Would appreciate input on audio interconnects.

[TrevorS]

I'm looking at downsizing my audio cable investment.

I'm satisfied that Blue Jeans Cable makes top flight video cables and their coax digital cable is at least very good. Although I liked the BJC price, I went with AnalysisPlus for Toslink, my confidence was higher.

I'm using BJC 5T00UP 10 AGW speaker cable on my center channels and it's working out fine. I don't know if that's also a good speaker cable for the main channels and music as well as HT, but maybe. Any other suggestions?

Does anyone have any recommendations on modest cost interconnects? I need a pair of good sounding 15ft balanced cables and I'm currently considering BJC 1800F with Neutric XLR's and Signal Analog Two Balanced (I don't see mention of the connector manufacturer). Silver wire doesn't interest me since it generally sounds too bright in my system.

I could also use some single ended interconnects (RCA), and am thinking of the same two suppliers, or perhaps Heartland 89259 with Eichmann Bullets?

Any recommendations or thoughts on this subject?

Thanks -- Trevor

 

[j_garcia]

What is your setup?

10AWG is pretty much overkill for nearly all cases, and the vast majority of systems even 12AWG is more than necessary.

I'm a big fan of BJC, so I would say go with their XLRs, but then I don't have any gear that uses ballanced interconnects either.

 

[TrevorS]

What is your setup?

10AWG is pretty much overkill for nearly all cases, and the vast majority of systems even 12AWG is more than necessary.

I'm a big fan of BJC, so I would say go with their XLRs, but then I don't have any gear that uses ballanced interconnects either.

I went with the 5T00UP speaker cables after reading an Audioholics evaluation strongly recommending them. I agree 12AGW would probably be adequate, but I just took the recommendation as is.

All my new video cable purchases are from BJC. I used to get Tributaries (superb video performance), but I lost my discount connection and they keep getting more pricey (appear to have recently moved to the boutiques). I find the BJC gives me at least similar performance to Tributaries.

My setup is all separate components with upper-end origins. It has the advantage of allowing good performing cables to strut their stuff, and the disadvantage of exposing the flaws of cables that don't do so well (proper system matching obviously being a factor). My current cables are pricey and I would like to be able to unlock the funds tied-up in them, but first I need to identify good performing alternatives.

I spent some time reading posts on AudioAsylum and StereophileForums and I see alternatives in wire and terminations, but I haven't found anything very indicative of how the cables actually perform. I'm hoping to find some guidance as to which cables/terminations actually give the best sound. I'm all for spending way less for good audio cables.

-- Trevor

 

[Hi Ho]

You should have no problem "downgrading" to less costly cables. As long as a cable is properly designed (solid connections and proper shielding) for the application then there will be no difference between cables. When it comes to digital cables there is even less concern. Any 75 OHM coaxial cable will pass a digital signal exactly as one costing hundreds or thousands. The same goes for optical.

 

[mtrycrafts]

I'm looking at downsizing my audio cable investment.

I'm satisfied that Blue Jeans Cable makes top flight video cables and their coax digital cable is at least very good. Although I liked the BJC price, I went with AnalysisPlus for Toslink, my confidence was higher.

I'm using BJC 5T00UP 10 AGW speaker cable on my center channels and it's working out fine. I don't know if that's also a good speaker cable for the main channels and music as well as HT, but maybe. Any other suggestions?

Does anyone have any recommendations on modest cost interconnects? I need a pair of good sounding 15ft balanced cables and I'm currently considering BJC 1800F with Neutric XLR's and Signal Analog Two Balanced (I don't see mention of the connector manufacturer). Silver wire doesn't interest me since it generally sounds too bright in my system.

I could also use some single ended interconnects (RCA), and am thinking of the same two suppliers, or perhaps Heartland 89259 with Eichmann Bullets?

Any recommendations or thoughts on this subject?

Thanks -- Trevor

You should check out monoprice.com cables.
How much did that analysis set you back? I think you payed too much.

 

[TrevorS]

You should check out monoprice.com cables.
How much did that analysis set you back? I think you payed too much.

