{"id":2675,"date":"2010-11-24T22:52:40","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T12:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=2675"},"modified":"2010-11-24T22:52:40","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T12:52:40","slug":"appalling-audiophile-usb-cables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=2675","title":{"rendered":"Appalling: ‘audiophile’ USB cables"},"content":{"rendered":"

The gains in low-end body and punch, midrange spaciousness and detail, and high-end smoothness alone are significant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So sayeth What Hi-Fi<\/a>. Apparently if you spend 50 UK pounds on the Wireworld<\/a> Ultraviolet USB cable (I’m assuming one metre), that’s the improvement you will experience.<\/p>\n

Seriously, what a load of crap!<\/p>\n

What gets me about this kind of thing isn’t the vendors. As it happens, I don’t know whether Wireworld are delusional or fraudulent. Just as I don’t know the truth about the vendors of the Power Balance Bracelet<\/a>. I do know that despite the ‘significant’ improvements in those airy-fairy subjective claims of spaciousness and body and detail, Wireworld have come up with two more cables. These ones actually use a ‘DNA Helix conductor layout’ that must obviously be better than than just about anything. After all, aren’t we made of DNA. Isn’t our frequency 7.83Hz (as claimed by Power Balance)?<\/p>\n

And the prices make it impossible that they could be anything other than better. 249 UK pounds for the cheapie, and 499 for the pricey<\/a>. Remember, these are one metre long USB cables, the main purpose of which is to carry, mostly, digital audio (packaged into USB format serial data) of CD-ish densities. (Or less. Did they do their listening tests with MP3 perhaps?)<\/p>\n

As it happens, a while back I demonstrated that<\/a> 44 metres of crappy audio cables, roughly joined together, could comfortably (almost) carry 3.5x CD capacity.<\/p>\n

Neither do I blame the customers, at least in terms of regarding them with moral opprobrium. I have myself been swayed, momentarily, from time to time, by the purveyors of this kind of plastic and wire snake oil<\/a>. If you’re a decent human being who generally likes people, the sheer conviction displayed<\/a> by some adherents of this weird faith can be quite persuasive.<\/p>\n

For me it is only ‘momentarily’ because I’ve learnt some stuff about myself. I know for a fact that I am very gullible in the face of a well-acted lie. I learnt that when I was a young policeman and tended to believe what the crims would tell me, until the senior policeman would thump the interview table, and they’d tell the truth. I learnt to follow the logic and evidence, not my sense of whether someone was truthful or not.<\/p>\n

Who I do blame are the writers at What Hi-Fi, and any other writers who go along with this crap. They are being paid to deliver a service to the readers, and they are allowing themselves to be fooled by their own misconceptions, and thereby misleading their readers.<\/p>\n

If they find themselves able to claim that a friggin’ USB cable can ‘significantly’ improve sound quality, then I would suggest that you cannot trust their views on how an amplifier sounds, how a CD player sounds. Indeed, how a loudspeaker sounds! Their opinions are worthless.<\/p>\n

If I am wrong about this, then the writers at What Hi-Fi, or some others, can easily prove me so, and earn themselves a stack of money in the process. Just take Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge<\/a>. He has previously permitted analogue cable devotees to start the process<\/a>. But they’ve pulled out before getting very far.<\/p>\n

So, come on. Prove me wrong! Prove you aren’t being paid good money by your magazines to simply spread your delusions about what you’re hearing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The gains in low-end body and punch, midrange spaciousness and detail, and high-end smoothness alone are significant. So sayeth What Hi-Fi. Apparently if you spend 50 UK pounds on the Wireworld Ultraviolet USB cable (I’m assuming one metre), that’s the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,23,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2675"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}