Is that an optical cable with gold plating to improve the electrical connection?
It’s called SCIENCE sweaty
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.
I do kinda see some point in gold plating electrical cables. Gold doesn’t tarnish so much and is also often used on computer edge connectors.
The issue has always been “audiophiles” telling you they can tell the difference with a gold or gold plated digital connector. Of course you cannot, you either are getting bit errors or not with digital audio. But they do generally provide a more reliable connection overall.
Now don’t ask me about my opinion, you’re talking to the guy that makes radio antennas with speaker wire. I am truly uncultured in terms of electrical connectivity.
TOSLINK is an optical cable though.
The photons gain a richer sound when traveling past the gold.
The gold is to protect the photons from getting micro-plastics, which we all know is in everything and will slow the photons down duh
I did qualify that I was talking about electrical cables distinctly and precisely because the image is of an optical cable.
Gold doesn’t make an external oxide layer when exposed to air. So, any bit of the plug that touches your contact will conduct well, instead of being a toss up on how much insulating oxide is between them.
But again, that’s only important in electrical cables…
Isn’t that pretty much what I said?
That’s compatible with your words. I guess I can’t read right at the first time :)
I mean technically you can hear the difference if it’s a mobile setup that has been plugged and unplugged 9000 times. The gold contacts will fare better because of the lack of oxidation. So for analog signals, I guess you technically could hear a difference.
Thing is, at that point the wear and tear could also be hard on the cable core itself and not the connectors, so you will have functional connectors on a cable with a literal break in the signal wires. But I’ll always feel like a cable is ever so slightly less shit if they’ve decided not to spare the great expense that is 0.00004$ of gold plating.
OP is hilarious though. Gold plate my wifi next please.
Gold plate my wifi next please.
There’s a non-zero chance the wifi antenna traces are gold plated, although IIRC it’s mostly connectors using it so maybe your m2 slot wifi module still has gold somewhere
With a digital cable (the electrical kind) you don’t hear the difference. Either the connection is good enough to get the data stream error free, or it will be dropping in and out and you’d need to clean the contacts or get a new cable.
Depends on cable type and speed. Sometimes it will limit maximum bandwidth available, but yeah if there’s enough noise it will simply kill the connection
Well. If it negotiates a lower bit rate I’m pretty sure the audiophile level kit will tell you it’s no longer 24 bit 96khz or whatever the cool kids use now.
But I’m pretty sure most High bitrate systems will have some level forward error correction, when the cable cannot deliver the snr needed to repair errors the signal will usually completely drop out. It will be perfect then gone.
Without error correction, random bit errors in digital audio are seriously jarring.
Having high quality (in terms of screening and contacts) won’t have the kind of subtle change it can have with analogue signals. With analogue you’re fighting things that can be minor like induced noise.
Gold doesn’t tarnish so much and is also often used on computer edge connectors.
Yes, Gold is a noble metal, so it doesn’t like to oxidize.
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.
Regular toslink is just plastic
That’s what I was thinking, it’s not even a glass fiber-optic. Works fine for audio though and lasers are cool, so it all balances out
Edit: I am aware that mostly anything works good for a digital signal.
Toslink is not a laser just a red LED.
Let me dream
Well the good news is that Toslink can carry “pew pew” noises with high fidelity.
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.
See depends how you look at it. Will it make the cable perform better? No. But then neither do the diamonds around the edge of an expensive watch.
The gold is just there so you know it’s a quality cable. It’s like a rolex fibre cable.
Does the Rolex do the chief function of a watch (keep time) better than a $30 Time ?
So you’re saying what it really does is communicate that you’re a superficial asshole and/or sucker.
Well. I wasn’t really thinking of a rolex specifically. Just comparing the use of precious metals or gemstones on a watch that doesn’t increase the functionality in any way, in the same way the gold plating doesn’t increase the functionality of the optical cable. But it sure looks good.
So I guess, yes. Lol.
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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
How fast would it be spinning? 33 or 45rpm?
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.
This is for-profit deception AKA fraud.
Does this legally qualify as fraud?
If this kind of thing were legally actionable, all salesmen would be imprisoned.
Hey man, you realize everytime you turn on your stereo your couch starts sliding towards it?
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)
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
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
Baking soda or baking powder? Because some (most?) baking powders do contain aluminium salts and some people are put off by that. Maybe that carried over to baking soda too.
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.
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.
Which is a form of value in itself
Did you consider the soft factor of convenience? That has value too
Making no difference to sound is a very expensive addiction.
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!
Unidirectional cables are very silly. I fixed a 300 foot unidirectional HDMI installed backwards during construction. I had to army crawl over ductwork.
For HDMI this is common with active optical cables.
I can imagine directional active cables, but not passive ones.
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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.
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.
But it’s Monster and costs 17x as much as Monoprice, it has to be better!
Septendecupleprice
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
Gold plated connections have a point, it prevents corrosion extending the life of the cable. Whether you think it worth that price is another thing entirely.
Toslink is optical, right?
And I think the gold and silver parts are usually just plastic.
You’re no true audiophile until you have audio graded solid state drive in your PC!
