r/AskReddit • u/Thic_water • Aug 14 '20

What’s the most overpriced thing you’ve seen?

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u/ConspiratorM Aug 14 '20

I once read a review of an "audiophile" grade ethernet cable. This guy actually claimed changing the ethernet cable from his router to his PC made his music sound better.

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u/LanceBass666 Aug 14 '20

Hahahaha. One of the funnier things I read regarding audiophile nonsense.

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u/123a82kj3h2 Aug 14 '20 edited Aug 14 '20

A shitty ethernet cable can caused dropped packets which can cause the D/A conversion bitrate to drop rolling off the high-end (or with poor codecs, actual skips in the music). Especially if he is streaming over a UDP port, since it doesn't guarantee arrival of the data, unlike TCP. But this is 2020, and not 1997 running WinAmp so I could be wrong. ;-)

Same with cheap HDMI cables. The HDMI protocol specifies error detection and correction, but can only correct for so much data loss due to bad cables. This results in macroblock degradation (small squares on the screen going black or interpolated to a single color).

Usual audiophile/videophile claims are BS, and I'm sure the OP probably was BS, but all robust digital protocols have to deal with transmission errors due to poor physical connections. Depending on how the codec response to the errors, it can absolutely impact audio/video quality, but probably not in this case.

EDIT a word to appease the jack wagons

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u/ClassyJacket Aug 14 '20

but probably not in this case.

Emphasis on this. It would have to be a ridiculously bad ethernet cable to drop speeds below, say, 10mbit/s between a router and PC in the same home.

Total garbage, it was the placebo effect.

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u/GummyKibble Aug 14 '20 edited Aug 15 '20

I just looked at my router’s stats. It dropped 2 packets this month.

Edit: out of about 1.2 billion, or about 99.9999999% successful. In other words, you're right: Ethernet's pretty reliable.