Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

@amir_asr need to point out I did not say what you have me quoted as saying above. I think you made a mistake there.

@somethingsomethingaudio 

@prof read the review. Amir doesnt recommend it because of the price...

You are all over the place. First you said someone was calling "it all" snake oil, when that person had only said he wanted to see good evidence for a dubious claim, to distinguish it from snake oil. It wasn’t "everything expensive is snake oil"

Now you’ve pirouetted to complain that Amir didn’t recommend a $1,000 USB cable due to it’s high price??? Well of course not! He’d just finished showing it’s performance was indistinguishable from a cheap generic USB cable! Why WOULD he turn around and recommend people pay $1,000 for a cable that promises better fidelity, but doesn’t deliver it???

@prof They absolutely do dismiss expensive stuff. Here is one. Amir shows it does the same thing as the less expensive versions, and therefore doesnt recommend it. Explain to me how that is not exactly what youre saying???

These are the marketing claims for that $1000 USB cable:

New micro insulated quad Alumiloy conductors in a very flexible noise rejecting shielded design offers all resolutions of digital audio beyond DSD sampling rates with excellent clarity. As with analog interconnects, excellent low level details and a highly refined sound. Not dull and boring nor thin and bright, this USB cable lets you hear your music through your front end electronics with true clarity and life.

The clear implication is that standard USB cable lacks clarity and sounds dull, boring and thin.  If that was the case, $1000 would be money well spent.  Of course the company provides no proof points for any of this.  No listening tests.  No measurements.  Nothing.  So we roll up our sleeves and check:

32 tones are thrown at the DAC  using this and dirt cheap USB cable.  There is absolutely no difference in frequency response, distortion or noise floor measured down to -140 dB (25 dB below threshold of hearing).

Listening tests were provided:

JPS Superconductor V USB Cable Listening Tests
I connected the output of the Topping D70s to Topping A90 which in turn drove my Dan Clark Stealth headphones ($4000). I used the high gain on the A90 to make sure I could hear any difference in background noise. I started with the JPS cable and the sound was as wonderful as I remembered on my standard reference tracks (which I have listened to hundreds of times). I then switched to the generic USB cable. Surprising (not), it sounded louder and more dynamic! I switched back to the JDS USB cable and difference vanished, leaving me with less perceived fidelity. Of course, this not a valid test as the switching time is way too long to allow proper comparison for small differences. But if folks want to run by "what I heard," I heard the generic USB cable sounding "better."

Those of you who ask "just listen" would have to believe that the generic cable far outperformed this "superconductor."

Conclusions are thus obvious:

"Conclusions
USB cables in short length deliver all the bits correctly. The ground connection though from the PC to DAC is an analog affair so in theory, some difference in noise can be there. If there is, and you can audibly hear something the solution is not another USB cable but to use better isolation (Toslink, XLR cables for interconnects, etc.). Measurements here show that there is no difference even in that department when with a "noisy" source like my desktop workstation PC.

Ad-hoc listening tests as usual produce unreliable results which if taken at face value, put the generic USB cable ahead of the JPS cable! So if you want to go by that, we still don't have anything of value here.

As you can predict by now, I can't recommend the JPS Labs Superconductor V USB. It is just a waste of money compared to any half-decent generic cable."

Company claims were not shown to be true so they charged $995 more than they should have.  They misled customers and took their money.  Nothing at all like a high performance DAC which produces stated of the art performance matching company's claims.

@prof Wait I never called the tact eq box snake oil. The other member of Audiogon did. Then I tried to explain why that argument was somewhat valid but I agree it's not snake oil in the strictest sense. However the jacked up price and added benefit is in fact snake oil. Which you stated. You said this 

 

Great.  So it's not a snake oil product.  And yet you'd quoted Amir saying it wasn't a snake oil product and implied it may as well have been.  That's the sneaky part I was getting at.

Then you said this 

 It's not "snake oil just because it's expensive."  It's snake oil "because they are charging people huge prices on the basis of claiming audibly superior performance" over cheaper cable, and many at ASR are technically proficient enough to explain why the claims are nonsense (and point out how they are virtually never actually demonstrated in any rigorous manner, either by measurements or controlled listening tests...it's all about the usual audiophile anecdotes).

We are saying the same thing. How is the tact $15,000 unit that many times better than any other eq product out there? So amir is touting its greatness which is what was called out as snake oil. He bought into the very products he doesnt recommend. 

@amir_asr Seriously why are you still here? Don't you have some donations to pole dance for?