Audioquest HDMI cables

WELquest

Industry Expert
Jan 30, 2016
46
8
138
How about this Mr. Lowe:

You think you could hear the difference between counterfeit King Cobra XLRs and the real item if you didn't have a chance to inspect before hand?

You think you could hear the difference in your Diamond RJE's? One with 4 week old batteries in the DBS and other with dead batteries?

I don't think you could afford to sit for such a sighted test ;)

At least I know what DBS actually stands for "Dat's bullshit"

Pretty much every day, somewhere in the world, a new audience hears a run through of cable comparisons in which a single variable is changed at a time, including solid vs. stranded, parallel vs. spiraled, metal-only change, and the same model of cable with and without DBS.

You of course wouldn't listen to such comparisons, but most of the rest of the world enjoys learning. It's an unfortunate human foible that knowledge can so often become a prison with walls put up to prevent new enquiry and additional knowledge.

A discussion by interested people working to advance the frontier of scientific investigation is de facto interesting. A declaration of a theological divide as to what's possible or not is just a ridiculous waste of time. There are other names for such self abuse, chacun à son goût.

Ciao
 

NorthStar

Member
Feb 8, 2011
24,305
1,323
435
Vancouver Island, B.C. Canada
WEL stands for William E. Low if I am correct? Is Bill Low your father?

Is AudioQuest Music record label (Blues) related with AudioQuest cables?

* I own a fair bunch of AudioQuest Blues music recordings on CDs and SACDs and they sound awesome. And I do own few AudioQuest HDMI cables as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AudioQuest
http://www.audioadvisor.com/products.asp?dept=153

1) "Located in Irvine, California, AudioQuest was founded in 1980 by Bill Low. AudioQuest has been the largest cable supplier to the high-end specialist market for many years. The brand is sold in over sixty countries. Bill Low is especially pleased that this success has been possible despite his insistence that the foundation of the company, and the foundation of AudioQuest marketing, must be the performance of the product."

2) "AudioQuest, founded in 1980 by William E. Low, is a manufacturer of audio/video cables, digital-to-analog converters, headphones, power-conditioning products, and various audio/video accessories—all claimed to match high levels of performance and sold at high prices.

AudioQuest is based in Irvine, California, has offices in the Netherlands and Hong Kong, and distributes its products to approximately 65 countries throughout the world."

Ethernet cable evaluation

"AudioQuest sells ethernet cables that they claim are "directional". One independent blinded ABX test of the ethernet cables at The Amazing Meeting in 2015 found that the cables do not produce a measurable effect. Independent physical testing of the data transmission quality of AudioQuest's ethernet cables show they perform no better than class compliant cables costing less than 1/10 the price. Audiophile bloggers that receive free sample products to review have said that their unblinded, subjective listening experiences justify the high price of the product."

_______

And I have also read articles plus watched some videos on the Internet that are not "pink" in all aspects of common agreement. But usually I don't put much credibility to that sort of jazz.
I try to remain composed and acquiesce an objective view on the pros and cons from various audio experts, engineers and scientists.
I have high respect for Hi-Fi journalist/audio reviewer/writer, Richard Hardesty.

Quality music recordings and good sounding audio gear (including cables) are one of my hobbies. I search for the truth in every crevasses of our society. I understand les engrenages of our economies @ home and abroad. I respect the psychology of action and reaction. I accept the weaknesses of our human race.
I'm only saying this because it's a jungle out there. It's the norm; it's just that I don't conform to most of it when deception and false misrepresentation enter the equation.
But you don't seem to fit that category...good.

If you want to I can provide you with few links and some videos too, and you can comment on them?
I just want to know the truth.

Respectfully,
Bob

P.S. Those AudioQuest Music Blues recordings are among my favorite sounding Blues CD/SACDs.
 
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Jinjuku

New Member
Apr 18, 2011
228
4
0
Pretty much every day, somewhere in the world, a new audience hears a run through of cable comparisons in which a single variable is changed at a time, including solid vs. stranded, parallel vs. spiraled, metal-only change, and the same model of cable with and without DBS.

You of course wouldn't listen to such comparisons, but most of the rest of the world enjoys learning. It's an unfortunate human foible that knowledge can so often become a prison with walls put up to prevent new enquiry and additional knowledge.

A discussion by interested people working to advance the frontier of scientific investigation is de facto interesting. A declaration of a theological divide as to what's possible or not is just a ridiculous waste of time. There are other names for such self abuse, chacun à son goût.

