I’m looking for something to look nice but also the “good quality” factor comes into play as I don’t want to buy something that might damage any of my equipment. Audioquest is really top quality but too expensive for the gear I’ll be pairing it with and also only available through Amazon US… 
But that would be a top choice of course.
Snake oil at its finest right there. 
Laughable, the only reason switching between 2 usb cables would make any sound improvements would be if one of the cable was defective…
Most of us are adults here and we should be able to have a real honest discussion about something like this. I just would like to know. Is it bullshit or is there really something to it. I don’t want to spend the money to upgrade to a carbon cable if there will be no audible advantage, but if there is, I’m open to the idea. It also all comes down to a lot of other factors, but with my equipment and how much time and effort I put into critically listening, maybe it would be worth it?
Basically signaling for USB works in a very similar way to other data signaling. You have data lines that can either be in a low power state off/0 and high power state on/1. There is no other information sent just on and off. (USB 3.0 or later adds in full duplex signaling which is a little different but I think all audio gear is 2.0 spec)
The issues do arise when interference cuses a value to be too high of low power and too low for high power or for a resonance/crosstalk to occur where a state is sent that should not have been sent. Proper shielding should fix all of this, but with cheep enough resistors and other things you can still have crappy cables which lose packets.
Oh boy, i think the Pandora’s box is now open!
Mainly just a different color but good quality – especially something that would not damage anything.
Yes, it’s usb c 2.0 so basically anything simple would do fine.
I’ll get in touch with Rikudou’s suggesting and see if they have anything usb c or if they’re able to do that.
I rather buy those 600 usd penon cables instead of the scam that is usb cables…
Please do not waste your money like that…
I fully agree, it is just that in my experience that almost never happens.
My 2 cents about this subject: any digital cable will either work or not work, there is no middle ground and certainly digital cables cannot change the resulting analog sound.
II was convinced by a friend to spend money in expensive HDMI and USB cables back in the day, there was ZERO difference…
I spent more money on the Audioquest because I was setting out to buy a good USB cable at a specific length specifically for my DAC. I asked myself, since I know this connection is very important that I knew I should have something good/decent. I didn’t want to skimp on it and just use anything. That’s a very important part of the chain and just wanted a quality cable, but I didn’t honestly think the quality really would or could change the sound since it’s transferring no analog audio.
If they don’t I have a few companies I used to go with when I was making custom mechanical keyboards that should also do fine especially if you want fancy loops or other things like that. Though type C to type C was not common when I was doing that so not sure if they do that… no reason they couldn’t just a different soldered end.
That reminds me of reading that review of the Oriolus Isabellae and desiring to buy it immediately. The review was almost poetic and implied that if I had the Isabellae it would be almost summit fi. lol
Then I read that other review from precog and seemed really stupid to pay 600 usd for that single dd iem. As we discussed in Discord I would probably be paying for the Oriolus branding only.
That’s what I thought but I do not have the hands on experience. I think Passion for Sound is a nice guy and I don’t think he’d be making this stuff up, but I may very well be having the wool pulled over my eyes.
I have to admit, I want to try the carbon just to find out the truth.
As you said, snake oil at its finest.
That’s for sure and I totally agree. If I was assembling the same system as yours I would probably do the same but as I decided for something much smaller / credit card sized / one cable setup / simpler / and cheaper a cable like Audioquest would be too much and even too thick for the Tone 2 Pro.
Placebo as always.
Gonna sleep now, have fun lol.
On to more important news, my spinfit CP155 and Epro horn tips arrived just now.
Don’t know if it helps right now or not, but in the comments of Passion for Sound’s video GoldenSound said that he was working on a similar test. Of course, no idea on a time-frame for for when his video on the subject will be out. Here’s the comment he left on Lachlan’s video:
GoldenSound
Great video!
I’ve actually been working on a very similar video myself, and wanted to make a couple constructive comments on the methodology.
The main thing is that audacity due to how it handles alignment isn’t a particularly ideal software for this. I initially tried using it, but even in control tests (where playback was done multiple times with all hardware the same, to check if variances occurred) there was significant variation. If using high sample rate this is less of an issue, but with 44.1khz content its quite important. Looking at some information on fourier transform you can see how visualisation of the samples alone without proper interpolation can often greatly mis-represent the actual waveform recorded.
I switched to DeltaWave, which is a tool designed specifically for digital audio comparisons. It has a few advantages including proper sub-sample alignment down to 1/1000th of a sample. As well as correction for long term clock drift and DC offset and gain offset (which is especially important when using an ADC with an analog pot like the focusrite). This allowed me to get MUCH more consistent results as well as in-depth views of spectrogram and null depth.
Clock drift is also a good reason to use a shorter piece of music instead of a longer one. With transients in particular, even the tiniest amount of clock drift or jitter in either the source or receiving ADC can show a difference in the compared/nulled result when actually it would not be there if long term clock drift was corrected. (In my testing for an upcoming video demonstrating DAC differences, even very high end dacs with low jitter, and additionally chord dacs specifically, can exhibit more than enough clock drift to throw off a null test after only 5-10sec)
Additionally, it would be very important to include a control test. Because if using your testing methodology, the same usb cable recorded twice, had variations as well, then that gives reason to believe that the differences shown might be due to other factors or run to run variation, rather than the USB cable
