AMP-F2: Reviews & Feedback

As far as I understand it, the data comes to our house – just like with electricity, like on a highway. Fast and slow cars drive on bad tarmac. To ensure peace and order on the road, you install a toll station, essentially a different power cable and power cable, and the road suddenly becomes super smooth tarmac. This helps to get more power and sound. It's best to use a switch as a mount station (e.g., Silend Angle Bonn 8) and a decent network strip (e.g., SUPRA Cables Power Strip MD06 MK 3.1 EU SPC Black) with a DC blocker in front of it.
And the result is that in the end, all the cars park comfortably in front of the Super Bowl Stadium.

 

Let's take the image of the highway with its moving cars. The cars are the protocol. The cargo in the cars is the data being transmitted. It doesn't matter whether the cars deliver their cargo on good or bad asphalt. The cargo arrives undamaged.
This is easily verifiable. For example, the "bit test" from RME illustrates this very clearly.




The test confirms that the data (i.e. the load in the cars) arrives as it was originally sent (loaded into the car) and is played back (loaded from the car) exactly as sent.
The condition of the road surface (cable) plays no role at all. It doesn't matter whether the data is delivered on a highway (so-called audiophile cables), a country road (conventional audio cables), or a dirt road (cheapest, mass-produced cables).

The data arrives. Always. And always, and in all cases, unchanged!

It is processed and rendered exactly as it was sent. Nothing gets worse, and nothing can get better!

This is a physical fact and cannot be refuted.
Anyone who can hear cable sound is out of this world.

Anyone who spends exorbitant amounts of money on audiophile cables is completely crazy.

The industry is milking this cow and is happy about all the idiots who buy it.

This is and remains bullshit bingo.

 

Are you high?!?

 

Clearly, cables themselves don't sound good, but they influence the tone and determine a harmonious sound.

 

No they don`t and they can`t. It is not possible as you learn a bit more above...

 

what you call "harmonious sound" has something to do with added harmonics / emphasized frequencies, all things that a cable doesn't do; unless there is a - combination of - capacitor, inductance and resistance attached to it; all things that will make it everything but a cable.
Please, don't say that cables do have a sound signature. And for your health, don't even believe it.

 

I think there's a bit of technical misunderstanding or more likely misinterpretation of the "facts" when it comes to network cabling.
Firstly, a piece of wire has no ability whatsoever to correct or otherwise improve data transmission performance. Take your typical Cat5e/Cat6/Cat7 ethernet cabling for instance. Yes, it's possible to degrade the link performance BUT to achieve that you actually have to deliberately have a condition or conditions that impair the electrical performance of the link or the channel. Let's look at some possible causes of link or channel performance degradation:

• Damage to the cable(s); This can take many forms but we can start with the improper installation. Stretching the cable during hauling, crushing the cable, placing too tight a bend or bends in the cable or physical damage to the cable sheath to name just a few of the common problems.
  
  
• Too long a link or channel: A channel is comprised of the link (the fixed cable and its associated sockets) plus the patch cables at each end of the link. The maximum length a channel without repeaters can be is 100 metres at 20 deg. C. This maximum length decreases with an increase in temperature as temperature affect transmission losses. So, if any part of the channel has cable in an environment where the ambient temperature exceeds 20 degrees C the overall length of the cabling must be reduced accordingly to ensure the channel performance isn't compromised.
  
  
• Incorrect fit off: This is incorrect or faulty termination of the wires (including shielding) onto a plug or socket. The most common IME is not terminating the wires correctly on the sockets. It's more than just putting the right wire on the right positions, it's ensuring the termination (most commonly using insulation displacement or crimp techniques) is electrically and mechanically sound. An improper termination can lead to a high resistance connection on one or more of the wires and whilst the signal might still get through the performance of the link or channel may be significantly degraded by unbalancing the pair which is a major contributor to near-end crosstalk which can significantly degrade data transmission performance. Split and/ or split and corrected pairs - ethernet cables have 4 pairs of wires inside them and the wires must be connected to the correct pins of the patch cable or wall / patch panel sockets to work. As the nomenclature "pairs" implies, the wires are arranged in twisted pairs and that pairing must be maintained throughout the installation. This means that when the installer "fits off" the cable to the socket they must maintain the natural twist of each pair as much as is practical right up to the point of termination. This is especially important on Cat6 and Cat7 installations where improper termination can significantly impact on crosstalk performance and thus potentially degrade the performance. If the installation uses shielded cable and sockets the installer must correctly terminated the shielding wires and / or foils according to the manufacturer's instructions.
  
  
• Mixing different categories of components: Cat5e, Cat6 and Cat7 installations must use components (i.e. cables, sockets and plugs of the same or higher rating in order to achieve the maximum performance capability of the link or channel.)
  For example; if you want a link or channel to perform to Cat6 standards (1GBs/s full duplex transmission) ALL the components in the link or channel must have a minimum of Cat6 rating and be installed and fitted off to Cat6 standards. You can't mix Cat5e and Cat6 components and expect Cat6 performance. If you do the performance of the link or channel will fall back to the lower standard.
  