Ciao


Oh to the contrary I agree with inquiry and life long learning. I have in my possession both AQ KK XLR's and Vodka RJE. Propose at the next RMAF I'll show up with Cisco Layer 3 switch setup for LAG. I'll provide a Diamond RJE with no batteries you bring your Diamond RJE with the batteries that you have biased for awhile and if you or whom ever you pick can hit 14/15 pick of the biased RJE stone cold blind I'll fork over $2000 to ya? If you lose just give $100 to a charity of my choosing. Heck, I'll even take the unbiased Diamond RJE out of the equation and bring a $13 Blue Jeans certified cable.

This setup will allow switching of cables while the computer is bitstreaming to your DAC and everything else down stream of your choice. I can feed USB, TOSlink, AES/EBU. J-River for the media player since we know it's bit perfect.

I agree we never stop learning.

Sauce que bon goût sur ??le goût de l'oie tout aussi bon sur jars
 

WELquest

Industry Expert
Jan 30, 2016
46
8
138
Hi Bob,

Thanks for your kind comments about AudioQuest Music. That was a fun multi-year adventure, though a pretty expensive one. The blues recordings broke even or better thanks to Tower Records (not because of hi-fi stores), the jazz recordings might have broken even after a thousand years. I chartered Joe Harley with creating AudioQuest Music figuring that everybody needs music, and that by offering real top-flight musicians and their music we could break even and gain a priceless PR halo. All in all, I wasn't too far off, having cumulatively lost "only" half a million dollars after AudioQuest Music was sold to Valley Music. Today, Joe is an irreplaceable Sr. VP of AudioQuest who on the side is half of the famous Music Matters label and is involved in many facets of the recording world.

As for me, often Asians think that Bill Low and William Low are brothers. I was once greeted at the Kuala Lumpur airport with "you look just like your brother." However, in the US there's rarely such confusion, "Bill" being the rather boring nickname for William that my parents never imagined would dominate, whether the individual approves or not, so I accept both.

Richard "Dick" Hardesty was a very, very strong willed individual with zero patience for either those who purposefully obscure the truth, or for those who reach "definitive" conclusions based on an inadequate subset of the necessary data and evidence. In his store, and later in his publication, Dick's was a zero-tolerance zone for BS. As seen from the outside, Dick's was not an easy existence, though in a tautological sense, he lived the only life he knew how to live, trying to honestly guide every consumer and every reader one person at a time.

Humans are often too quick to ascribe intent where there is none. Most drivers who make mistakes or cut one off, are doing the best they can. No matter how much we don't like the way they drive, there is no mal-intent in their actions -- to take insult is a weakness in the observer. In this manner, many designers are doing their best, and truly believe in something questionable or wrong, but they are trying to act on and tell the truth the best that they can perceive it. It is a rare audio designer who doesn't actually believe the sometimes impossibly silly things that they posit are the fundamentals of audio, or of their products.

Where most of the BS comes in is with less audio-competent marketing types. The engineers at some chemical company that designed a fiber optic, and the product development department at an audio manufacture that chose to use that fiber, might be people we would wholeheartedly approve of. The brass ferule on a Toslink connector might be honestly specified to have gold plating, a gold "flash", because the tiny cost will more than be paid back by the incrementally better sales due to gold's attractiveness -- but when that product gets put in a package with the bullet point "gold-plated connectors", I think the line dividing expedient and unacceptable BS has been crossed. The gold plating is on a ferule, not on a connector, and has no bearing on the performance of the cable. A survey of Toslink cable packaging reveals a surprising number of claims to higher performance through gold-plating -- such claims almost always being made by commodity level companies who I believe (based on the performance of the cables) never actually did their job -- to be professional industrial level consumers, choosing the best fiber for inclusion in their final assembly.

The James Randi's foundation's Las Vegas show of challenging the efficacy of AudioQuest Ethernet cables, as reported by arstechnica.com (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...ile-ethernet-cables-to-the-test-in-las-vegas/), was a show-biz farce. As with some of Trump's most definitive enemies being other Republicans, so too was the Randi foundation's methodology so bad that even those who are certain that Ethernet cables are all the same also condemned the silly bit of showmanship. The question as to the efficacy of AudioQuest Ethernet cables is a proper credible question -- such a false-science pursuit of the truth was not credible.

A not surprising example of irrational human tribalism, as with condemning movies one hasn't seen, etc., many cable naysayers love to mock AudioQuest's claim that all drawn metal is directional by citing how (to their and our knowledge) the signal can't possibly be directional. How convenient it is for these people to have never read our literature, advertising or box copy, to have never noticed that I have never claimed that an audio signal, analog or digital, is directional. I used to make a point of using directionality as a prime example of the need to honor empirical evidence regardless of lack of understanding. If a cable sounds better one way than the other, why would I ignore such a thing when using the cable in the better sounding direction is free?

