Posted on August 18th, 2010 by Sasha Muller

No, really. I’m serious. Those red SATA cables you got free with your motherboard, or those black ones that came pre-installed in your PC, they’re not up to the job. They might be capable of transferring hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes in a flash, but when it comes to transporting uncompressed high-fidelity audio files, they’re just not good enough. If you want to hear your music as the artist intended then you need new, improved Super SATA cables.


Or at least that’s what you’d understand from reading the recently published blog of a veteran Hi-Fi journalist, Malcolm Steward. To be absolutely fair, it wasn’t the SATA cables in his PC that he replaced, but rather the cables connecting the hard drives to the motherboard of his NAS device. He claims that after changing those standard SATA cables for the Super variety that he, “clearly identified easily perceptible improvements.”

He continues, and surmises why there could be such an improvement:

“My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the ‘air’ around instruments.”

The alarm bells immediately start ringing. How on earth can a SATA cable delivering 0s and 1s to their respective destination have any effect on those 0s and 1s? The answer is, it can’t. Unless it’s a magical one made of pixie shoes. After all, if a SATA cable was so poor as to cause errors in the transmission of data, you wouldn’t be able to listen to the music in the first place: your operating system wouldn’t boot, and in the case of a NAS device, well, it just wouldn’t work.

And as for poor SATA cables adding noise to the music? It’s simply impossible. The SATA cable would need to physically alter the sequence of 0s and 1s, and would be as likely to add noise to a JPEG image file as it would be an audio file. And regardless, error correction does not allow for such an eventuality. If it did, well, I wouldn’t be checking Facebook, listening to a low-bitrate MP3 and intermittently typing this blog post. I’d be staring at a blank computer screen, or, if I was really lucky, maybe one that was a lovely shade of blue.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/08/18 ... nd-better/

Analogue: cables matter
Digital: doesn't matter.

SATA is digital. (as the Americans say) Go figure.

Anyone saying they see an improvement by buying a premium digital cable is either lying or fooling themselves.

It's not the cable, it's the hard drive, go buy a SCSI or SAS drive (along with one of those SuperSATA cables), your music will sound awesome!!!!!!

Getting better speakers is a good bet for better sounding music.

Not 100% true.

There are places for premium cables, but not in the home market.

Tests show over 15ft (5m-ish) it makes a difference, but not any less

Better speakers/cat5 speaker cabling is a better investment though

Also do not forget that the majority of people cannot tell much difference normally so extra special cables will make bugger all difference.

Remember, aligning your cables N-S to match the Earth's magnetic field improves audio quality 150%.

As does placing a blue piece of paper under your left front speaker and a piece of green paper under your right front speaker

o_0

LOLWUUUUUUUUUT

i hear that integrated Southbridge chips introduce lots of noise into music. sure, they maybe able to transfer and organise gigabytes of digital data from your hard drives, USB connections, PCI add-in cards and anything else you care to throw at them, but when it comes to high-fidelity audio files, theyre just not good enough.

someone mustve been high

The only possible improvement would be, when the better cables have better shielding and give off less RF to affect the analogue reproduction circuitry... Digital optical out to a dedicated amp should solve that though, if you are an audiophile...

An acquaintance says" how can anything that small be any good " denying the capacity and fidelity of my ipod. his collection of upto 35 year old vinyl and cd's is the pinnacle of audio fidelity in his view. Some just won't be told.

And before anyone starts on the fidelity issue his speakers date from the late 70's too.
I also quite like the space saving Spotify. Prob get burnt at the stake if I go on.

Now that I can believe.
The onboard sound on both my pc and laptop are terrible. I've switched to an external card to get rid of the noise.

In theory there's some logic to it however what self respecting hi-fi buff would listed to music from a home made nas?
Every commercial nas box I've seen has fixed connectors so you can't change the cables.