  
• Interference issues: The usual culprits are incorrect building cabling. The cabling in the walls, ceilings and ducts that don't comply with the regulations or standards. A typical problem is running your network cables too close to mains power cabling or sockets, LED lighting power supplies, transformers (generally the type used for older low voltage lighting), high voltage insect zappers and florescent lighting fittings. These can induce electrical noise into the data cable and impair transmission performance. Sadly, I all too often find these problems when investigating data transmission problems in a customer's premises. Either the installer has disregarded these requirements during installation or an electrician has subsequently installed power cables or lighting equipment too close to an existing installation. Yes, interference from mutual induction /coupling is real. Anyone who has a turntable will probably have experienced problems with hum if the low-level phono cables have been run too close to the mains power cables.
  
  
• Faulty patch cables. It's possible to end up with a faulty patch cable in your network. Either gone faulty due to excessive flexing, physical damage (crushing and your cat or dog chewing on them is more common than most would like to admit to) or just faulty from manufacture. I got caught out with the latter which had me scratching my head trying to find the problem. Long story short, I purchased a Cat6 rated ethernet patch cable for a new printer. On trying to print a large document the printer took an extremely long to print. Put the printer on another cable and it worked perfectly. So what was the problem with the new cable? Got out a simple wire mapping tool and it tested perfectly. No broken, shorted or crossed wires. It wasn't until I took a very close look at the colours of the wires through the transparent shells of the connectors that I noticed something amiss. I got out the Cat6 transmission tester and measured the transmission performance of the cable only to discover it had massive crosstalk between two of the pairs. Hmmm.... what's happened here? It would appear that somehow during manufacture two of the pairs had become split on one end of the cable. It was probably discovered during wire mapping testing but instead of discarding the cable someone at the factory must have tried to "fix" the problem by swapping around a few wires on one end of the patch lead in an effort to "correct" the mistake. Probably completely explains why the 10 metre cable was actually 5cm short out of the packet. Unfortunately in doing so they created a transmission crosstalk problem that was only identified by me as the consumer with a Cat6 transmission analyser. Now your average consumer isn't going to have a Cat6 transmission analyser just lying around for such occasions so this type of fault might have turned out to be one hell of a headache for the average non-technical type without the right testing equipment available to them to identify this sort of problem.
  
  
• "Anaconda" thick cables: On troubleshooting a customer's system to which he had fitted a very expensive network cable that had the diameter of a baby anaconda. The customer complained of intermittent drop-outs but the cable tested fine. So what was the issue? The excessive unsupported weight of the cable dangling out of the back of the equipment had caused a fracture on a solder joint on the PCB to which the ethernet jack had been wired resulting in intermittent breaks in data transmission. Yes, with a resoldering of the joint on the PCB it was fixed but the unsupported excessive cable weight was the actual cause of the problem in the first place.

In short, ethernet data cables can't enhance the performance of the network, only degrade it if they haven't been installed correctly, are damaged or as I found out, faulty in manufacture (which is rare). In a network where all the components have been correctly installed and possibly even certification tested to the specified category standard(s), buying an ultra-expensive patch cable to connect the fixed (structural cabling) or just straight between a port on the router to the port on your streaming device is just foolhardy. The performance of a data link or channel is limited by the performance of the lowest performing component in the line. IOW, fitting a Cat6 patch cable to a Cat5e installation won't make it perform to Cat6 standards.

Will an expensive ethernet cable magically "fix" jitter or packet losses? NO, it simply can't. It's a passive device. Sorry to break the bad news to those under the impression that they think they can. If any manufacturer or vendor is promising these "benefits" they are boldly lying to your face whilst simultaneously quietly laughing behind your back knowing full well that audiophools are quickly parted from their money and are easy targets for such snake oil merchandise. Ah, but I hear the cries from the gallery already. "You've got cloth ears, your system isn't up to the esoteric heights mine is so you won't notice the difference, you won't know the difference until you try it..... yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, I too was once a "true believing" audiophool. And yes, I did spent tens of thousands of dollars on so called "audiophile" cables only to be utterly disappointed. It's amazing how powerful advertising hype, cash for comment reviews and expectational bias can be. After all you've watched the glowing reviews on YouTube, read the advertising in the audio porn magazines, then finally taken the plunge, got out your credit card and spent all this money buying some high-end cable so it's got the be better - right?

 

...or 15 minutes in the microwave oven.

Imagination and a lot of believe can move mountains...

How would you try to explain it in a technically comprehensible way?

 

Ok... one may even believe cables can make a difference, but... BUT... and I mean BUT!!! Even believing that a cable needs burn-in.
No, this is evidence of lack of knowledge, logic and common sense. I really feel sad for such ignorance. I am sorry, but cannot feel anything else.