No worse..

than idiots paying more than a tenner for a HDMI cable...

It's directional too..

Best thing about it is that the signal direction is printed on the cable, so you don't risk getting degraded performance by connecting it with the wrong end in your reciever and dvd.

How about using it for the computer? Maybe it will "bring out the nuances" in downloaded music, and make youtube videos look all the shinier. But then again, ADSL lines from the house is kind of crappy...

Well!

I work for a company who are one of Denons bigger Australian supporters. I do agree that this is pricey for a network cable and I dont recommend you buying one in goal of reducing your lan party lag, its purely an AUDIO product. One big consumer misconception is digital doesn't have an error rate. If its ethernet or HDMI for instance, the error rate per bit can be massive! And then everything is up to the quality of a components integrated debugger to fix where the cable has failed to deliver. This cable's error rate is practicly non-existent, and thus the debugger needs not add what it "guesses" is missing from the original signal. I will also add that this cable is designed for Denons highest and most primium level of products. Any customer wanting the level of quality Denons highest end units supply are more than willing to pay very well for it.

This is a difference here!

cost

Anyone remember "monster cables" £50 for a scart cable?

well guess what, the buy price on those for a company i used to work for was........ 30p each, that is some mark-up, even £3 or £10 would still yield huge mark-ups.

simple fact of cables tho, cheap telly, cheap hi-fi, cheap gear wont sound or look any different with good cables, proper gear needs better cables as its more susceptible to interference. BUT if there isn’t any interference and the run is relatively small the signal loss would be almost non existent regardless of the cable.

what im getting at is, if you wire your gear up right in the first place moderate cables is all you need for any good gear.

and despite that th single biggest mistake "amateur come pros" make is not earthing it right, having everything from the microwave to the dishwasher running of the same loop as you audio gear would make it sound "crap" regardless of the cables.

Dylan

Put down the Kool-Aid and have a seat until the effects wear off.

to Dylan

I work in Networks.... you comment is bulls****

enough said.

Guesses!

I hate it when my data is guessed! I better buy 5

@Dylan

Seriously? You believe that?

I'd put a Dick Smith cat 6 cable up against it anyday - as long as the connections are well crimped there would be zero difference.

If you've got a high error rate check the sending component!

Dylan;

this cable is snake oil and you know it. Surely any packets sent by ethernet, audio data or otherwise, would be re-sent if any errors occurred?

It's not like a CD player reading a dodgy CD.

Re: Well!

With ethernet, every packet has a checksum, so you will pick up that an individual bit error has occurred, at which point you either drop the packet, or request it to be re-sent depending on the application. Now, while I agree if you had a number of packets with failing checksums, this could cause degredation (you'd either drop bits of the audio or request it to be re-sent, adding some latency).

However, I've worked on a VERY busy network of gameservers (lots of small UDP packets, like most audio situations would have), cabled up with bog standard ethernet cables, some home made, some pre-built, but the most expensive one probably cost £3. Running a packet trace on it, I saw a grand total of ZERO packets with incorrect checksums - so could you explain again the 'problem' this cable is solving?

Total Crap

Yeah, and after downloading your bits over a pristine cable, where do you store it? Why, on your perpendicular recording hard drive, where due to the bit packing density, there is massive overbleed between bit domains and the only way the drive can extract meaningful bit patterns from the platter is by statistical processing.

The comments by Dylan are a total crock. It's an Ethernet cable, not an audio cable. The bit streams go through the error processing whether you want them to or not. It's in the specification, dood.

This is just another crappy product with an extreme price for those drooling inbreds dumb enough to fall for this "premium" fantasy.

Perhaps Denon is owned by Apple?

0

Overpriced, I can make up an Ethernet cable for a low price of £25. As you can see my cables drop zeros, but only the important ones. Any takers? :D

Yeah right

So your saying all my data that gets sent between me and my server gets partially corrupted? No, because the transfer protocol can handle errors. Are you saying audio equipment omits this for some reason? Unlikely for these so called highest and most premium level of products.

No difference

Sorry Dylan but I just don't believe the hype. Try putting a £250 gold plated, heavily shielded cable between your pc and printer and then tell us how much better your prints look.

