USB printer cable VS USB audiophile grade cable?

Better shielding against noise sources almost always pays dividends when needed. No doubt about that.

It's caused by dirty USB power. It actually adds signal to your music. The Furutech cable is well engineered and rejects some of this electromagnetic interference, which is from your computer. Think about it, there are millions of circuits inside your computer and as they operate they cause interference on a quantum level. It does not affect the computer at all, and the noise generated by these effects simply flows with the electricity, no big deal. Now, if you connect your USB cable to your USB DAC then that polluted power can freely flow down the 5 volt power feed, aka V bus, along the powerline inside each USB cable. This extra noise pollutes the analog outputs of your DAC. It goes right through and into your speakers. Your observation totally nailed it.

USB Disruptor solves this problem, you can read more on usbdisruptor dot com - for $49, not hundreds or thousands.

And, even if your DAC reclocks it doesn't matter. I've gotten great sound out of cheap DAC's - no asynch or fancy Sabre chips - simply by removing the dirty usb power. USB Disruptor makes virtually any DAC sound great, and I don't mean it makes any DAC sound like a Bricasti M1, or DirectStream DAC, or any other of the world's finest DACs, what I mean is it lets the DAC do what it's designed to do, and the cheapest DAC's don't sound bad, they just sound a bit hollow, but very musical and enjoyable.

I assure you, no DAC sounds good with dirty USB power, and like you Dasign, you've heard the difference, but there are so many other people out there that are missing out.

And you don't have to spend a lot, this is a simple problem that was not well understood and in some ways overlooked.

Dirty USB power is the cause of digital woes, I will go down as saying that forever because I've heard it first hand.

It's caused by dirty USB power. It actually adds signal to your music. The Furutech cable is well engineered and rejects some of this electromagnetic interference, which is from your computer. Think about it, there are millions of circuits inside your computer and as they operate they cause interference on a quantum level. It does not affect the computer at all, and the noise generated by these effects simply flows with the electricity, no big deal. Now, if you connect your USB cable to your USB DAC then that polluted power can freely flow down the 5 volt power feed, aka V bus, along the powerline inside each USB cable. This extra noise pollutes the analog outputs of your DAC. It goes right through and into your speakers. Your observation totally nailed it.

USB Disruptor solves this problem, you can read more on usbdisruptor dot com - for $49, not hundreds or thousands. It's for sale on Audiogon.

And, even if your DAC reclocks it doesn't matter. I've gotten great sound out of cheap DAC's - no asynch or fancy Sabre chips - simply by removing the dirty usb power. USB Disruptor makes virtually any DAC sound great, and I don't mean it makes any DAC sound like a Bricasti M1, or DirectStream DAC, or any other of the world's finest DACs, what I mean is it lets the DAC do what it's designed to do, and the cheapest DAC's don't sound bad, they just sound a bit hollow, but very musical and enjoyable.

I assure you, no DAC sounds good with dirty USB power, and like you Dasign, you've heard the difference, but there are so many other people out there that are missing out.

And you don't have to spend a lot, this is a simple problem that was not well understood and in some ways overlooked.

Dirty USB power is the cause of digital woes, I will go down as saying that forever because I've heard it first hand.

Better USB cables seem to have several attributes:

1 better shielding
2 heavier ground and power wires
3 better dielectrics
4 smaller signal wires
5 good impedance match

USB uses a differential signalling technique.. This inherently implies some common-mode noise rejection at the receiver. The problem is that these receivers dont reject CM noise vey well.

Some async USB interfaces use the power in the cable to generate the timing/clocking and therefore, any variation in this voltage can cause jitter. The voltage from a PC USB port is not that clean to begin with,so the cable just adds inductance, which adds noise. This is the reason why heavier power and ground wires improve things.. The best scenerio of course is to use an external high quality supply and not the one from the computer.

Improving the common-mode noise will also reduce jitter.. There are two ways to accomplish this:

Add a CM filter to the cable
Get a USB interface withgalvanic isolation

Better Sheilding of the cable can also have an effect, but I’m not sure why.  There may be RFI to the receiver or impact on the impedance.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio