USB Cable Ridge Street Audio/Synergistic Research

I am part of a group of audiophiles that compared the Ridgestreet to Kimber to Cryoparts to Synergistic to the Belden "Gold" USB cables. The good news is that the clear winner was the Ridgestreet USB cable (by a healthy sonic margin). Every single sonic parameter (that differentiates USB cables sonically) was clearly better with the Ridgestreet offering. As a side note, I must give Cryoparts some kudos here too for offering a clear step up the sonic ladder for very little money (by far the cheapest of the bunch but not cheap sounding). It's not nearly as good as the Ridgestreet but both of these USB cables are solid recommendations in my book. One as a low cost upgrade and the other that may represens the best sounding USB cable in the audio marketplace today (at this point in time mind you). I'm sure that Nordost will offer a $5.000 USB cable "for us" once we start seeing more USB dacs approaching the $20k mark ;-)

As for the other companies making USB cables (in this comparison) I seriously started to wonder if they really did their research as they created their offerings or just tried to "grab some marketshare" by quickly "baking up" something that "looks good" and put USB connectors on each end ;-)

Ehider,The good news you mention I would say is actually bad news.Good news in the sense you determined the best sounding cable,bad news in the sense 450$/meter or whatever the price is too much for many people in the neighborhood I live in.Thanks for the tip though.Its almost Christmas and I do like to dream,cheers,Bob

Ehider,

Did you use the iRoc for your tests?

Thanks

I suppose in the end it will be a matter of having to try it to really "know". Still I'd like to try to understand the science behind it. I read the technical information on the Ridgestreet site but I couldn't glean why anything they claimed that their cable does affects the sonic product. Surely there's a way to describe effective benefits of a cable in terms of what it transmits (or does not transmit) to the DAC and why it's beneficial. In other words, if comparing cable A to cable B . . .

If bits are bits then
If the differences are bit-related then
- does A change fewer bit values than B?
- does A transmit with less data loss (null values) than B?
- does A transmit data with better timing than B?
- does A reduce a need to resend data over B?
- some other effect?
If the benefits are not bit-related then
- does A limit superfluous energy sent to the DAC better than B?
- some other effect?
If bits are not bits then
What about the nature of bits (not the value) affects the performance?

I'm not trying to dispute anyone's claim of sonic superiority of A over B. I would just like to know why . . . even just a rough idea . . . before spending hundreds of dollars on something that I don't remotely understand. Again, a previous poster stated that the superiority of some USB cables "is not just a subjective opinion." So what's the fact or theory behind them?

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>I would just like to know why . . . even just a rough idea . . . before spending hundreds of dollars on something that I don't remotely understand.<

M3pilot... probably like that old movie conversation in which one guy says...

"those that knows ain't saying..."

I don't really understand how that electricity comes into my house and powers my whatevers... but I still use it and mostly enjoy and appreciate everything it does for me.

:) listening,

Ed

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