Real error rates

Apologies to anyone with an ounce of computer sense, but Dylan's comment can't be let stand.

ifconfig says my error rate is 0 bits / 800 Gigabytes, on garden variety cable. The real error rate is probably non-zero, but it's close enough to zero (non-existant) for me.

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:467704309 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:255034840 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:392610032906 (374422.1 Mb) TX bytes:459347623115 (438068.0 Mb)

Sucker born every minute

Error-rate my ass. I can download gigabytes and gigabytes of data with no checksum errors, and that requires the not only the transfer of data over a cable to a magnetic storage device, but threw this horrible mess known as the interweb

If the that system of the internets all the way through to my pc works with out misproducing bits, than audio equipment that is built upon the same components is going to do the same thing.

You know why PAR and PAR2 files work? Because with good digital error correction, correction is 100%. There is no difference. Hence, any error correction being passed down an Ethernet cable with the data should be 100% or the people who designed the standard should be shot.

Knowing they wouldn't want to be shot, I call shenanigans on your post.

No difference at all

Dylan must be working for either Denon, or perhaps here in America he may be working for Monster.

There's no difference at all for the very reason Dylan states in his comment.

"This cable's error rate is practicly non-existent, and thus the debugger needs not add what it "guesses" is missing from the original signal"

Well guess what? If there are not enough errors to completely degrade the signal, the error correction will work.

If there are too many errors, the error correction not work and you will have no signal whatsoever.

Digital either works or doesn't. There is no in between. Please don't try to pretend that having less errors will speed up your connection. Errors or not it will still run through the error checker.

I Hope It is Cat6.

Dylan... What is the error rate from 1.5m of Denon vs standard CAT6? In addition, there are protocols for error checking when they do occur. If you think your cable is having issues, get a $30 NIC with cable error detection. Continue to fool youself with useless crap like this but please don't try to fool others.

You've got to be kidding me!

Dylan,

Sorry, but you're full of it. If you are transmitting digital data over ANY media (copper, fiber, whatever) and receiving ANY bit errors, then your media or interfaces are screwed up.

How do I know this? I run a very large enterprise network with gigabit and ten gigabit ethernet everywhere. We have THOUSANDS of devices running gigabit over copper. We push HUNDREDS of TERRABYTES of data daily with NO ERRORS. If there are ever problems, it almost always due to a buffer becoming full and dropping data, NOT transmission errors.

This is just another rip-off by high-end audio manufacturers trying to LIE to consumers since they realize that most consumers have even less understanding of digital technology than analog.

You claim this cable is designed for "Denon's highest and most primium (sic) level of products". But I'd bet you the world I could take Cat5e cable, 2 RJ45 connectors and some crimpers and make a cable that will handle anything your "high-end" Denon can throw at it.

At 48KHz sample rate, 16 bits/sample times 8 channels (even tho in 7.1, the .1 channel isn't a full bandwidth channel), you get a data rate of 6.144Mbps. That's it! Slower than most cable modem offerings (which use off the shelf cables). Even if you did 96KHz samples at 32bits/sample for 8 channels that would still be a paltry 24.576Mbps. Nothing compared to the gigabit speeds achieved ERROR FREE over off the shelf Cat5e cables.

Dylan you are wrong

Massive error rates per bit? Come on! Watch this report which shows very well how expensive cables are a rackett for ignorant people with too much money to spend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDw2ZSDzlMw

White Papers?

Perhaps a white paper on why this is better will convince us. . .

re@Well

1. WTF is an error rate per bit?
(there is only error-bit-rate)
2. error correction has nothing to do with guessing,its done with checksums, flow control etc.!!
3. a debugger is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs

to assume that you get massive errors with a standard 1.5m CAT5 or CAT6 is hilarious and shows that you have no clue about ethernet and IT, so please spare us your marketing bulls@it

The King Has No Clothing...

Error rate _per bit_? Debuggers?! That's amazing, I didn't realize PHY controllers could pick up on individual electrons gone MIA. Learn something new every day.

One thing IS correct though, the folks who buy Denon's (and others) premium audio kit definitely will pay ridiculous amounts of money for pretty much anything that claims to improve sound quality, no matter how absurd and scientifically impossible those claims. I'm just jealous that I'm not the one making $500 per cable on those suckers.

Oh my ...

Dylan .. ever heard of the digital age, and digital error correction and how unlike analog transmission 1 bit along the line is not equivalent to 1 bit of the actual data?

