Is that an optical cable with gold plating to improve the electrical connection?
It’s called SCIENCE sweaty
I love sweaty science.
You gotta pronounce it schweaty science… Source: My ex used to lug 50lb buckets of mud up 3 flights of stairs several times a day…
You’re gonna love my schwetty balls.
Better than 🦇 wings?
And if you don’t, you might wind up shot, who knows.
I would ask how you know that guy sweats a lot, but then I saw his username.
Fair enough.
It’s a joke, Noodle isn’t actually calling Enigma sweaty but ironically using it instead of “sweetie”
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Yes.
It’s also for digital signals, so interference doesn’t matter (up to the point it stops everything).
But hey, it also has a silver ABS grip.
That’s so lame. They should have gone with gold HDPE.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I would think it’s to resist corrosion, but there are plenty of cheaper metals to plate with that don’t corrode, so even that’s a stretch.
Or, you know, plastic.
If you wanted to make a high quality plug, you’d use a stainless steel guide. It has to be steel because it’s elastically deformed during insertion, and any plating will be scratched with enough use.
Most plugs don’t work that way, but this one model does.
Umm, they are already using plastic, don’t you see the silver ABS part??? (Jk)
That sounds like something one of those humans would say.
Fucking humans
The data link is 100% digital.
There’s micro plastics in our data streams now.
I once had a Best Buy sales person tell me “the improved shielding helps with magnetism”. I stared at him for a sec and said “if there is enough magnetism in my house to bend light, how my stereo sound really won’t be one of my main concerns”
But how many people do you think he used that line on and it sealed the deal?
Given the results of the 2016 and 2024 elections in the United States? Way way WAY too many!
It’s for those occasions when there’s a black hole passing through your house. Gotta be prepared.
Could just be a regular magnetar neutron star
I used to sell TVs for Best Buy back in the day. The Video Department manager, my boss, set up a display side by side to show the difference between $40 Monster cables and the normal cables that came with a DVD player.
When there was no noticable difference, he went into the TV settings and adjusted the settings for the normal cables to make the picture look like shit. Not all customers are that gullible though, so usually one of the more savvy ones would fix the settings. So my boss would have to go in and fuck the settings up again once or twice a shift.
Hey man, you realize everytime you turn on your stereo your couch starts sliding towards it?
My favorite story along these lines…
Someone compared Monster cables to un-bent coat hangers.
https://gizmodo.com/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger-363154
“Seven songs were played while the group was blindfolded and the cables swapped back and forth. Not only “after 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire,” but no one knew a coat hanger was used in the first place.”
To be fair, it was 4 coat hangers. The Monster cable was therefore outnumbered.
This is a classic.
A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore “prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal”.
So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.
Earth: look at my mighty magnetic field that pushes back the very radiation of the sun!
Wooden block: hold my beer
Installing cable TV at a man’s house, ripped his Monster coax connector off. He was appalled! (I was appalled!) Showed him what I was replacing it with. Parts guide.
“The shield is quad-woven steel. Yours was 1x of angel hair copper. The dielectric is solid, not a noodle. See? (bendy, bendy) Foil shield? Uh, did yours have one? Oh, I see the shredded bit right there!”
Bent the center conductor on his Monster cable with my pinky. “Try that with mine.” Stopped him before he hypodermic-needled himself.
tl;dr: Whatever the cable guy cuts for you is miles above Monster grade.
It’s like Yeti gear. “So you paid $35 for a cup that’s simply a vacuum sealed canister? I got a 6-pack off Amazon for $25. Cute colors too!”
$35 is generous
Been 15-years ago, but I bet an audiophile coworker, who had a physics degree, he couldn’t tell the difference in a coat hanger and proper wires.
“Well, yeah, but, bla, bla, bla…”
Now I wish I could shove that article up his butt! 😈
Yeah babe, my wardrobe is worth 100k.
But do coat hangers hold up to repeated use ?
Ah yeah, you know the gold plated connections make all the difference for the fiber optic connection
I like to head on over the auto zone, get me some of that dialectic grease and dip all my dac cable ends. Just feels good going on ya know?
/s
Edit: onlyfans? Like just me greasing up different terminations and inserting them.
Just as important is what they connect to. You know the plastic part it connects to inside whatever device you are connecting to. Same concept when monster cables were a thing, the gold plated connectors that connect to the back of your tv using plastic and undefined metal.
Gold plating is used to prevent corrosion, not optimize conductivity. It matters only for the longevity of the cable.
Those 128kbps are going to be well delivered, that’s for sure.
FWIW toslink supports up to 125mbps theoretically
Much lower in practice of course, but it’s a bit better than 128k
Yeah but my mp3’s from Kazaa are all 128. I want to hear them perfectly as the original ripper intended without distortion from the cables. The gold connector adds warmth to the sound.
now that’s a name i haven’t heard in a while
I preferred Gnutella.
