digital is digital…but cheap is cheap, and ludicrously expensive is…well, ludicrous.
what do you buy that’s within the balance of being reasonable?
Cheapest Audioquest. Because it’s the cheapest and the build quality is pretty much guaranteed. Oh, it also looks nicer than a generic cable.
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Also the Pangea Premier USB is pretty solid imo, nice looking and feeling for the price
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That’s what I got for my Office set up dac
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do they have a SuperSpeed option? Zen DAC is SuperSpeed…surprised me. makes me suspect that’s why USB powered operation can be so noisy, cause it’s not getting enough power from the PC.
I use amazon bsics cables, higher quality and more expensiev than a prime cables cable in terms of feel adnd materials. but not as stiff as a monoprice cable
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About $20…Schitt sells usb cable made by straighwire…all u need…
the $60 in freight to Canada kills that for me. 
That really sucks…there has to be another way?
Yeah, Schitt needs to get better at international shipping. They want 82 USD to ship to Mexico via fedex while Geshelli only charged me 25 USD for the same.
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For USB powered devices, I can understand the quality makes a difference since the signal is analog.
But USB for sending digital songs? How could that make a difference.
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Because a digital signal is sent the same as an analog - with a voltage. The voltage needs to hit a certain threshold to be considered a 1. If it doesn’t, it’s considered a 0. This is a non-issue for devices that talk to each other because the receiver can signal the sender and say “hey the last packet you sent is corrupt - send it again”. With an audio signal timing is critical so there’s no talking back and forth and resending of info. So if packets of info are bad they just get dropped. Weather this is audible is debatable. But you can think of a super extreme example as producing sound like a skipping CD.
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I use this after seeing it highly recommended In Stereophile and also by Ana[dia]log.
It’s half the price in Italy although it’s a Japanese brand. There are three class levels, this is the middle one.
So in Amazon Italia :
Oyaide NEO class S: €62
Oyaide NEO class A: €34
Oyaide NEO class B: €33
The bargain is Class A and that’s the one recommended in Stereophile. I have no complaints but I don’t know if I can hear differences in USB cables. I just went on trust.
I can hear differences on headphone cables however so I’m skeptical of the skepticism concerning upgrading cables.
Yup. And to make that clearly distinct, devices use what is refered to as a Schmitt Trigger.
Easy test to see if a USB cable is good:
Copy a large file to/from an external harddrive via the cable you want to test and compare the R/W speed to a “known good” cable. When your test cable runs lower speeds, the cable is bad/out of spec.
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in this case, it does both power and data transmission.
what is the dif between A, B and S?
also, to reiterate…I need a USB 3.0 SuperSpeed cable. so a Type A connector on one and a special variant of the Type B. looks like this:
I’m pretty sure it’s just Oyaide’s own class designation. Here’s an excerpt of the review I read that explains the differences:
“The black-jacketed Class A model incorporates gold-plated connectors and high-purity copper conductors, though the specific copper formulation has been changed recently, and different suppliers still carry overlapping stock, depending on length. I have one of each, and thus far cannot differentiate between the two by listening.
The less expensive Class B model sports a garish neon-green jacket, and silver-plated copper conductors. The more expensive Class S model is fitted with a white jacket over substantially thicker copper conductors of the same formulation used in the Class A cable, but terminated with platinum- and rhodium-plated connectors.”
I made a mistake with the reference. It was from a site called “The Absolute Sound”:
I’ve used Normal type B connectors in slots made for the special type B variant you illustrated and it works just the same as far as I can see (hear?). I thought it was an issue when I first used the Oyaide NEO USB cable with my ifi Zen dac but it didn’t seem to matter at all.