Happy broke bank balance Dylan.

bleh error shmerror

the difference is... the lack of error means less processing power to correct said error.... so in theory denon can use shittier hardware to do the same thing :P

but does it make a difference to the actual audio? does it fsck

More money than brains.

Anyone to buy into that is a fool.
Simply hogwash. Save your self $490
and get some Cat 7.

there's a sucker born every second

I'm willing to test my 53p network cable against this £250 cable and I will wager £1M to a penny that they will both transfer my files to my queezebox and they'll sound EXACTLY the same.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly in need of a visit to the local lunatic asylum ....

Dylan

This is fabulous stuff. I'm crying with laughter.

Difference?

Of course errors occur in digital cables. And of course there is a quality difference between different cables. That's why error correction is built in into the transfer protocol. If some bits are corrupted in a packet, the receiver simply demands the data to be resent. A normal cat6 cable can transfer almost 1Gbit/s (some overhead) of non-corrupted data over distances of up to 100m. With uncompressed audio you will at very most use ~20Mb/s. So theoretically every audio sample could be resent 50 times before the next sample is even supposed to be played. So there will be no need to "guess what is missing from the original signal", even with a cheap cable.

lol

!

Dylan: you're ridiculous

Obviously you have no idea about digital signal transmission theory and are a reseller of Denon cables, so stop spouting bs.

Re: Well!

Ethernet is a packet based technology with built in redundancy to prevent data loss, even over networks spannding tens of thousands of kilometers and hundreds of interfaces. Even if packet loss or an error does occur, the device simply requests a new packet, it dosen't try to 'guess' whats missing.

On a side note: not even premium grade 144 count singlemode fiber costs that much per foot.

Don't talk crap Dylan

Honestly, I'm a pretty placid guy normally, but this sort of thing makes me seethe. You are just a snake oil salesman feeding on gullible audiophiles who have more money than sense.

Fact is, the bit error rate for ethernet cables is absolutely miniscule, around 1 part in 10 million or so. Google "network cabling bit error rate" and read the first hit. For music reproduction it is so insignificant as to be laughable.

Tsk Tsk

You would say that. You're clearly full of it - sales talk that is

Most people reading this know its a pile of gumpf and that your doing the whole blind with science thing. Well this is our science so take a hike with your objection handling and USP's

Crap

Dylan, there exist something called Category in the Ethernet cables. This stuff is (at best) Category 6, or even CAT5E. Just tell me how much expensive can be the copper of the wires or even the gold of the connectors (if there's any). If you want to convince us, try next time with a Fluke 2000. At least will add some credibility to your words. I can pay 50$ for the best ethernet cable, more than that is just plain stupid.

Uh

You gotta be joking? On a bog standard "$4 cheapie" cable I get roughly 51 error packet every few months. This is neither massive nor worrisome.

I going to give the ACCC a call about this on monday, they are cracking down on these sorts of spurious claims quite a bit atm.

All these cables look like is a weave and end cap kit on a standard cable, anyone willing to donate a cable to be dissected to find out which cheap Chinese cable maker rolls the wire in it?

Damage.Inc

douchebag

"the error rate per bit can be massive"

yeah it's either 0 or 1 in a bit.... so the error rate can be nothing or 100% in a bit. Douche bag.

sale?

does anyone know when they have next buy one get one free sale?

Snake oil express

I would like to follow up on Dylan's comment above with the following. The only misconception here is that promulgated by some members of the high-end cable industry that bit error rate is normally significant. HDMI, for example, specifies a "massive" (?) maximum error rate of... wait for it... one part in a billion, at the physical layer. (http://www.hdmi.org/download/HDMI_Spec_1.3_GM1.pdf) Although HDMI does contain the means for error correction of data, in the case of audio and video, Dylan is right that the error values are uncorrected; this is reasonable, of course, since it is quite impossible to detect one error in at least a billion symbols through human perception alone. The situation is akin to the proverbial 'needle in a haystack', except that it is more like one needle in all of the haystacks in the entire world. Of course, this argument applies mainly to short runs of a few metres used by a typical consumer; if one is using HDMI over several tens of metres, the situation may be quite different--but I don't believe that this is what Dylan was trying to convey. For the distance case, one might refer to the highly reputable Blue Jeans Cable (http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/whats-the-matter-with-hdmi.htm)--whose cables are designed with only real (and not imagined) engineering principles in mind, and consequently sold for a tiny fraction of the price of those others containing liberal quantities of snake oil.