The AnalysisPlus Toslink cables cost me roughly three times what I would have paid for BJC. My concern was in the area of the optical quality of the terminations -- ie. optimal mating and resulting minimization of reflection. I could find evaluations of the AnalysisPlus, but not of the BJC. Experience tells me that just because a manufacturer does very well with one product line (video in this case), does not mean that their other lines are similarly good.

-- Trevor

PS. I'm not saying BJC Toslink has problems, just that I'm reasonably certain AnalysisPlus Toslink doesn't.

 

[TrevorS]

You should have no problem "downgrading" to less costly cables. As long as a cable is properly designed (solid connections and proper shielding) for the application then there will be no difference between cables. When it comes to digital cables there is even less concern. Any 75 OHM coaxial cable will pass a digital signal exactly as one costing hundreds or thousands. The same goes for optical.

My actual statement was: "I'm looking at downsizing my audio cable investment."

If at all possible, I would prefer not to downgrade the sound. The goal is purely to free-up dollars that are currently locked up in cabling.

I have directly compared different 75 ohm digital coax cables in the past and I've heard dramatic differences in performance. Note that I say dramatic, as in highly non-subtle. Therefore, I know all digital cables aren't created equal. I can easily believe the differences are mostly (if not entirely) in the terminations, but differences there are. (Please understand, this is not a point I'm willing to argue -- the arguments never resolve anything and can go on indefinitely.)

However, my primary focus at this point are analog cables, not digital.

Thanks -- Trevor

PS. If my experience had been that all analog cables sound the same, I would still be using the Monster Reference A1's and Monster Cable that were my very first attempt at cable upgrades -- and that goes back awhile .

 

[mtrycrafts]

The AnalysisPlus Toslink cables cost me roughly three times what I would have paid for BJC. My concern was in the area of the optical quality of the terminations -- ie. optimal mating and resulting minimization of reflection. I could find evaluations of the AnalysisPlus, but not of the BJC. Experience tells me that just because a manufacturer does very well with one product line (video in this case), does not mean that their other lines are similarly good.

-- Trevor

PS. I'm not saying BJC Toslink has problems, just that I'm reasonably certain AnalysisPlus Toslink doesn't.

Well, at 3X you are buying piece of mind, nothing more, nothing less.

The optical is either working or it is not, no in-between about it.
As to your other post on 75ohm coax, unless you have huge interference issues, they are all the same, period.

 

[Jack Hammer]

I'm curious about optical (toslink) cables...

...I've read in other threads that many peoples opinions on toslink cables is that they are all the same because they only transmit 1's and 0's and those are pretty hard to mess up. Further that any claim to improved sound quality is snake oil and it is nearly impossible (my own summarization) for there to be any difference.

[FLAMEJACKET ON]
It occured to me the other day that there could potentially be a difference. The cables only have to transmit 1's & 0's, but what happens if the end of the cables, where the light goes into and out of the cable, aren't as well polished? I mean if they are blurred. Wouldn't that potentially effect the ability of a clear number to be read on the other end of the cable? Also, if inferior material is used to manufacture the light transmitting cable itself (fiber optic material), couldn't it possibly effect the 'clarity' of the signal being passed? What does the reciever do when it gets an unclear signal? How does it know if it was originally intended to be a 1 or a 0? [/FLAMEJACKET OFF]

Guys, I'm just asking, and legitimately curious. So to the cable conspiracy fanatics out there, either contribute something useful or nothing at all.

Jack

 

[porziob]

"There could be a potential difference". There could be aliens in UFOs. There is NOT a subtle difference between POSSIBLE & PROBABLE.

 

[tejax]

Jack Hammer is right. One of the biggest myths about digital connections is the "all or nothing" theory. This is simply untrue. The protocol even may be designed in such a way that a miss bit could cause a major problem, promoting the "nothing" at the other end, but that doesn't happen at the transmission level, and does not occur in most digital protocols, anyway.