Now, thanks to the brilliant Garth Powell having joined AudioQuest from Furman, we believe we have a very clear understanding of the mechanism which explains directionality -- which is that at radio frequencies, the directional eccentricities at the surface of drawn metal causes a tiny difference in impedance in one direction vs. the other. In as much as the laws of physics dictate that energy must follow the past of least resistance, by controlling directionality, one can make noise provoked distortion mechanisms better or worse depending on in which direction the picked-up noise is directed.

Civilization is possible thanks to astonishing human diversity, and the ability of civilization as a whole to harness the insights of people who by themselves couldn't survive and would never cooperate. In this way, even the idiots contribute, if only to make stupidity visible to those intent on finding the truth. Sorting through all that noise in order to arrive at a rational approach to optimizing the performance of one's audio system is more or less impossible -- and unnecessary. No audio system sounds real, no audio system is so good that it guarantees audio nirvana, and almost no system is so bad that when one is in the mood, listening to music one likes, that one can't get just as high on the music as through a "great" system. We don't enjoy music more as we (ideally) progress through life to ever better components and systems -- we just get more spoiled, and maybe more snobbish about our connoisseurship.

This doesn't mean that there isn't real benefit and enjoyment in having good audio gear (I'm very fortunate to have some of the best), but it does mean that it's not about absolute audio quality -- it's about our personal relationship to the music, as made possible through the system. From this perspective, the voicing of the components, and the placement of the speakers in the room (the room often being THE most critical component in the system), is 99% of the process.

I advocate that cables can be chosen for their lack of voice (simple bypass testing that almost no one ever does), but that for almost every other part of a system, components must be chosen for their voice -- to pretend that amps or speakers or a turntable don't have a voice is sheer blindness. The difference between good and bad hi-fi is how long it takes before one gets tired, not whether you can count 75 or 76 people in the chorus. Successful emotional stimulation over time is the result of minimal misinformation, not maximum information -- it is the misinformation (distortion, the moving of energy to the wrong frequency and/or time) which interferes with why we listen to music, not a lack of information.

The digital HiRes initiative is further confusing this issue. While high-resolution files can offer significant audio advantages, the most important thing they offer is that when properly processed, there are less audio band artifacts, less misinformation to corrupt our music. Unfortunately, higher speed processors are noisier, so a 24/192 file sometimes sounds better when processed at 24/96.

Does that kind of knowledge make it easier to buy good hi-fi gear? I think not -- but that doesn't mean that the chase, pursued in this manner, can't be rewarding and fun. However, for most people, the more they think that they understand the gear, the more likely they are to focus on the gear's inevitable flaws, and the harder it is to let go and immerse in the music.

May you enjoy the quest for the most efficacious audio gear, and then may you forget what the pieces are as your spirit soars on the inventiveness of your favorite composers and artists.

Sincerely, WEL/William/Bill
 

WELquest

Industry Expert
Jan 30, 2016
46
8
138
Oh to the contrary I agree with inquiry and life long learning. I have in my possession both AQ KK XLR's and Vodka RJE. Propose at the next RMAF I'll show up with Cisco Layer 3 switch setup for LAG. I'll provide a Diamond RJE with no batteries you bring your Diamond RJE with the batteries that you have biased for awhile and if you or whom ever you pick can hit 14/15 pick of the biased RJE stone cold blind I'll fork over $2000 to ya? If you lose just give $100 to a charity of my choosing. Heck, I'll even take the unbiased Diamond RJE out of the equation and bring a $13 Blue Jeans certified cable.

This setup will allow switching of cables while the computer is bitstreaming to your DAC and everything else down stream of your choice. I can feed USB, TOSlink, AES/EBU. J-River for the media player since we know it's bit perfect.

I agree we never stop learning.

Sauce que bon goût sur ??le goût de l'oie tout aussi bon sur jars

Thanks for your response, and your reasonable challenge.

I suspect you are wanting to do instant comparisons, and wanting both cables to be attached all the time. The first is a methodology that the professionals in my community have done their best to explain why it's a defective methodology, most notably John Atkinson.

The latter physical problem, of having both cables attached all the time (depending on intricacies of the switcher with which I'm not familiar), is that having both cables attached to the hardware means that some of what would be compared in a one cable-at-a-time comparison is effectively eliminated by having them both attached -- a comparison (unintentionally) designed to eliminate some of the the variables which account for different performance.

I won't be at RMAF this year, and if I were, this isn't how I would choose to spend my time (I'll be at the New Yorker TechFest instead). However, if anyone at the show, from AQ or Nordost or WireWorld, etc. wants to accept your challenge, your incentive vs. cost is kind, though if it were me, and I succeeded, I would refuse the prize.

More relevant from my perspective would be for you to take the hot seat and listen to a without DBS vs. a with DBS cable, inserted one at a time directly (as in a consumer's real system), the music started again from the beginning each time, and report on what you hear. When you report "no difference," we can all agree that you don't need DBS, and maybe don't need anything better than a Blue Jeans cable. We're back to how personal is any given person's relationship to reality -- because no matter the number of objective details, "reality" is overall a personal construct.
 