Returning to the topic of the ethernet cable, I have no idea what the prospective customer is expected to do with this device, although I will point out that ethernet cabling is not intended as an inherently reliable physical medium. Hence, although error checking is accomplished with a CRC32 checksum for each packet, correction is not performed; rather, higher layers such as TCP deal with errors by detection and retransmission. One could certainly argue that this might be an issue for isochronous applications such as audio, although the low data rate is likely to render this a non-issue in many cases. In situations where errors in the physical layer are significant, one may ask: why would any competent engineer select ethernet for this purpose? Of course, they would not, and I have faith that Denon's engineers are competent in this respect. The marketing department, however, is clearly a different matter, judging by the existence of this cable and Dylan's comments about it.

[SM replies: Yeah... what he said]

a bit late

Well, you're not an early bird Steve, now are you? This cable has long been on sale and its
purpose is to establish high quality audio connections between Denon components. And if you look at it as an audio cable, it's not by far the most expensive one, considering that interconnect cables and speaker cables can be priced up to 10000-20000 $. Cheers

Your all missing the point

This network cable was crimped by male sex midgets. I think that alone is worth $500.00

The cables were woven by naken blonde midgets again worth $500.0

Personally I think this is a bargain - so does Dylan.

obviously Audio sends different data than an Data Network cable so you need the extra expensive ones

Market segmentation at its best !!

Having B.Sc in Telecommunication Engineering, CCNA, CCDA, CCVP and an MBA; I can assure you that what they are trying to do is based more on marketing than on data transfer theory!!!

He clearly says: "this cable is designed for Denons highest and most primium level of products. Any customer wanting the level of quality Denons highest end units supply are more than willing to pay very well for it.”

In other words "if they are dump enough to pay the amount of money we are charging for our premium products, then let us try to charge them a premium for our cables!!"

expl

This cable is not for ethernet applications
It is used to transfer high bitrate multichannel audio data (no references to ethernet, tcpip protocols, etc)
They use there own proprietary patented protocol (marketing name - denon link) btw. certified by both dolby and dts to passthrou DRM PROTECTED bit ferfect HDaudio from DENON dvd players to DENON dvd AV processors.for decoding.

The only similarity to ethernet stuff is high bandwith cable :)

Your not paying for error free

Leave poor Dylan alone... that $500 isn't going into the cable quality it's going into that Gucci pattern nylon cover!

If someone would pay $500 for a Gucci belt let them pay $500 for a Gucci cat5 cable... 1.5m should be enough to hold your pants up

I found it i Finally found it!

Cat7!!1 here we come.

They must have been talking to MS about how to bring an identical product the the previous, yet rape your wallet for all its worth!

lol.

Denon just totally undermined themeselves with this one!

why the hell would you be streaming music over a network anyway, if you were running such expensive equipment to make a $500 cable a drop in the ocean?

morons!!!!

Poor Dylan..

Dylan is typical of many people who have a smattering of technical knowledge, just enough to know that data's moving but real idea about what's happening on the wire. He would be quite surprised -- and this is talking about really low level stuff, well below the protocol layers you'd see in the software.

The biggest mistake he's making is thinking that digital's like analog. That is, once the signal arrives at the socket then that's it. Not true. So, for example, for this short run -- 1.5 meters in a relatively quiet environment -- any transmission errors that get introduced will be in the PHY components that encode and decode the signals onto the wire. This are quite complex analog circuits -- they're well beyond the capabilities of a bespoke audio designer to produce (and certify) them. Their output will be strings of bits which are interpreted by the MAC as the familiar packets that you'll see in a computer.

Audio is really very simple to work with. We only went through a bad patch with it some years ago because early amplifier designs were derived from servo drivers and the people making those designs didn't have access to sophisticated testgear. (They also couldn't model like we can these days.) Technology moved off and left the bespoke audio people high and dry, forced to sell ever more ridiculous gimmicks as technological advances because there was nowhere real for them to go. (The ultimate joke turned out to be that owning high end audio equipment just treats you to all the problems in the recording end of the chain.) Anyway, leave them to their gold plated fiber connections and lintz speaker wire....they're happy.