I'll give you an example that happened to me. Had two dvd players, both connected to a denon avr 3805, both via optical toslink. Both cables exactly the same (model, brand, length), running the same path, similar bending. Now, inserted an HDCD (van halen-1984) on one, the denon detected HDCD (showed on the screen). Inserted on the other, the denon didn't detected it as HDCD. In fact, it detected it as a regular "PCM digital" and started playing it normally (without hdcd decoding however).

In this case we're not talking about the cables "per se" (they were equal), but about the lossy characteristics of digital connections. The first player had a better electrical-to-optical circuit, a stronger led, or something else, that made the transmission to be less faulty than the second. On the second we all have to agree that bits were loss during the transmission, however not enough to cause a total failure, as the denon still played the pcm stream it was getting.

 

[MDS]

You are correct that digital is not necessarily 'all or nothing' as there are things that can go wrong, BUT there is no possible way that lost bits will cause the dvd player or receiver to not recognize that the disc is HDCD encoded. An HDCD is PCM just like a regular CD; the difference is the way the bits are encoded on the disc.

 

[tejax]

This is a quote from wikipedia page on HDCD.

HDCD encoding places a control signal in the least significant bit of the 16-bit Red Book audio samples (a technique known as in-band signaling). The HDCD decoder in the consumer's CD player, if present, responds to the signal. If no decoder is present, the disc will be played as a regular CD.

It seems to me that failing the transmission of some bits would cause the receiver to think it was getting a regular pcm stream. On the other case, as those bits went ok thru the channel, the receiver activated the hdcd decoder.

 

[Hi Ho]

It occured to me the other day that there could potentially be a difference. The cables only have to transmit 1's & 0's, but what happens if the end of the cables, where the light goes into and out of the cable, aren't as well polished? I mean if they are blurred. Wouldn't that potentially effect the ability of a clear number to be read on the other end of the cable?

All an optical cable transmists are pulses of light. It's not as if the optical receiver is tryint to read actual graphical represtentations of 1's and 0's. It either senses the pulse of light or it doesn't. A "blurry" connection doesn't mean anything. Obstruction by a foreign material or a break in the cable can cause problems.

 

[MDS]

HDCD

This is the key statement from the Wikipedia article: High Definition Compatible Digital, or HDCD (also known as High Definition Compact Disc) is a patented encode-decode process.

There is very limited technical info on how it is actually encoded, so I can only guess. It is an encoding of the data and when the player identifies that encoding, the decoder no longer interprets the data stream as a sequence of 16 bit samples. The idea behind HDCD is that you can encode 20 bit samples using only 16 bits and that naturally requires some kind of encoding scheme.

If it uses the least significant bit as part of the encoding scheme then what the encoder probably does is use the least significant bit of the first N samples to build up a magic number that means the data is HDCD encoded. I highly doubt the magic number is only 16 bits (probably much longer) but as an example, lets say it is - the magic number could be 1010101010101010. It would read 16 samples and collect the least significant bit from each to form a 16 bit word and then compare it to the magic number. If it matches, then it knows the data is HDCD encoded.

If it is HDCD encoded, then the decoder will collect 20 bits at a time instead of 16 for each sample value and send that 20 bit sample to the DAC. That is why you need a 24 bit sound card (because obviously a 16 bit card can only output 16 bit samples).

If the player or receiver is not HDCD enabled then it won't even try to identify the stream as being HDCD encoded and will still output 16 bit samples. It will still sound normal because changing the least significant bit of a few samples is not going to change the data much at all - in fact it will change the sample value by 1 - if the original sample had a value of 256 (which would have an LSB of zero), changing the LSB to 1 will change the sample value to 257 - entirely inaudible.

In order for a cable to affect that it would have to magically drop every LSB of every word that is part of the identifier that specifies it is HDCD encoded and being that not every single sample has had its LSB changed by the encoder (the decoder would have to read the entire disc to identify it as an HDCD before it could begin playing if that were the case), the probability that it loses only the LSB of every single sample is exactly ZERO.