Jinjuku

New Member
Apr 18, 2011
228
4
0
Thanks for your response, and your reasonable challenge.

I suspect you are wanting to do instant comparisons, and wanting both cables to be attached all the time. The first is a methodology that the professionals in my community have done their best to explain why it's a defective methodology, most notably John Atkinson.

I've only read conjecture as to why on John Atkinson's part. I don't think he came out well in his session with Arnie. Atkinson's position is merely opinion. Everyone is welcome to one.

I'm not wanting to do any kind of comparison. I'll simply make a swap, or I could in 5 minutes train an AQ employee to make the changes. The evaluator wouldn't know nor would it matter.

The latter physical problem, of having both cables attached all the time (depending on intricacies of the switcher with which I'm not familiar), is that having both cables attached to the hardware means that some of what would be compared in a one cable-at-a-time comparison is effectively eliminated by having them both attached -- a comparison (unintentionally) designed to eliminate some of the the variables which account for different performance.

LAG is Link Aggregate Group. That means two NIC interfaces are tied to a single MAC address on the host system. That means you can start the playback of music over the network from remote storage and swap cables out and only leave one 'in situ'. The reason why is any frame on the wire is routed to the MAC of the network interface (layer two of the OSI model if you are interested). LAG presents a MAC address and either NIC receives the frame therefore allowing swapping with out noticeable loss.

The test bed is robust enough that it will even perform open air (that is zero network cables connected).


this isn't how I would choose to spend my time (I'll be at the New Yorker TechFest instead). However, if anyone at the show, from AQ or Nordost or WireWorld, etc. wants to accept your challenge, your incentive vs. cost is kind, though if it were me, and I succeeded, I would refuse the prize.

Intellectual honesty is never a waste of time.


because no matter the number of objective details, "reality" is overall a personal construct.

As is delusion.

The issue is DBS, as I read it, is to correct time coherence of an analog signal. Fundamentally Ethernet cables are analog at 25Mhz as a base clock but after that they are digital, framed, packeted, windowed systems. They aren't carrying analog wave forms but fixed frequency.

I'm telling you what circumstance that I'm willing to be incorrect in. What would be yours?

I've already been in the hot seat with your XLR and Ethernet cables. Subjectively and Empirically I could find no difference between Mogami/Blue Jeans and AQ. Nor has AQ presented any measurements. Based on both experience and measurements I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and bring a cable that is ~ 1/100th the value of your DBS based RJE and let the chips fall where they may.
 
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Don Hills

Well-Known Member
Jun 20, 2013
366
1
323
Wellington, New Zealand
Thanks for your response, and your reasonable challenge.

...

More relevant from my perspective would be for you to take the hot seat and listen to a without DBS vs. a with DBS cable, inserted one at a time directly (as in a consumer's real system), the music started again from the beginning each time, and report on what you hear. When you report "no difference," we can all agree that you don't need DBS, and maybe don't need anything better than a Blue Jeans cable. We're back to how personal is any given person's relationship to reality -- because no matter the number of objective details, "reality" is overall a personal construct.

From *my* perspective, the person in the hot seat should be someone who believes they can hear a difference, and they should have no clues as to which cable is in circuit at any one time other than by listening to the music. (Surprisingly hard to ensure.)
 

FrantzM

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
6,455
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405
Hi
I have tried to stay out of cables discussions for a while ... This said ..IC and speaker cables? ... One is entitled to her/his/its opinions .. Ethernet cable making differences because of the DBS thing? ??!!??!!?? Ethernet Cables? By the way this is a misnomer as this type of patch cable is for anything that can be carried on a UP 8-conductor cable but I got the point and need proofs.. Not opinions, facts. Not anecdote, peer reviews.
 

Billinge

New Member
Aug 15, 2021
28
21
3
61
I know that. :) And my intent was to use a still test image. The problem is that I think HDCP will be asserted by the graphics card regardless. If so, without a cheater card you can't capture it. Do you have confirmation of any graphics card solution which only asserts HDCP on protected content that requires it?

I will get our HDMI analyzer and test my system here and see what it does.
Why would a HDMI analyzer test any parameter or scenario other than those mentioned in the HDMI spec? Specs aren't perfect and may not list every minor consideration nor test devices test for those

Also, I have a frame grabber as well, I haven't performed the frramegrab cksum test, I had thought of it but there is also surely a possibility of some electrical boundary condition that may occur at the plug end?

Surely to be totally measurement oriented you would need a comprehensive mathematical and physical model for source, cable and sink, then build a dedicated tester?
 

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