Is that an optical cable with gold plating to improve the electrical connection?
It’s called SCIENCE sweaty
I would ask how you know that guy sweats a lot, but then I saw his username.
Fair enough.
It’s a joke, Noodle isn’t actually calling Enigma sweaty but ironically using it instead of “sweetie”
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Yes.
It’s also for digital signals, so interference doesn’t matter (up to the point it stops everything).
But hey, it also has a silver ABS grip.
That’s so lame. They should have gone with gold HDPE.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I would think it’s to resist corrosion, but there are plenty of cheaper metals to plate with that don’t corrode, so even that’s a stretch.
Or, you know, plastic.
Regular toslink is just plastic
That’s what I was thinking, it’s not even a glass fiber-optic. Works fine for audio though and lasers are cool, so it all balances out
Edit: I am aware that mostly anything works good for a digital signal.
Toslink is not a laser just a red LED.
Let me dream
Well the good news is that Toslink can carry “pew pew” noises with high fidelity.
If you wanted to make a high quality plug, you’d use a stainless steel guide. It has to be steel because it’s elastically deformed during insertion, and any plating will be scratched with enough use.
Most plugs don’t work that way, but this one model does.
Umm, they are already using plastic, don’t you see the silver ABS part??? (Jk)
I once had a Best Buy sales person tell me “the improved shielding helps with magnetism”. I stared at him for a sec and said “if there is enough magnetism in my house to bend light, how my stereo sound really won’t be one of my main concerns”
But how many people do you think he used that line on and it sealed the deal?
Given the results of the 2016 and 2024 elections in the United States? Way way WAY too many!
It’s for those occasions when there’s a black hole passing through your house. Gotta be prepared.
I used to sell TVs for Best Buy back in the day. The Video Department manager, my boss, set up a display side by side to show the difference between $40 Monster cables and the normal cables that came with a DVD player.
When there was no noticable difference, he went into the TV settings and adjusted the settings for the normal cables to make the picture look like shit. Not all customers are that gullible though, so usually one of the more savvy ones would fix the settings. So my boss would have to go in and fuck the settings up again once or twice a shift.
This is for-profit deception AKA fraud.
Does this legally qualify as fraud?
If this kind of thing were legally actionable, all salesmen would be imprisoned.
Hey man, you realize everytime you turn on your stereo your couch starts sliding towards it?
My favorite story along these lines…
Someone compared Monster cables to un-bent coat hangers.
https://gizmodo.com/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger-363154
“Seven songs were played while the group was blindfolded and the cables swapped back and forth. Not only “after 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire,” but no one knew a coat hanger was used in the first place.”
To be fair, it was 4 coat hangers. The Monster cable was therefore outnumbered.
That’s a classic and I am glad it see it passed around again. The best part is the people that start delving into the snake oil absurdity that is “audiophile cables” before, you know, getting better actual speakers/headphones. Like for fucks sake, your $200 fancy cable isn’t going to make your bullshit bargain bookshelf speaker into the voice of god. Just get some half way decent equipment and listen to your actual music.
Yup, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. The worst instance I saw was someone posting about an intermittent buzz in their system. Multiple people were recommending a full rebuild, (which would cost thousands of dollars). From what they described, it was pretty obvious that OP just needed a ~10¢ ferrite bead on a power cable, to make it stop acting as an antenna.
I was like “okay, you could try rebuilding your entire system like everyone else is suggesting… But maybe start with a ferrite bead. Here is a link for a multipack on Amazon. Worst case scenario, you’re only out like $5. And even if it doesn’t fix this specific case, the multipack is handy to have around anyways, because manufacturers often cheap out and skip adding them when their devices really do need them.” Like three days later, I got a “holy shit this actually worked. You just saved me thousands of dollars (and a ton of time) on a complete rebuild.”
Rebadge them with a fancy name and sell them for $20 to the gullible. 😉 “Toroid Choke Core”.
Sell gold electroplated ones with “extra EM protection” for £150
I’m curious about other cases where ferrites are actually useful. I have done some access point installations where I was required to loop a patch cable through a ferrite for each. The majority of APs I install don’t get this treatment. Is it bullshit? I assumed it was, but of course I used them anyway.
Was this in a radio station (or was someone nearby acting as a radio operator, like a police station or dispatch center), by chance? Or maybe in a lab setting where they may have gear that is affected by interference? They tend to be picky about RF interference, and Ethernet can be fairly noisy on certain RF bands. In that case, the ferrite bead was likely to do the exact opposite; They wanted to stop the Ethernet cables from acting as an antenna and broadcasting RF interference.
Yes, all the ones I’ve installed that required ferrites were in hospitals or clinics.
Classic issue and I am a bit shocked they hadn’t run into it before, I had figured that out when i was a teen with my first stereo setup. I am also not surprised at all that they were recommended to fully rebuild lmao
I have friends that are hardcore record collectors of obscure 70s punk, power pop, glam, etc. They have Marantz receivers and top of the line turntables, setups that approach like 10 grand. Then they listen to some of the most poorly recorded, cheaply pressed vinyl you can imagine.
Um you mean greatest music ever made vinyl SIR. The hiss and pop is part of the experience!
Seriously though, I love old punk records, especially when you can find self pressed shit from the 70s. Yea the quality sucks but god damn I’d rather hear that than overproduced, built by focus group crap today /rant
Makes sense, I like vinyls for the deliberate retro experience of putting on the record and listening, but I have never agreed that they actually sound better. When CDs became mainstream I was personally thrilled.
I admit there’s a part of me that wants a custom turntable, but you know what? I spent enough on what I’ve got. The whole system was just a few hundred bucks, and it sounds, plays, and looks perfectly fine for me. My ears ain’t calibrated. I’ll never spend that much on an audio system. I’ll just keep sinking stupid money into records.
