this level of obsessive spending. But as one of the sources is Tidal streaming, the cost vs return would be limited.

I have a DAC that accepts Coax, Usb and optical. My PC for audio is dedicated to audio playback though, as I use a more powerful machine for gaming.

As I said, apparently, running power down the USB can affect the ones and zeros enough for some people to hear a difference. Who am I to question if they can or not?

 

[Gray2233]

Higher end PC based audio tends to use Reclockers and network players like the SOtM SMS-200ultra. My basic level PC is nowhere near this level of obsessive spending. But as one of the sources is Tidal streaming, the cost vs return would be limited.

I have a DAC that accepts Coax, Usb and optical. My PC for audio is dedicated to audio playback though, as I use a more powerful machine for gaming.

As I said, apparently, running power down the USB can affect the ones and zeros enough for some people to hear a difference. Who am I to question if they can or not?

I wont bother going into the audio clock argument as it's another barrel of fish when it comes to the end consumer.

As for noise via USB and whether or not it should be questioned, I find it's important to question most things rather than just agreeably letting people carry on making poorly founded claims. Especially when the unwitting can end up being suckered into these things and end up spending silly money which does nothing but fund charlatans. As long as the USB cable is properly made and of a decent level of quality it should not be a problem, which frankly shouldn't cost more than a tenner. I'd love to see some blind testing in regard to those things, unfortunately people tend to run a mile when offered the chance to put their claims to any sort of test.

I question other highly suspect things too, homeopathy for example, although in the case of audio snake oil at least it doesn't get people killed.

Just to note, I've ran/tested the Aune T1, Woo Audio Fireflies, Schiit Gungir + various AMPS, and a bunch of others, all using a 'premium' (aka it looked nice) standard £10-15 USB cable. Never had any problems whatsoever, the only person I've ever met in person that's claimed a special audiophile USB cable actually made a difference in sound had demonstrably worse hearing than my own. I'm not even joking, we ran some listening tests using his gear at his behest when I told him the two cables sounded identical, he struggled to hear the same range I could.

People will believe whatever they want to believe, especially if that thing somehow makes them feel special, there's a lot of golden ear types out there.

 

[chorse]

I used to be a bit of an audiophile, but I lost 0-100hz hearing after an infection, and stopped caring so much. Who knows what else I'm missing.