Digital Trends

Rob Enderle really gets my goat. You remember him—he's the one who just wrote a TalkBack column disparaging Apple. What really burns me is that he got more hate mail than I ever have. Now I feel ten feet small. There's only one way to regain my rank as the most hated writer in consumer electronics:  It's time to talk about premium cables again.

The last time I wrote about cables was, well, in my book. But the last time before that was in a magazine devoted to custom installation. That column was headlined "The Truth About Cables," so I guess you could call this one "The Truth About Cables, Part II" (even though there's no first part here on the Designtechnica.com website.)

In the words of British comedian Peter Cook, "I have learned from my mistakes—and I'm sure I could repeat them exactly." Allow me to repeat all the mistakes I made in my previous piece on this subject.

The mistake that drew the heaviest fire had to do with digital cables. Not HDMI and IEEE 1394 (a.k.a. FireWire); those connections weren't widely used in audio/video gear when I last wrote about cables. The two types of digital cables I referred to were the optical and coaxial types. Their most common use is to transfer CD, Dolby Digital, and DTS signals from a DVD player to a receiver using a single connection.

The main difference between them is that coaxial cables transfer the signal electrically, while optical cables transfer the signal (you guessed) optically. However, some folks believe there's also a difference in audio quality. My mistake was in saying that I'd listened to both types—through some pretty high-end equipment, too—and heard little difference between them.

This sent readers howling. One demanded, "Was that article written on a napkin?" He was absolutely convinced that coaxial cables were audibly superior. Another reader, though more politely "disappointed," reached the opposite conclusion; he felt optical cables were vastly underrated.  I love it when readers contradict one another. Both of them couldn't be right, but they were equally certain that I was mistaken.

Now I must take a few moments to reread that column and look up the other mistakes. Ah, there's nothing like a walk down memory lane!  But this time, I'll repeat the remainder of my alleged mistakes in reverse order.