best quality firewire 400 (fw400) / firewire 800 (fw800) cables

[macStuff]

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/6-PIN-9-PIN-BETA-FireWire-800-FireWire-400-9-6-Cable-IEEE-1394B-1-8m-Black/253215907311?hash=item3af4d81def:g:kCIAAOSwcLxYLqcR

i found this firewire 800 to firewire 400 cable, im not sure of the quality, has anyone used this seller before?

trying to find best quality / best price
the wrong cables can make everythng awkward to plug in and a pain in the ass


anyone have any experience to share? does better cabling affect firewire speed at all? im curious

some vendors ive observed:
rocketfish, startech, tripp lite, pearstone, insignia, belkin,

what are your fave cables? and why?
are cheap chinese cables not good? or are they a good value?
ive read some threads on other forums i remember that a few people had their problems go away when they switched to a different firewire cable.. thats why im asking

[FdB]

Don't really know.

Picked up a couple of Belkins IEEE-1394 and specs on your variety note: IEEE-1394a. Maybe total length could be a factor, yet I use mine only for short-length connects, only to FireWire drives. (Sneaker Net) Quick search yielded info "no appreciable difference".

I use a highly shielded (braided), 12 foot, 400 to 400 FW cable for large format printer. 

[MusicWorks]

This is what I learned about cables while soldering at the studio:

- All cables carry a copper strand (or silver in some rare cases) inside a plastic tube. It can be shielded or not, multicore or single, but it is in the end a copper strand. Ridiculously priced cables are for people that don't anything about cables...it's true the gauge/impedance of the copper can be variable, but it is in the end a copper strand. So there is no "miracle" cable that will sound better than others.

- Connectors are what keep changing (with the corresponding patents, that is) but the cable is still the same...copper strand. So USB and Firewire are essentially the same, with different characteristic of course, but again -a copper strand- with a connector. The transfer protocol is what changes transfer speed characteristics (USB 1.0/1.1/2.0/3.0). In the end, it is pure marketing.

- However, the overall build quality of the cable is what matters (and impedance if working with audio). So in this particular case, IMHO the best quality Firewire cables are the first generation ones (before all the cheap shitty chinese cables started pouring in) for example the cable that came with the first Firewire interfaces and devices and specially made cables by companies like Lindy.

I recommend you have a look at Lindy cables, very high quality and not very expensive.

My 2 cents!

- MusicWorks

[cyberish]

For the quality of transferring sound over firewire cables pick up some of Audioquest. - The difference was stunning.
I tested with an old M-Audio 410 interface. - Clocking that one externally (in my case via a Apogee Big Ben) you could hear a difference, better sound , more relief, 3D, but to change to the Audioquest Cinnamon cable (they exist FW800-400) was very much the thing to have even better sound. I would say in all that the soundquality lift came 1/3 of the external clocking and 2/3 by changing to the Audioquest fw-cable.

[GaryN]

Hmmm… yeah. I especially love the way that "Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion" because "speed is important" and it affects the "sound" of the data bits.

I'll bet if you take the FW cables and wrap some of those battery-powered speaker wires around them, you'd get even better "interconnection phase purity without the bitter taste of the cinnamon"

Sorry…couldn't help myself. I made that last bit up.

[cyberish]

  , actually it wasn't a M-Audio FW410 when I tested this , it was via a M-Audio Lightbridge...
I'm listening these days (via dead old but good sounding Yamaha i88X clocked to a Apogee Big Ben ) to some contemporary classical recordings to give some feedback to the mixing engineer.
We're working in 24bit/96khz. Mainly the reverb parts of the sound is where you can hear those changes (FW-cable quality, clock) quiet a bit.

[macStuff]

interesting! thanks for telling your experience Cyberish!

the problem i think with the PC market, has always been due to low quality control on alot of generic taiwanese type vendors... thats why u can buy those items for 1$ frm china, etc but sometimes its not a case of low quality/low price sometimes its good quality/low price, depending on the item...

common practice with stores in north america for the last ten years has been one of covert deceptionl
ie: lets take "mountain equipment co-op" as an example, they used to sell really high quality products all
made in the usa. etc. they build up their customer base + reputation, and then they slowly pull the switcheroo
and replace all those high quality items with items that look just as good but are made in china for next to nothing..
its happening in like every single department store, and the ones that arent ripping people off are the ones that are folding, closing their doors forever..  half-ass chinese crap everywhere... which will all end up in landfill eventually :/

[GaryN]

Oh Jeez…

[MusicWorks]

Mainly the reverb parts of the sound is where you can hear those changes (FW-cable quality, clock) quiet a bit.

