$1,250 Diamond-Branded Ethernet Cables Lure Audiophiles With Silver and Carbon

Headline correction "Lure Gulible (or idiots)". Your choice of words. Not sure what clown would spend that much on a cable.

When will people learn.. The only reason a cable might seem to improve audio is if the cable you had prior was bad. Aka poor quality materials, bad shielding, worn connector, etc..

On the bright side, they're never going to sell one.

Obvious. The 1's and 0's need proper cushioning upon transfer.

In a word...NUTS!!

As hardcore audiophile and occasional musician, I am often loured into reading articles like this to see what is up. I often have to fall back on reason using my engineering skills and checking the intersection of marketing hype with true expectations, and the hype very very rarely makes correct sense. Often the marketing boils down to marketing claims that can be held up in court.

Yes, court. :) The major technical claim here sounds like they are claiming that there would be reduced Ethernet packet loss.

Just recently, I had a Windows system drive image that copied badly and had to re-copy it. Even the tried and true Ethernet CRC checks occasionally fail and you get data corruption. In my rather large SOHO network, I have gotten errors like 1 in 10^18 bits (better that a HDD), and worse on WiFi. So when sending critical file copies, I use tools like Goodsync and Teracopy to verify the final written data, and they both do catch errors. Teracopy is great, but Goodsync has gotten too expensive for the average user and they went to a subscription model (boo).

The causes of a bad network transfer are many, so don't think of it as simple: bad cables, bad data switches, dirty RJ45 connectors, WiFi errors, local power glitches and outages occurring (think: UPS transfers), solar flares, cosmic rays, local lightning strikes, and other transient activities.

So these guys with their cable are technically correct. I would trust that they can prove that they reduce bad data packets from getting through. Without their products on a continuous audio feed, you probably can get once every month a data glitch that results in an audio fart. Someone with OCD will find that annoying and want to buy their cable to fix it. If it makes the buyer happy, I am all for our capitalistic economy.

Note that in the music world, there are tons of existing products that are "over the top" now such as using Teflon capacitors, ultra low THD amps, never using Class D amps, and horror of horrors, never listening to MP3 files (ah, even high bit rate MP3s). The last one really makes me laugh because of all of the blind studies that show nobody on the planet can hear the difference in 320kbps MP3s. There are literally hundreds of proper scientific studies that show nobody can hear a difference between a 320kbps MP3 and CD.

And another note: 300 years ago diamonds where considered a useless, colorless rock that nobody wants. Especially since they tend to have no color. So 300 years later and clever marketing strategies, we pay incredible amounts for diamond jewelry. And it is expected, too. Not a lot different from the pet rock product a few decades ago. :)

pointa2b said:

Ethernet frames have cyclic redundancy checks built into them which detect corrupt data, so how is this at all needed? 🤡

CRC doesn't recover errors, it just tells the ethernet MAC that the frame is bad and should be discarded, then the upper layer protocol needs to figure out that the packet got lost and re-send that data. As long as you don't have packet loss due to CRC errors, then no amount of blowing smoke up your ass with fancy/fancier cables will make ethernet audio any better or worse than it already is.