I should stop.
Installing cable TV at a man’s house, ripped his Monster coax connector off. He was appalled! (I was appalled!) Showed him what I was replacing it with. Parts guide.
“The shield is quad-woven steel. Yours was 1x of angel hair copper. The dielectric is solid, not a noodle. See? (bendy, bendy) Foil shield? Uh, did yours have one? Oh, I see the shredded bit right there!”
Bent the center conductor on his Monster cable with my pinky. “Try that with mine.” Stopped him before he hypodermic-needled himself.
tl;dr: Whatever the cable guy cuts for you is miles above Monster grade.
It’s like Yeti gear. “So you paid $35 for a cup that’s simply a vacuum sealed canister? I got a 6-pack off Amazon for $25. Cute colors too!”
$35 is generous
Been 15-years ago, but I bet an audiophile coworker, who had a physics degree, he couldn’t tell the difference in a coat hanger and proper wires.
“Well, yeah, but, bla, bla, bla…”
Now I wish I could shove that article up his butt! 😈
But do coat hangers hold up to repeated use ?
Those 128kbps are going to be well delivered, that’s for sure.
FWIW toslink supports up to 125mbps theoretically
Much lower in practice of course, but it’s a bit better than 128k
Yeah but my mp3’s from Kazaa are all 128. I want to hear them perfectly as the original ripper intended without distortion from the cables. The gold connector adds warmth to the sound.
now that’s a name i haven’t heard in a while
I preferred Gnutella.
Edonkey (also for 9 second 240p porn videos called 1.mpeg)
What about BearShare?
Overnet. Or Shareaza.
I wondered why the PS5 didn’t have optical out when the PS3 did, then thinking back on it, I probably never owned content/speakers that were good enough to really tell the difference. I had routed the PS3 audio to a receiver with 5.1 surround, and video to a projector via HDMI. Then just played media from an external/had a dual boot to yellowdog Linux at the time. Was fun for young me, hell the projector was probably only 720p at the time
They’re going to look damn good getting where they’re going.
ABS Silver Shell
silver-colored plastic
It’s actually anti-lock breaking system, super high end; not many cables have it
Same bullshit with guns.
“Hi-tech polymer slide, boolshit, boolshit, boolshit…”
It’s fair-quality plastic, painted silver. My Smith & Wesson EZ is wearing off. :(
So regardless of the fact that it’s about an optical connector here, and hence completely nonsensical, gold is actually a worse conductor of electricity than copper or silver. The point of gold plated connectors is not so much to improve the immediate audio quality, but to prevent oxidation of the connector over time, which can degrade quality and lead to bad contact. Gold is a noble metal, so doesn’t oxidize. I would think most audiophiles know this?
I used to have to replace the cable of my electric guitar every few years because the sound would get crackly or drop out intermittently, I eventually got one with gold plated 6.35mm plug and I’m still using that same cable 15 years later.
You are correct; the point of gold plated contacts is anti-corrosion and long service life not for absolute highest conductivity.
I’m a ham radio operator; I have some silver-plated antenna connectors, because antenna feedlines are dealing with extremely weak signals on receive, so any loss you can eliminate in the connector the better. Problem is they corrode to hell everywhere they aren’t tightly screwed together. For consumer AV equipment the signals are basically never weak enough to bother with that.
I would think most audiophiles know this?
They’re not marketing to audiophiles. They’re marketing to dudes and dads. They aren’t trying to get the guy hooking a manual turntable up to a tube amplifier, they’re trying to get the guy attaching a PS5 to an LG TV to a Sonos soundbar. They’re going for the guy who is spending middle class money on AV equipment without bothering to understand it.
Wish I’d thought of it.
I wonder if, in the 15 years of not buying the cheap cables, you managed to come close to saving what you paid for that ten cents of gold plating.
I have no idea, and I don’t particularly care either, it’s not like it was some wildly expensive cable (though I don’t remember the price) … I just know that I saved myself a whole lot of inconvenience.
You can sell aluminum free baking soda and convince someone baking soda contains aluminum. Fads and marketing are becoming an epidemic
I’m so glad this is illegal where I’m from
Making no difference to sound is a very expensive addiction.
Audiophiles are the stupidest conceited fools who have ever been parted from their money.
Don’t forget your Audiophile grade cat5e cables for your NAS! Plug them in the right way though so the arrows point away from the NAS!
Unidirectional cables are very silly. I fixed a 300 foot unidirectional HDMI installed backwards during construction. I had to army crawl over ductwork.
For HDMI this is common with active optical cables.
I can imagine directional active cables, but not passive ones.
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Directional cables kind of make sense in an analogue, single-ended connection if it’s about the shielding being connected to ground only on one side… although I haven’t tried it in practice. Still, it has nothing to do with signal directionality, just noise rejection. The ground lift switch on some devices does the same.
This is even funnier considering the fiber element in toslink is actually plastic which was chosen to make it really cheap since the distance was not of concern like a proper multimode fiber cable made with glass.
But it’s Monster and costs 17x as much as Monoprice, it has to be better!
Septendecupleprice
The biggest impact I ever saw was an electrical filter for advanced audio systems. It’s basically an alternator. And it was the most impressive piece of any audio system I sold.
I once had a guy try to sell me one of these to my face. I asked him to explain why it was better than the one I got in the box with my DVD player, and he carried on about better conductivity and improved sound.
Called him out on his bullshit and never returned.
I miss when being an audiophile was just using vintage equipment and/or opting for lossless formats over compressed mp3s.
There’s always been a group of audiophiles with more money than sense. To the point that “audiophile” almost feels like an insult to me, and I’m a man who…well…loves his audio. They should have a word for that.
This community has been on fire today.
Sounds like sweaty, shirtless firemen are in order.