BTW -- We can get 10GBits/sec down that sort of wire....

Audiofools

This super-overpriced cable thing has been going on forever. It worked really well back in the analog days. It has always relied on a combination of a total ignorance of electronics and deep pockets on the part of some audio nuts. We old-timers in electronics call them, of course, the name stated above.

Dylan, such saitire

Hilarious, the untutored might actually think you were serious for a moment, rather than mercilessly exposing the risible huxterism that seems to part fools and their money.

Thanks for the best laugh of the day- even more than the original article. I work in the research labs of <censored> surrounded by rather overly serious engineers and scientists researching and holding basic patents in some cutting-edge areas of digital audio and video. They're a serious and academic lot, and levity can be thin on the ground. They haven't laughed this much at AV quackery since one of them tried one of those fancy green pens on a CD, logged the bit error rate and used that to annoy the religious who'd actually bought them in genuine hope.

That there are people out there who make these claims (and that there are some salesmen solipsistic/moronic enough to actually believe it) almost defies rational belief.

Great work in sending up these shameful con-men. Someone has to do it. I salute you, sir.

Bringing Out The Nuances

Who are we to judge the Pentagon?

Got a little Dylan in ya?

http://www.geekendnw.com/dylan.jpg

Look Thru Their Trash.

Neighboring Rental Studios oft
en strip out cable, & thats big trash item. hech you could go into cable business on internet theres so much waste.
Plus this item fits into pocket, does nothing extra? & is often Missed.
Drashek

@Dylan

Hi Dylan,
Sorry, but I think you ought to take a break from all that crack. It's hurting you.

Aside from the obviousness of Denon's actual lack of quality and colossal expenditures on marketing, Denon is generally well known for aiming product sales towards the Wannabe-Audiophile market.

Denon doesn't spend its money making good products. It spends its money marketing their products to unknowing individuals.

Look at any major audiophile reference-grade equipment manufacturer which keeps itself true to its products and their uniqueness and qualities. They barely ever spend money on advertising; they rarely even have a marketing division to begin with. They rely on their ability to deliver top-notch quality equipment, which are then highly discussed about amongst audiophiles and thus eliminating the requirement for marketing altogether.

It’s this essence which keeps true quality audio equipment manufacturers ahead. They focus on their engineering, not their marketing.

I’m not any random newbie in the audiophile world either. I have spent well into the thousands just on analog cables alone… never mind the amount I’ve spent on my actual audio equipment. I swear by quality analog audio cables, as proper matching with analog audio equipment can deliver audible improvements. Do note the key here was “analog”.

I absolutely shun “high quality digital cables”. Unless you’re talking about running cables in excessive lengths (which isn’t being the case here with Denon’s 1.5M long Ethernet cable), there is absolutely no difference at all between various methods of constructing a digital cable while adhering to its standard manufacturing requirements.

Digital is digital. Face it. It’s at the end of the day simply ones and zeros going across the cable (and it’s obvious this is not information Denon wants every consumer to know). With analog cables you’re dealing with an extremely wide frequency spectrum, and hence the differences in quality of cable do result in audible differences, especially if you consider the fact that analog cables are more prone to EMI interference, an issue digital cables do not really inherit.

You can say all you like Dylan. Fact of the matter is any cheap 1$/m cable is going to be able to directly compete against your “performance” Ethernet cable there.

Dylan is right(ish) - He just doesn't know why

For reference: my day job is developing electronic systems and software to encode and deliver digital audio over IP and other protocol networks. This includes 'high fi' audio in public presentation spaces such as opera houses.

The first point is that 99% of the comments so far relate to error tolerance of the networks and IP protocols. The comments are by and large correct but irrelevant as they ignore the temporal dimension (NB I've been waiting to get 'temporal dimension' into a post for a while now)

Professional digital audio relies on very low latency encoding, delivery and decoding of audio. This is because professional audio is often live. On IP networks low latency is achieved by encoding minuscule chunks of sound and squirting them across the network in tiny UDP packets. It's horribly bandwidth inefficient but it gets the latency down. In this scheme there is no provision at all for retries so if a packet is dropped for whatever reason the receiver recreates it - such as repeating the last packet, or simply silence, or fancy digital synthesis techniques.

