About USB cables in general

[chrisc]

In our audio club we have a scientist who is the chief scientific officer for the Square Kilometre Array, the largest group of radio telescopes in the world, that are nearing completion in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. He had two doctorates, one in electronic engineering, another in computer science

The reason I mention this is since this fellow never accepts anybody's word at face value. He inspects and examines all aspects of anything engineering-related when it comes to audio

Although he considers fancy cables to be of no theoretical value in terms of improving the sound of a system, we have shown over and over again that the substitution of a better (mains, interconnect, speaker) cable does have a noticeable effect on the overall sound. It appears to be cumulative, first the mains cable and plugs, then the speaker cable, each one helps a little, in small increments

We have not been able to duplicate this phenomenen with USB cables. However, there is (often, not always) a difference between using a USB cable of any sort (not a cheapie USB printer cable, but a decent one costing perhaps the equivalent of £20) and a Cat-7 LAN cable.

A room-full of listeners, who were not informed in advance of what we were doing, could detect (some) difference, but were not always able to put their fingers on it

I have tried various permutations of AudioQuest. I figured that robustness and accuracy of construction was the primary consideration. There are some inexpensive, well made and shielded USB cables using decent quality copper made by "Lindy". I'm using their Gold one and it seems very good to me