Posted by Jim Gilliland on 11/08/06 21:44

Guest wrote:
> Jim Gilliland wrote:
>> Guest wrote:
>>
>>> I have read over the last few years about HDMI/DVI cables being all
>>> the same regardless of build quality because "ones and zeros are
>>> ones and zeros. It either works or it does not." This type of
>>> reasoning makes sense on it's face, but then I recalled having a
>>> Monster Cable optical cable and then an Acoustic Research optical
>>> cable and I noticed a very big difference in sound quality. The AR
>>> outperformed the Monster to a very larger degree.

>> Really? Can you describe the difference between the sound of the two
>> cables?
>
> Yes. The Monster sounded flat (some people may love that) and lower in
> volume. It lacked detail, kick and bass. The AR had kick, clarity, bass
> and it was louder. It gave the music and surround sound true impact.

And to what do you attribute this difference in sound? How do you suppose the
cable altered the bit stream to cause the audible difference that you believe
you heard?

I'm not sure how to interpret words like "kick" and "impact", but words like
"louder" and "bass" have a fairly specific meaning. In order to impact the
volume of a digital signal, some fairly simple arithmetic needs to take place.
In order to impact just the low frequency portion of the signal, some rather
more sophisticated arithmetic must take place.

Apparently, one (or perhaps both!) of your cables is able to do some fairly
sophisticated digital processing - changing the bitstream in such a way that the
values carried by each 16-bit word were modified to create more or less bass.

Changing the bass characteristics of the music would require that your cable
change each successive 16-bit word in exactly the right direction (some values
increased, some decreased, some left unchanged) in exactly the right sequence
over an extended period of time. And it would have to do all that without
losing any of the signal bits (pre-emphasis and so on), nor mixing up any of the
interleaved samples for the right and left channels.

I think this is an amazing discovery! You shouldn't be telling us about it here
- you should be documenting your discovery and sending it to the Patent Office!
Imagine that a simple piece of fiber can do processing that we thought
required a sophisticated DSP integrated circuit. What a wonderful world we live in!

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