An example data rate for a stereo audio stream, 24 bit, 88200 Hz is around 4.2 Mbps. If you were to frame that in a low latency UDP format you could easily triple the on-wire bandwidth. So on a 100 Mbps links, even a single audio stream is an appreciable fraction of the available bandwidth. In a typical multichannel setup the overall bandwidth gets very high and room for errors drops to zero.

In fact IP is not a very good way to deliver professional audio. It has too high latency. For this reason various manufacturers have developed their own proprietary protocols that are not IP based. Some are ethernet based (and so can use a switch), some dispense even with that and rely totally on proprietary hardware.

The common feature in these schemes are the low latency and the reluctance to provide any form of retry error correction - especially in IP networks. What this means is that any bit error is bad bad baddity bad. This is why professional audio people want as few of them as possible.

Switches can be/are used in complex audio networks - however mostly running non IP Ethernet protocols. In complex low latency networks with switches you get to see jitter problems start turning up - and in a low latency network a jittered packet is as bad as a lost packet. Some schemes have very strong ECC so the effective bit error rate becomes effectively zero. This is good, but if jitter gets in you get your packet but too late to use.

Now we get to the area where Dylan is right but wrong. He is right in that bit errors are bad. He is wrong as to where they come from. In reality most errors and dropouts are caused by the switch software/hardware and scheduling, and relatively less so by interference with active electronic devices (cosmic rays etc). Where they don't come from is the body of a data cable (unless a roadie trips over it). The only other place is dodgy RJ45 connectors - but that tends to produce a go/nogo effect rather than increased BER.

So in summary, expensive data cables possibly perform slightly better than cheapo ones (assuming the crimps are better)- but on the scale of things you'd never ever notice.

The only reason...

The only reason I know of for a highly shielded cable such as this is extreme magnetism. I am familiar with a case (I work with a electrical contractor and we frequently install networks) where a quantity of lodestone near a federal installation was preventing ANY signal transfer. The solution still was not $500 10ft shielded cable; it was fiber optic.

digital

digital , thats the beauty of it ................

Dylan

You're an idiot, a liar and/or an astroturfer.

Ethernet doesn't attempt to "guess" missing data. If it did then any file you tried to download over Ethernet that HAS to be bit-perfect would be suspect to corruption. Ever try to open a zip file with a single bit error? Why don't web pages ever contain random bursts of unintelligible text like the line noise you used to get on analog modems (assuming the browser's set up to use the same character encoding as the page was sent in, of course)? Any executable file you downloaded where the system "guessed" the missing bits would fail to run or crash spectacularly.

Ethernet is designed around packets. Each packet has a checksum. If there are bit errors then the packet is discarded and either a retransmit is requested or that packet is dropped entirely, depending on the specific application the data is being used with.

True, the retransmission rate will eat into the theoretical maximum bandwidth of the cable, and better quality cables will have (marginally) lower error rates and require less retransmission, but even the cheapest, crappiest cable will, as long as it complies with the spec it's claiming to comply with, still induce bit errors and cause retransmissions at a statistically insignificant rate. If the cable doesn't comply with the spec it's claiming to comply with then that's in most cases a breach of honesty in advertising laws and a criminal offense. Any Ethernet cable that is up to the job it claims to be will not produce audio quality one iota different from any other cable that is also up to the job.

The Soul Owner

Well Dylan, we see who owns your soul not to mention your corporate a$$.

You're telling lies brother, and the sad part is you actually seem to believe them. You're are the definitive willing corporate whore.

Have a nice day living with yourself.

Dylan, you have my sympathy, as do your customers.

Dylan, you have my sympathy, as do your customers.

Can someone get an official from Denon to reply on here about this?

Media is reluctanct to push manufacturer's over their dodgy claims in case the manufacturer's cancel their advertising. Inq, will you push it?

Cables do make a difference

I am an electric engineer and currently own a computer store.I have seen good and bad cables.In order to have a good cable it needs to have proper shielding and good copper(or actually for some cat5s enough copper).Best cables ive ever used were the Cablel.Greek ones, slightly overpriced (5-6 quid on 305 meters not more) but excellent nonetheless.If you want near perfect quality use a heavy shielded one.That's it.Nothing else.