Yes, the reverb tails is a good place to analyze quality of sound....but the gain you are experiencing is from the external clock and has nothing to do with the FW cable. An example:

Do you guys remember the old days of analog TV? When there was interferrence you could see white snow, or other analog artifacts in the image. Nowadays, with DVB-T (digital TV) there are no artifacts....you either receive the signal....or you don't. A digital signal is a packet stream, so the cable is simply transferring that packet stream. You either have a signal or you don't.

This is the reason why any FW cable will transfer the same packet stream (a package of ones and zeroes) and there will be NO quality improvement. Even if you were to use gold strands.

It's the clock

[cyberish]

Music Works, I know what you mean, the theory etc. But I think I can trust my ears. I did not change the clock and the cable at the same time. At least for me it was obvious that the sound with that Audioquest cable was very much deeper , more tailed, more 3D. - Did you yourself test and compare with a Audioquest fw-cable? When I ordered it , it was more out of playing around like "you never know", but now I hear ;-)

[MusicWorks]

I'm sorry to say the effect is mostly psychological. Maybe the cable you were using before was not up to spec, and the Audioquest is. If you compared the Audioquest and Lindy the results should be identical. However, it's true that within transfer of digital signals you can have bit-perfect or non-bit perfect transfers and it mostly depends of the transceiver at both the output stage and receiving end.

Some transceiver circuits will resample incoming signal (for example to do Sample Rate Conversion) sometimes to sync with the internal clock -if it's not able to slave to an incoming clock signal. Some low to mid end audio interfaces do this, and it will certainly change the cadence of "ones and zeroes". Best way to test is to output a raw AC3 signal to an external decoder and see if it correctly decodes the multichannel stream.

Impedance-matching and AES/SPDIF output status are the only other situation in which a bit-perfect transfer might be compromised. AES3 is a differential digital signal transfer with a required cable impedance of 110ohms, whereas SPDIF is an unbalanced output that requires a normal coaxial with a nominal 75ohm output. Impedance matching transformers must be used if going to AES/SPDIF, given most input transceivers will correctly decode both AES3 and SPDIF transfer protocols (the headers are different, however the bitstream is encoded the same way in both formats).

In any case, the golden rule of audio and music production: if it sounds good, it's good

[Astroman]

imho you're a bit too optimistic regarding digital transfer packet loss.
You certainly know the effect of mismatched S/PDIF cables as you adress it yourself.
That could happen anywhere in the transmission path which I'd even extend right into the CPU. I don't trust the 'it's all numbers anyway' paradigm at all.

Myself using 2 different hardware DSP systems, and both deliver audibly 'superior' processing compared to Intel native stuff (didn't check G4 PPC yet).
I'm not biased in this domain because there was no need to add Pro Tools TDM to my rig.
But it just sounded (!) convincing and worth keeping - opposed to a lot of Intel VST stuff I tried and trashed over the years.

My suspect is based on the fact that a DSP card (regardless which brand) does synced stream processing that can't be interupted from outside. The OS/CPU has no access.
But even in this 'sandbox' complex processing may occasionally shift a bit here or there.
I know it because one of my systems allows to grab and check data at arbitrary points of processing.

I don't even want imagine how a multi-threaded desktop CPU will handle such stuff...
You may assume it performs flawless, because it doesn't throw an error and it's zeroes and ones anyway, but you just cannot be shure.

That's practically what happens on a digital cable when packets get lost. The stream may shift a bit here or there and it may add up.
But of course cable quality isn't related to gold plated hyper copper dunnowhat 

[GaryN]

I'm sorry to say the effect is mostly psychological.

I'm inclined to believe it's ALL psychological.
Aside from the lack of anything resembling a true A/B test, the desire of the psyche to want NEED the Audiocrap to seem better after spending half-a-month's rent money on 2 meters of FW cable cannot be ignored.

Remember, this is the company that sells $1000 speaker wire with little 9-volt batteries attached to "properly polarize" the insulation…seriously - "polarize the insulation"! They also describe how they use different gauge strands of wire in a cable to properly convey different frequencies - seriously.

[mrhappy]

Probably 'Hocus Pocus'... HOWEVER... after watching my grandmother find water with a stick, I never completely dismiss any possibilities!!! Haha! 

[MusicWorks]

They also describe how they use different gauge strands of wire in a cable to properly convey different frequencies - seriously.

Everyone knows that only unicorn hair can convey all frequencies at the same time. That, and a feather from a red dragons back dipped in silver moon paste.

[macStuff]

Probably 'Hocus Pocus'... HOWEVER... after watching my grandmother find water with a stick, I never completely dismiss any possibilities!!! Haha! 

sounds pretty cool, is it on youtube? haha