It’s a paradox that you need really expensive equipment to hear the faults and errors.
Wow this is just too much. I hadn’t realised that vendors were still actively scamming people with this whole cable shielding gives you better quality zeros and ones. Thanks for the illumination.
To be fair, I’d love to have better quality cables than the ones I have, they do seem a bit cheap, but not at 400 pounds, because exactly the above, the same data still turns up.
I jumped to the end apologies if this has already been said - I better read the rest of the thread as it looks entertaining!
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I trained as a sound engineer, have done live sound and recording in the past and shifted into IT many years ago. In sound engineering they teach you to become extremely pedantic about what is in an audio stream, to train your ears to listen so that you can pick out every individual instrument or noise source and seamlessly traverse the differing sound sources at speed so that you can adjust for the best kind of recording or sound.
I just put my studio headphones on (which for the non-audiophiles amongst us give a nice flat response and are more sensitive to differences). Playing that YouTube clip, I hear no difference between the two examples and fail to see how this could have any impact on the sound quality. Albeit I suspect YouTube isn’t the greatest way to produce a high quality audio stream.
What I notice with listening tests is it’s easy to perceive one as being better due to some trick in the mind which I’ve never really been able to verbalise, but which has been shown before with blind listening tests where people have ‘preferred’ the $10 cable because it sounds better in that moment than the more expensive one. The best way to describe this is as a perception of quality based on what is believed to be better based on subconscious pre-conceived notion of what is coming next. Still, some people I know still insist their ears are better and as a result also know better.
SATA drives communicate at such speed, that if there were an error in the communication, it would have corrected it long before the data was needed by the audio output. I can agree to other parts in the chain having a minimum perceivable difference in quality for perfectionists, but not SATA cables.
Also, you should see how sound engineering is done - even with the training, the source of the music does not have anywhere near the level of pedantic ‘what can you hear’ conversations going on - though, that does happen to a practical level.
I enjoyed the jesting in this thread, but there is no way I’d be buying SATA cables like this, nor the network switch.
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Like watching an old episode of Fawlty Towers: you know exactly what’s coming, but it’s predictably amusing nonetheless 
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This is a bit long-winded, but it might be useful for some. Someone mentioned that properly designed digital cables should sound the same, and I totally agree. The emhazis, however, is on properly designed cables and especially USB cables. I want to recount an experience I had with a cheap of-the- shelve USB cable, which was used to connect a USB hard drive to a digital player. I bought the cheapest possible cable because, well, all digital cables sound the same. My system sounded terrible, I had know idea what was going on. I actually thought my power amp was faulty and almost sent it in for evaluation. I replaced the USB cable with the same cheap cable and nothing changed. This proved that the cable was not faulty. This went on for weeks. Eventually I decided to buy a $124 Wireworld USB cable and it resolved the issue. The difference was dramatic and the sound was restored to the level when I was using a CD player. What surprised me is the fact that it was only used to connect a USB drive for storage purposes, so one would think , minimal impact!. USB cables are a bit more complex as it also has cables for power, so I guess more care should be taken to buy a properly designed cable with regards to USB. I had no idea what was wrong with the cheap made in China USB cable, but I only needed to spend $124 to ensure the cable is properly designed. The point of this post is that a USB cable that was not properly designed, had a massive impact to the point that my system was unlistenable.
Haha. That’s made my day. “Only” $124 
I’m fairly sure that it’s possible to buy a “properly designed” USB cable for a bit less than that
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Agreed. I am sure one can get a properly designed cable for much less, however, look what happened to me when I bought cheap crap.
I’m with you on that one - cheap crap, that clearly isn’t designed to spec’, is never a good idea.
Where digital cables are concerned, I find Amazon Basics perfectly adequate. No better and no worse than much more expensive cables.
I did once buy a cheap, long, USB-A to mini USB-B cable (to connect my Wacom Intuos Pro to the PC which resides in a rack-mount case in my server cabinet) which didn’t work. Turned out it only had a 2-core cable - Vcc and Gnd. No data connection, whatsoever… 
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I must have missed this post.
“The cable is directional and must be installed with arrows facing SATA port on a motherboard.”
Anyone who makes a statement like that is either misinformed or in need of controlled prescription medication.
Drives are read from and written to - data travels both ways, which leads me onto one of their other statements:
“A SATA drive with Operating System (Windows or Linux) on it benefits the most from the cable”
OS drives are written to very heavily which completely undermines their directionality claim…
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Or they know exactly what they’re doing - scamming the gullible by introducing a spurious feature that sounds good to the uniformed (no pun intended).
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I guess I should have said “Anyone who makes a statement like that is misinformed, in need of controlled prescription medication or an out and out liar”
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If you’re going audiophile SATA cable, you’ll be needing an audiophile SSD, sir. This is an M2 SSD, so internal, yet has its own power jack. My favourite quote from an early tester “Initial impressions are positive, this is easy/pleasant to live with as OS boot drive, unlike the Samsung 970 Evo plus NVME.”. I am failing to see how running an external PSU to my internal M2 drive is “easy/pleasant to live with”, but hey.
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No doubt it’s an ‘audiophile’ linear PSU too…
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Bravo.
Truth from the reputable Tom’s Hardware. I noticed they also take a swipe at audiophool network switches.
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Love that description of the differences in sound quality.
TLC mode: It sounds like background music, no features and powerless, everything is flattened, lacks extension and density.
pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry."