On analog audio though the cable MAKES a difference.Buying a good cable is not that expensive either, but analog has NO Error Correction, and the signal IS ofcourse different.More power on the cable equals more noise:Cat5 is very low power, thus you need just not a crappy cable...

Just like the power cables

I also have to laugh at the claims made for some premium power cables in the audio industry. Claiming that your sound will be better if you use a $200 power cable is bullsh*t, but I see this sort of claim all the time. Makes me wonder what the miles of cable getting to the house have to do with my audio experience, let alone what the claimants know about modern power supplies.

Suckers born every day....

Sounds like...

... Dylan the shill needs to learn how Ethernet works. Dylan, you don't know jack, and that cable is pure snake oil for moronic "audiophiles" with more money that brains.

Forget about Dylan

Guys, let's forget a second acout Dylan and concentrate on the bs Denon is doing. Can I extrapolate and assume their "premium high-end products" are overpriced as the cable?

Denon Link <> Ethernet

It's amazing how many of you are willing to make such confident statements about this "ethernet" cable and rubbish Dylan's claims when in fact you are only exposing your own ignorance. Did you think to even search for details of the Denon Link interface before you posted your ill informed comments?

Denon Link is not the same as Ethernet. It is a proprietary interface, and hence the specification for it is not publically available. So, I do not know how Denon Link works and hence I do not know how this cable might affect audio quality compared to other cables. Because I do not have the necessary information to form such a judgement, I will keep an open mind about the possibility that this cable could affect the audio quality.

Is there anyone who actually knows the details of the Denon Link specification so we can have an informed discussion rather than an irrelvant discussion about how this cable would not deliver improved Ethernet performance when it is not, and does not claim to be, an Ethernet cable.

Denon, do you hear the sound of my wallet closing shut?

I've gone through several gererations of Denon equipment over the years (decades, really) and I feel a new upgrade coming up. I've known Denon equipment to be well engineered. Lately, I've been having doubts but this is the clicher. I'm one of those twisted customers who has long MEMORY and hates DISHONESTY. I will never buy Denon again. For their sake, I hope they make enough money on their fancy cable to justify alienating customers this way.

Best comments of the year/month/full moon

Hi Inq staff. Any chance there you"ll publish some kind of top for best comments posted by readers? Best should be determined by the amount of flames received. Somebody commenting to this article got tens of them with a few rows of "science". Shurely skilled

It's not an ethernet cable...

I'm sorry, just because it uses RJ45 ends doesn't make it an ethernet cable. It makes it an RJ45 ended 8-core UTP cable.

All you guys mouthing off about zero-error networks must realise that you have two layers of error correction, and possibly more on the application layer. And that this error correction is only possible because the data you are sending is not time-critical.

In AV gear, if you need to resend a packet it's already too late. The opportunity to display or reproduce the content is already gone. That's why the protocols resort to best-guess-or-drop correction.

Why don't they have a buffer you ask? If you buffer one input, you need to buffer all inputs. No-one is going to pay the price difference for equipment with the large amounts of memory and interface bandwidth required to buffer 1080p video with lossless sound.

So, get with the program, bit error rates do matter. That's the theory sorted.

Now for practicality. The frequencies that are needed to run this sort of protocol are well under the Cat 6 standard. If you can actually notice any difference in the signal your cable is dodgy.

Ignorant

First of all why are you people all in a tizzy over Dylan? There may have been one or two replys to Dylan by people who actually know what they are talking about.

Why does it matter to any of you anyway? No error rate is going to make or break the audio quality of your circuit city system. Nobody here will ever be successful enough to buy a good AV system. It does not concern you, so just relax.

dylan, dylan, dylan..

I'm an engineer at a fairly well reknowned recording and mastering studio and despite some rather expensive cables, we sometimes use ethernet cables in two of our digital rigs and our on-location rig for audio purposes. I can guarantee that these cables are not 250 squid cables but cheap cables made by our overweight iron-maiden t-shirt wearing pro-tools geek. we cater for many clients with two ears and not once have we heard how our ethernet cables have hindered quality, just the shite vocalists

But yet...

What's sad is that SMS's are far more of a rip-off than this, and we don't even bat an eye-lid at those. It would cost me £50,000 to wire my house up with this crap. It would cost me £2bn a MONTH in bandwidth if it was charged at the same rate as SMS traffic.

