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.
Did you consider the soft factor of convenience? That has value too
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
Toslink is optical, right?
And I think the gold and silver parts are usually just plastic.
I miss when being an audiophile was just using vintage equipment and/or opting for lossless formats over compressed mp3s.
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.
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
I have no idea what the fuck this meme is about. I gather from the comments it’s something to do with audio stuff? Why is this cable bad? What the fuck is it even supposed to be? I’m so confused
The cable is fiber optic, which is to say light. Light don’t care about gold and silver. The highly polished lens bit is probably also bullshit, but at least light cares about lenses.
The gold isn’t there to conduct anything, it’s there to prevent corrosion, gold doesn’t rust or tarnish.
Neither does the plastic that these cables normally are made of.
More generally, it’s not that cables are bad, it’s that audiophiles have way more money than sense. I’m not exaggerating when i say that I’ve seen short speaker cables sell for £6,000. Anything more than £5 will be of exactly the same quality as the £5 cable. You could maybe argue me up to £15-20.
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.
The one good use of Monster cables I saw was a buddy who played guitar and was pretty energetic in his sets and not disciplined enough to take proper care of his cables.
Monster cables really were pretty tough compared to the cheap stuff, but the bigger deal was the lifetime free replacements. He bought 2 Monster cables for 1/4 cable to his amp, and when one broke he’d swap to the backup while waiting on the replacement in the mail.
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.”
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
But do coat hangers hold up to repeated use ?
That’s a classic and I am glad it see it passed around again. The best part is the people that start delving into the snake oil absurdity that is “audiophile cables” before, you know, getting better actual speakers/headphones. Like for fucks sake, your $200 fancy cable isn’t going to make your bullshit bargain bookshelf speaker into the voice of god. Just get some half way decent equipment and listen to your actual music.
I worked at a big box electronics store back in the day. Problem was we only sold two kinds of cables.
1 - shitty cables with the ends crimped on that will fall off after three uses.
2 - way overpriced gold plated cables that cost 10x or more.
I’d love it if we sold something in-between, but you absolutely could tell the difference between those options. Mostly cause the RCA ends didn’t make an actual decent connection to the equipment, so it wiggled around and induced static into the signal.
I am sure it was no coincidence that those were the two options. I fell into that trap when I was a teen and had my first stereo. I had to buy some cables I couldn’t really afford because they literally didn’t offer RCA cables longer than 6’ in the other brand.
I have friends that are hardcore record collectors of obscure 70s punk, power pop, glam, etc. They have Marantz receivers and top of the line turntables, setups that approach like 10 grand. Then they listen to some of the most poorly recorded, cheaply pressed vinyl you can imagine.
Um you mean greatest music ever made vinyl SIR. The hiss and pop is part of the experience!
Seriously though, I love old punk records, especially when you can find self pressed shit from the 70s. Yea the quality sucks but god damn I’d rather hear that than overproduced, built by focus group crap today /rant
Tbf. many Marantz receivers sound fucking awesome. Although mine’s from the 90s and cost me ~80€. Still blows anything I compare it to out of the water. A modern 1000€ Bluesound Powernode I used to have sounded anaemic in comparison. As a collector of obscure punk and prog vinyl I think it sounds best on a Frankensteined together system with some character that allows you to crank it loud.
Makes sense, I like vinyls for the deliberate retro experience of putting on the record and listening, but I have never agreed that they actually sound better. When CDs became mainstream I was personally thrilled.
I admit there’s a part of me that wants a custom turntable, but you know what? I spent enough on what I’ve got. The whole system was just a few hundred bucks, and it sounds, plays, and looks perfectly fine for me. I’ll never spend that much on an audio system. I’ll just keep sinking stupid money into just records.
I should stop.
Yup, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. The worst instance I saw was someone posting about an intermittent buzz in their system. Multiple people were recommending a full rebuild, (which would cost thousands of dollars). From what they described, it was pretty obvious that OP just needed a ~10¢ ferrite bead on a power cable, to make it stop acting as an antenna.
I was like “okay, you could try rebuilding your entire system like everyone else is suggesting… But maybe start with a ferrite bead. Here is a link for a multipack on Amazon. Worst case scenario, you’re only out like $5. And even if it doesn’t fix this specific case, the multipack is handy to have around anyways, because manufacturers often cheap out and skip adding them when their devices really do need them.” Like three days later, I got a “holy shit this actually worked. You just saved me thousands of dollars (and a ton of time) on a complete rebuild.”
I’m curious about other cases where ferrites are actually useful. I have done some access point installations where I was required to loop a patch cable through a ferrite for each. The majority of APs I install don’t get this treatment. Is it bullshit? I assumed it was, but of course I used them anyway.
Was this in a radio station (or was someone nearby acting as a radio operator, like a police station or dispatch center), by chance? Or maybe in a lab setting where they may have gear that is affected by interference? They tend to be picky about RF interference, and Ethernet can be fairly noisy on certain RF bands. In that case, the ferrite bead was likely to do the exact opposite; They wanted to stop the Ethernet cables from acting as an antenna and broadcasting RF interference.
Yes, all the ones I’ve installed that required ferrites were in hospitals or clinics.
Classic issue and I am a bit shocked they hadn’t run into it before, I had figured that out when i was a teen with my first stereo setup. I am also not surprised at all that they were recommended to fully rebuild lmao
Rebadge them with a fancy name and sell them for $20 to the gullible. 😉 “Toroid Choke Core”.
Sell gold electroplated ones with “extra EM protection” for £150
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
To be fair, it was 4 coat hangers. The Monster cable was therefore outnumbered.
Yeah babe, my wardrobe is worth 100k.
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! 😈
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.
And if you don’t, you might wind up shot, who knows.
Better than 🦇 wings?
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.
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.
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
And theyre fast!
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.
Technically you’re still hearing the difference. If it makes contact, you’re hearing the music, if it doesn’t make contact, you’re not hearing the music.
Yeah but if a normal cable stops the music entirely you clean the contacts or buy a new one and then suddenly it’s back to a perfect reproduction.
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.
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.
Umm, they are already using plastic, don’t you see the silver ABS part??? (Jk)
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.
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.
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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Lol you’re the reason marketing is a profession.
Now go read my other comment in this thread and realise this was about as obvious as you can make sarcasm…
Nah
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”
Hey man, you realize everytime you turn on your stereo your couch starts sliding towards it?
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.
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?
Abs is a type of plastic, ergo an insulator.
Ah yeah, you know the gold plated connections make all the difference for the fiber optic connection
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
Those 128kbps are going to be well delivered, that’s for sure.
They’re going to look damn good getting where they’re going.
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
Making no difference to sound is a very expensive addiction.