Edonkey (also for 9 second 240p porn videos called 1.mpeg)
What about BearShare?
Overnet. Or Shareaza.
I wondered why the PS5 didn’t have optical out when the PS3 did, then thinking back on it, I probably never owned content/speakers that were good enough to really tell the difference. I had routed the PS3 audio to a receiver with 5.1 surround, and video to a projector via HDMI. Then just played media from an external/had a dual boot to yellowdog Linux at the time. Was fun for young me, hell the projector was probably only 720p at the time
Wait its actually worth something? I thought it was 2mbps limit.
Oh yeah for PCM it’s CD quality on everything and capable of 24bit/96khz on most hardware made in the past decade (I think there’s some high end stuff that does 24bit/192khz, but funnily enough I imagine you need a somewhat higher grade than typical cable for that, since most are made of super cheap plastic fibre, which is usually fine)
You can also send bitstream over it for most pre Blu-ray multichannel formats if you have a compatible receiver
They’re going to look damn good getting where they’re going.
ABS Silver Shell
silver-colored plastic
It’s actually anti-lock breaking system, super high end; not many cables have it
Same bullshit with guns.
“Hi-tech polymer slide, boolshit, boolshit, boolshit…”
It’s fair-quality plastic, painted silver. My Smith & Wesson EZ is wearing off. :(
You can sell aluminum free baking soda and convince someone baking soda contains aluminum. Fads and marketing are becoming an epidemic
I’m so glad this is illegal where I’m from
Not sure if that’s the case elsewhere, but here truthful statements that aren’t exclusive to your brand also must have a warning. For instance, if I want to add “rich in calcium!” to my yogurt’s packaging, I must also add right next to it “like all other yogurt”
Where do you live? It sounds sane there!
Boneless Pizza ass moment
So regardless of the fact that it’s about an optical connector here, and hence completely nonsensical, gold is actually a worse conductor of electricity than copper or silver. The point of gold plated connectors is not so much to improve the immediate audio quality, but to prevent oxidation of the connector over time, which can degrade quality and lead to bad contact. Gold is a noble metal, so doesn’t oxidize. I would think most audiophiles know this?
I used to have to replace the cable of my electric guitar every few years because the sound would get crackly or drop out intermittently, I eventually got one with gold plated 6.35mm plug and I’m still using that same cable 15 years later.
You are correct; the point of gold plated contacts is anti-corrosion and long service life not for absolute highest conductivity.
I’m a ham radio operator; I have some silver-plated antenna connectors, because antenna feedlines are dealing with extremely weak signals on receive, so any loss you can eliminate in the connector the better. Problem is they corrode to hell everywhere they aren’t tightly screwed together. For consumer AV equipment the signals are basically never weak enough to bother with that.
I would think most audiophiles know this?
They’re not marketing to audiophiles. They’re marketing to dudes and dads. They aren’t trying to get the guy hooking a manual turntable up to a tube amplifier, they’re trying to get the guy attaching a PS5 to an LG TV to a Sonos soundbar. They’re going for the guy who is spending middle class money on AV equipment without bothering to understand it.
Wish I’d thought of it.
I wonder if, in the 15 years of not buying the cheap cables, you managed to come close to saving what you paid for that ten cents of gold plating.
I have no idea, and I don’t particularly care either, it’s not like it was some wildly expensive cable (though I don’t remember the price) … I just know that I saved myself a whole lot of inconvenience.
Making no difference to sound is a very expensive addiction.
This is even funnier considering the fiber element in toslink is actually plastic which was chosen to make it really cheap since the distance was not of concern like a proper multimode fiber cable made with glass.
Audiophiles are the stupidest conceited fools who have ever been parted from their money.
Don’t forget your Audiophile grade cat5e cables for your NAS! Plug them in the right way though so the arrows point away from the NAS!
Directional cables kind of make sense in an analogue, single-ended connection if it’s about the shielding being connected to ground only on one side… although I haven’t tried it in practice. Still, it has nothing to do with signal directionality, just noise rejection. The ground lift switch on some devices does the same.
But it’s Monster and costs 17x as much as Monoprice, it has to be better!
Septendecupleprice
The biggest impact I ever saw was an electrical filter for advanced audio systems. It’s basically an alternator. And it was the most impressive piece of any audio system I sold.
I once had a guy try to sell me one of these to my face. I asked him to explain why it was better than the one I got in the box with my DVD player, and he carried on about better conductivity and improved sound.
Called him out on his bullshit and never returned.
I miss when being an audiophile was just using vintage equipment and/or opting for lossless formats over compressed mp3s.
There’s always been a group of audiophiles with more money than sense. To the point that “audiophile” almost feels like an insult to me, and I’m a man who…well…loves his audio. They should have a word for that.
Audio enthusiast