FEC

It might be worth noting that error detection and correction does not *require* any packet retransmission. Even very simple real time protocols with no retransmission capability can include Forward Error Correction.

Hence even if not using IP based protocols, there is no requirement to forgo error correction as long as you have sufficient excess bandwidth to allow for a FEC overhead. Since this will be at worst 50% and in reality much less, there should be ample capacity at gigabit transmission speeds for any resolution of audio that you are going to encounter.

These encoding schemes allow errors to be detected and corrected without any need to retransmit data. They include simple FEC systems like hamming coding, and more sophisticated systems like reed solomon encoding (as used on CDs). The inclusion of interleaving built into many such protocols further reduces the impact of burst errors and makes the FEC even more effective.

So if typical raw (i.e. before FEC coding) line error rates over short distance on UTP connected interfaces are proving to be a problem, its not a cable problem you have, but one of poor engineering design.

RE: Ignorant (by: ak)

You reply with a comment title "Ignorant" and yet you yourself are presenting ignorant comments for the rest of us to laugh at?

DenonLink

Someone mentioned that we ought to check the specs of DenonLink before crucifying Dylan (although that has been done quite comprehensively already...)

My thought is why on Earth would you possibly want to design an interface that had such poor noise rejection characteristics that it required such a cable to work to the best of its abilities in the first place?

I've done a lot of pro TV and audio work and I can honestly say that you could run stuff like AES/EBU audio or SDI video over bell wire in most environments for that kind of distance with no ill effects whatsoever. From practical experience, error counters generally stay at zero or skyrocket - having something that's "a bit noisy" tends not to happen unless you're on cable runs of 30-plus meters.

If DenonLink is that shoddy, I'd suggest looking elsewhere for your audio gear...

Dylan's Right

All of you people assuming this doesn't make any difference are wrong. I've been running one of these cables for several weeks now, and the sound on my system is a lot crisper, with far better separation of bass and treble.

Well worth the money

bwahahaha

Fact: If it uses a RJ45 plug, the wire has 4 pairs, 8 wires in total. (yeah, it's a no brainer), so it can be made with standard components. That is, any fool with a crimper, a wire map of this particular cable and some plugs/wire could make a copy of it.

Fact: Regardless of whether the cable is ethernet, crossover or exotic wire config, zero errors recorded over a period of time of transmission testing means that you have a good cable and good crimping at each end.

Theory: If Denonlink (the protocol) requires a 500 quid cable to ensure zero errors, doesn't that infer that the error handling built in to the protocol is faulty, inadequate or non-existant, and ergo it wouldn't matter worth a damn what cable you are using?

When someone produces a verifiable, repeatable double blind trial proving these cables are worth more than a standard RJ45 Cat6 cable, I'll admit there is something to this.

Such a pity that with all such products, the producers are either completely unwilling to submit to double blind trials in an unbiased environment, or the results come out consistent with a person "guessing".

Buffering and bandwidth

It's less than 360 MiB/s (almost all of which is video) to buffer a 1080p video stream and a 24-bit, 96k, 7.1 channel audio stream. (Denon Link doesn't support more than 2 channels at 192k, which if it did, would push the bandwidth to 360 MiB/s + 360 kiB/s).

I doubt anyone buying a system capable of 1080p who wants a cleaner signal from the components (not just a cleaner cable or satellite signal), would mind spending an extra $7 to buffer 1/2 second of signal. HDMI already offers 2.7x the bandwidth needed to send a 1080p signal, and audio bandwidth is tiny. The only trick would be keeping the two in sync.

If Denon was really concerned about getting a flawless audio signal, why not use cheap cables, transmit 3 signals and have them vote on what the correct value is. Or you could just use one signal and send it multiple times.

It's a proprietary 1.2 Gbps protocol, but lets use Ethernet and UDP as an example. There is 46 bytes of overhead per IPv4 packet on Ethernet. If we used 48 bytes of data, that would be enough to send two copies of one sample for each of the 8 audio channels. 1.2 Gbps is enough bandwidth to send almost 16 million of these (double) packets every second, or 333 copies of 24-bit, 96k, 8 channel, uncompressed audio (sending two copies per packet).

With all this bandwidth, if they can't engineer a protocol that will ensure quality and timely data, without resorting to $500 cables, they need new engineers!