I'm sure the issue is that the player that reads the disc as simple 16 bit PCM is not HDCD enabled.

 

[brushro]

Speaker interconnects

I have 3 pair of Synergistic Research's luminessance interconnects that I'm trying to clear out for $50.00/Pr...they are only 1.5 mtr though

 

[tejax]

None of the players are HDCD ware. The only hardware that understands HDCD on that setup is the Denon. So the cd/dvd player reads 16 bits from the CD and sends it to the denon. The cd/dvd player reads that CD just as would read a regular CD. What matters is that it will send the two samples of 16 bits 44100 times per second thru optical link.

Now enter the receiver, HDCD enabled. It checks some magic signatures and whatever else more, if detected HDCD, activates the decoder. If doesn't detect, it will process the 16 bits samples as if it were just a regular cd pcm stream (2 channel, 16 bits, 44.1khz).

The information sent by the first player was correctly enough for the receiver being able to detect the stream as HDCD.
The information sent by the second player was faulty enought for the receiver NOT being able to detect the stream as HDCD. It was not a failure on one bit per sample, that doesn't make any sense. It was a fault on the header. My hunch is that the faulty player (actually a samsung hd745, to be more specific) sents weak pulse lights thru the line that causes random bit losses. Those but losses were enough to break the HDCD signature, whatever that is. After that, it just a regular CD playing, with eventually some bit losses, which one will not detect most of the time.

How a regular 16@44.1khz information can simultaneously be interpreted as a 20@44.1khz or 15@44.1 is the magic of HDCD which only a few people know how, but that's kind of irrelevant to this case. A "blind" hardware just sent 16 bits down the pipe.

EDIT: actually this might be caused previously to the bit sending process. It could be the samsung drive to get more errors from the disc. Independently of where the problem was, the important is that on an all digital process (fetch data from disc, pulse encode it and so on) there can be parcial faults, as was in this case.

 

[MDS]

I tried to illustrate how an encoding scheme can work to show that your theory that the signal is 'weak' or whatever else you want to ascribe to the problem cannot be the case. There is no possible way that the optical interface - whether the cable itself, the transmitter LED, or the receiving LED - can selectively drop only the few important bits to make the stream unrecognizable as an HDCD encoded stream of bits.

It's not magic, it's data encoding and there are umpteen schemes for encoding data but I think this discussion is way beyond the original topic of optical interconnects so I'll just leave it alone. You might be surprised to learn that 1s and 0's cannot be sent over a wire or optical cable as a 1 or a 0 - that requires, you guessed it, an encoding scheme.

 

[tejax]

I tried to illustrate how an encoding scheme can work to show that your theory that the signal is 'weak' or whatever else you want to ascribe to the problem cannot be the case. There is no possible way that the optical interface - whether the cable itself, the transmitter LED, or the receiving LED - can selectively drop only the few important bits to make the stream unrecognizable as an HDCD encoded stream of bits.

Sorry but you don't stand correct with your own illustration. On the first part of it you have said that there should be same magic number identifying the stream as hdcd. If that magic doesn't match on the receiver part, the stream will not be identified as hdcd and treated as plain cd audio, right? Where "loses only the LSB of every single sample" has to do with it, then?

But you're right. This has evolved to what kind of failure can exist on a digital link, which was not the spirit of the original poster. I'm sorry for that.

 

[MDS]

Start another thread if you want to discuss anything related to computer science. Perhaps you don't have the same background as I and didn't quite follow the explanation. That's ok.

The Wikipedia article cited said that the info is encoded in the LSB and since nobody has the exact details of how it is done, I offered one possibility. If the signature/magic number/id/whatever that identifies the stream as HDCD encoded uses the LSB in one or many of the actual audio samples, the cable or optical interface would have to drop ONLY THOSE BITS to destroy the encoding and that is what I am getting at. The possibility of that is exactly ZERO. For one thing the interface sees nothing but a stream of bits - it has no idea how it is encoded - just as the coax or optical cable has no idea that it is passing bits that are encoded as PCM/DD/DTS/whatever.