sako243
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If you look at the bit of Wozzaaah's post I quoted I was referring to mains cables, I completely agree that the £250 is just taking a punt on naiveI can almost buy this when talking about analogue signals
Strong statement and probably true for the vast majority of digital standards provided they meet the standards. However there is a BIIIG difference between slow speed digital signalling and high-speed signalling. Cable quality absolutely matters in the higher speed stuff, although if they meet the spec then they meet the spec so price is slightly irrelevant then. For example, a consumer grade digital link: SATA requires diff pairs to be routed with no more than 20mil (confusingly mil in PCB layout contexts means thousands of an inch) difference in length between the individual traces in the pair. Now that is total trace variation between source and end-point so if you have a cable then the cable cannot have more than 20 thou variation between individual strands in the wire.but I absolutely refute that a £1 cable that delivers the same digital signal, error-free, is inferior (in terms of sound quality, not physical construction) to a £250 cable.
Continuing the same theme - a colleague at my previous work was implementing a eSATA (external SATA) interface for a radio we built. I can't remember the exact specs off the top of my head but eSATA cables should be guaranteed for full throughput up to ~2m (for arguments sake). Now in very few people actually needed anything approaching those specs (typically lower speeds and much shorter cables), in those instances any cable sufficed. However our client (as always) genuinely needed maximum throughput and long cables in certain deployment scenarios. Cue a whole host of back-and-forth why things weren't working, turns out, yup it was the cables. So they actually paid us to buy a load of cables and test them so they knew when they needed full throughput at long lengths they knew which cables to buy. The most expensive ones weren't necessarily the best in this case but shows that meeting a "standard" can be rather subjective and still produce a big variation in results.
Now I completely agree that a £250 USB cable is taking the proverbial - particularly the one linked - but there are situations where it matters. Having said that it was a particularly unique scenario with this client that no one else is likely to push things to the extreme like they do.