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That’s pure #metoo, plain and simple.
I discovered there’s a name for this the other day, but actually I think there are two names. And to be clear, I think all of us suffer from one or more of these at times. But I do think that there is something special about music and our ability to perceive things that aren’t there. It does make me wonder if the best audio upsampler we have available is actually in our heads!
The first one is confirmation bias, I use it here in the context of anyone looking to prove something is something, can search online, in literature or even among social circles and get supporting commentary. The trick is to apply science and prove that it is true until all known competing theories are proven wrong scientifically.
The second one I can’t remember the name of, but it means that you might believe something because those around you believe it and you have no-one else to challenge that thinking so you just accept it as a fact. I find this stuff fascinating.
For example, @Douglas_Henning has a killer example above. He doesn’t say which side of the argument he is on (which is actually really great), but just states his experience as he remembers it. If you’re on the camp that audio cables make a difference, his commentary may confirm this further to you. If you’re not in that camp (like me) you’re left saying OK so there was a faulty cable, that doesn’t mean that a normally functional cable makes better or worse audio quality.
So - even with the cable being called faulty - my brain is asking itself, so is he saying the 1’s and 0’s did not turn up at the other end the same way as they were sent? What does the USB protocol do about faulty data - how long before an error cannot be corrected and what would happen to the sound if it wasn’t able to be corrected?
But hey, if you consider a stereo PCM audio transmission at 44.1kHz / 16 bit, that’s about 10MB of traffic a minute or converting to more common transmission speed format 80Mbit/min or about 1.3Mbps (Megabits per second).
An old (by today’s standards) USB 2 protocol is capable of sending data at a speed of 480Mbps. So unless there is an error right at the beginning of a track, there is plenty of bandwidth available to buffer and work out any errors in the transmission using CRC checks etc - it’s not like the old CD players that had limited buffers and such - we’ve got what is equivalent to a super computer by CD standards, constantly checking and correcting data at lightning speeds and lets face it most of us are using USB 3 of which the slowest version is operating at 5Gbps. This is not looking good for the theory that cables are going to change audio quality - this system is going to be correcting zeros and ones at speeds not even close to being needed to push out audio.
So, having a look at the USB protocol online here of note, is the following:
Types of USB Data Transfers
All communication between a USB host and a USB device is addressed to a specific endpoint on the device. Each device endpoint is a unidirectional receiver or transmitter of data; either specified as a sender or receiver of data from the host.
Each endpoint is different, specified through their bandwidth requirements and the way they transfer data. The four types of USB data transfers include: Control, Isochronous, Interrupt, and Bulk transfers.
Control: Non-periodic transfers. Typically, used for device configuration, commands, and status operation.
Interrupt: This is a transaction that is guaranteed to occur within a certain time interval. The device will specify the time interval at which the host should check the device to see if there is new data. This is used by input devices such as mice and keyboards.
Isochronous: Periodic and continuous transfer for time-sensitive data. There is no error checking or retransmission of the data sent in these packets. This is used for devices that need to reserve bandwidth and have a high tolerance to errors. Examples include multimedia devices for audio and video.
Bulk: General transfer scheme for large amounts of data. This is for contexts where it is more important that the data is transmitted without errors than for the data to arrive in a timely manner. Bulk transfers have the lowest priority. If the bus is busy with other transfers, this transaction may be delayed. The data is guaranteed to arrive without error. If an error is detected in the CRCs, the data will be retransmitted. Examples of this type of transfer are files from a mass storage device or the output from a scanner.
So from this, it could be supposed that if usb devices are using isochronous transfers, it is possible it would prioritise timeliness of packet arrival over quality and not retransmit any errors. Of course, we are now in the land of assumptions because there are a 100 different ways we could be using USB to output audio. If it’s simply file storage, there’s no way we’re going to see loss of data because it has so much bandwidth to burn we’re going to be using the full error correcting bulk method. But if it’s a USB attached audio device, maybe, but it’s a big maybe. We’d have to consider that a) the USB cable isn’t just a cheap cable, it’s a cheap and s-h-i-t-e cable that is so bad and losing so much traffic that lots of the ones and zeros aren’t turning up. And I think this is going to come down to the individual design of that particular device and how that manufacturer implemented its particular communication protocols, driver and so on.
As for the intent of this article, which was a conversation around sata cables and a more recent discussion on USB cables, I think we can refer back to the ‘Bulk’ paragraph above that states ‘The data is guaranteed to arrive without error’ (in other words to arrive exactly as it is stored) - I mean obviously if this didn’t happen the computer industry would have been laughed out of the world as it wouldn’t be possible to rely upon it for anything - having data turn up the same as it is stored is an absolute fundamental here.
So, (my apologies) this is a bit of a flurry of typing - there may be mistakes and I’d be interested if anyone knows more about protocols and such that could shed some further light on the inner workings there, would be fun to learn a bit more, get some feedback from others and see if we can sway anyone’s opinion one way or the other!
Have a great day everyone!
Marshalleq
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No. That is grossly incorrect about CD and CD-R. Additionally, there is no such thing as CD+R. Where are you getting this info?
AJ
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OK you’re right about CD+R - I was confusing DVD+R and DVD-R. Nevertheless, it was still taught to me that CD’s did not have error correction - you can ask the international school of audio engineering where they got that information from - I’ve not bothered to validate it. So the CD+R is just an incorrect anecdote - which doesn’t really matter for the point really.