many robots

I was pointed to this by someone on the Something Awful Forums, it's one I'd been searching for for a while. I'm going to quote the whole thing here because the color scheme on the original page is painful and disturbing.

The point is an important one, namely that wire is really, really cheap to make and the selling of it is modern-day snake oil. No, that $45 dollar component cable is not "cheap". This one at $3 is cheap. And it will perform exactly the same.

Calm down Mrs. Crawford, yes, through a wire hanger... It'll work just fine...

Ok,

So if any of you followed the digital wire wars a while back you may recall that some people maintained that you absolutely, positively, NEEDED a 75 ohm digital cable to connect your DVD player to your pre/pro... Nothing else will do... Anything else, and you risk errors in the bitstream so bad, that they are not only uncorrectable but you will also lose that "smooth airiness on the highs; open and more believeable soundstage; (insert your favorite audiophile tripe here)" and that basically the more money you spend on a digital cable, the more likely you are to achieve a sonic nirvana.

And you may or may not remember that after some rumblings and an e-mail from Jon Wenger, I built "The Finest Digital Transfer Wire In-the-WORLD!"® by taking two blue painted wire hangers and cutting an old, cheap, ugly green rca patch cord in two, soldering the ends onto the wire hangers.

You may remember my initial listening tests between that, a cheap, ugly yellow patch cord, a proper RG-6, 75 ohm cable with gold rca's, and the optical tos-link for comparison, yielded no discernable results, BUT there were too many other factors, like my ears may not be as golden or magical as someone else's, or that the toslink was shoddy anyway, etc.

Well, with Jon's help, I have now finished lab testing the cable.

For the dvd player, we used a professional version of the Sony 7000 reference player. It's actually model number DVP-S7000TP, serial # 2023. This is a pretty cool player... it has a nice gray matte, professional looking face, with a really cool rotary region selection switch near the headphone jack! For the processor we used a Dolby Labs model number DP562 multichannel ac-3 decoder, serial # 500280. The very cool feature, which is very necessary for our scientific experiment (since my pedestrian ears can't be trusted to be refined enough for the audiophiles whose heads travel in extra rarified air,) of this Dolby produced decoder is that it will do a bit error rate count... Yup, it will count each and every error it sees... Which is crc (cyclic redundancy check) protected which means the odds of having multiple errors such that the crc check passes an error in the data stream, is almost impossible. The output of the dvd player is an rca coax connector, and the input to the decoder is an XLR balanced connector. Jon normally has a Canare XLR to rca wire connecting the two.

I brought all my wires in case the number of errors that the wire hanger wire rolled was so great, that we would want to try the others and tabulate results... If you would like to see a picture of the wires (including the Sky-Blue/Lime-Green model of "The Finest Digital Transfer Wire In-the-WORLD!"®) go to: See a photo of the wire on my main Home Theater page.

Now we initially had a little problem with the hookup because we planned on using an rca female to female adapter and putting the test wire right between the Sony 7000 and the Canare cable, BUT we could not find the female to female... Not wanting to give up without giving it the old college try, Jon found two wires with alligator clips on them, so we used those.

So just to recap this thing to death, we had: The professional Sony S7000TP reference dvd player, going to a 20 year old, ugly green, rca patch cord which was cut in two. On one side of the green rca I soldered a blue painted wire hanger to the shield and another to the center conductor. I soldered the other ends of the wire hangers to the other half of the ugly green rca patch cord. We then clipped the alligator clips with thin wire to the centers and shields of the rca connectors of my cable and of the Canare cable, and then plugged the other XLR-balanced side of the Canare into the Dolby Labs decoder. I honestly did not know how badly we would be rolling errors on this one... and with open, scientific minds, we played a dvd...

Are you all sitting down? Good. We played the King Crimson Deja VROOM dvd for over fifteen minutes with this configuration and not only did it sound good, but the Dolby Decoder reported ZERO errors... Did you all get that ok? ZERO, nadda, nihil, zippo, nothing, none... error-free. Given that, there was not much point in trying the higher quality cables I had brought with me.

Conclusion: IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOU USE FOR YOUR DIGITAL CABLE CONNECTION BETWEEN YOUR DVD PLAYER AND YOUR PROCESSOR... YOU CAN BASICALLY USE ANYTHING THAT LOOKS ELECTRICALLY LIKE METAL. IT WILL WORK JUST FINE. (Between the coax connectors that is... I have not successfully used the wire hangers on the tos-link optical connectors... yet...) If you like you can hook the shield on one side to one of your Rodan bronze statues, and the other shield to somewhere else on the statue, and then hook the center conductors to another Rodan bronze, and it will work JUST FINE. The sonic clarity will be stunning, as well as visually pleasing.

So you can use the rca cables they throw in for free into your component boxes that you've been meaning to throw away for months because they offend your sensibilities, or you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Rodan Bronzes and use those, or anything in between... but please do not tell me that it sounds "warmer, cleaner, more open" or anything like that BECAUSE of the WIRE... It may sound different to you or to others... There are lots of reasons why it MAY sound different, not ALL of which are in your head... If it in fact IS different, then this difference is NOT due to the $800 wire you just swapped in. It may be that your player or decoder are somehow defective, or not designed very robustly (i.e. - if there is a difference that is NOT your imagination, then something is broken and you should not be wondering about the wire... you need to look elsewhere for the answer...)

Lastly, if you remember, my original preliminary offer was to sell this cable - "The Finest Digital Transfer Wire In-the-WORLD!"® to whomever wanted one, for a check or money order for $750.00 and two soiled shirts and I would send you the cable, in your choice of designer sky blue with lime green ends, or designer bone shell white with banana yellow ends, and your shirts laundered... However, in light of the new lab-tested/hand-made nature of the cable, I am going to have to bump up the price. Yes, you guys had your chance, I am going to have to raise the price to $1249.00 and two soiled shirts. Keep in mind that this is for an error-free, lab-tested on official Dolby lab's equipment, cable. (Don't worry Jon, I'll split the profits with you for an occasional, over the weekend testing session!)

I've pretty much completed this experiment to my satisfaction, and believe I have beaten the proverbial dead horse to a bloody pulp... If someone thinks I may have overlooked something however, my mind is not closed on this topic, and I would be happy to address any serious scientific hypothesis regarding this or other results... Thanks for paying attention... It's been real... Remember, do have fun with your hobby... you are doing this for fun aren't you?

-al