Paul Muller

Great question and I read the same review – frankly i LOVE the look of the Oyaide cables (except the hideous green ones) and any review the justifies me buying them is alright with me, BUT – I like the look, I couldn’t tell you if they sounded different to save my life.

Here’s the test you need to ask yourself – have you ever listened to music and suffered from “Spatially, individual images that initially seem small or smearing, vagueness, and bloat? Instability of the reproduced sound field during complex passages and dynamic peaks; instruments splashing forward, change size or location, or suffer from timbral shifts? Everything NOT staying put with solidity and tonal consistency to the point where you couldn’t play music at volume with confidence?

Yeah me neither – in fact some of these things I am not even sure are real things – reminds me more of the kind of rubbish you hear people talking about when drinking wine and pretending to know more about it than they do.

So my guess is, buy the cable – love the look OR save you money and buy more vinyl 😉

P.S. for the record I use DJ Tech Tools cables as a general rule but have also used whatever junk has been in the booth and if there was a difference I couldn’t hear it!

We need to make sure the “digital is safe from bad cables” folks don’t give everyone a false sense of security.

To be clear, I am not the world’s authority on “streaming audio over USB”, but here’s what I understand (clipped form my reading on the topic); http://www.edn.com/design/consumer/4376143/Fundamentals-of-USB-Audio
“USB Audio
USB Audio uses isochronous, interrupt and control transfers. All audio data is transferred over isochronous transfers; interrupt transfers are used to relay information regarding the availability of audio clocks; control transfers are used used to set volume, request sample rates, etc.”
Which means “I’ll send the data, digitally, along with a checksum – if what get’s there is corrupted (for example due to a dodgy cable), then I’ll drop that packet and you’ll hear ‘noise'”

SO, what does that mean in practice? A well designed cable, that’s in spec, with say ferrite chokes and decent shielding should in principal be less “lossy” than a crappy cable that drops/corrupts packets. Each of these packets gets transferred once every 125us so I ASSUME (scary word) that one corrupt packet in a series of good ones would corrupt the same amount of audio (roughly 1/10,000th of a second).

Assuming all the above to be true (happy for a USB protocol engineer to jump in here!), were you to get enough dropped packets in a given period of time, could you hear it? The answer would have to be yes. In most real-world situations are you likely to be capable of hearing it? Assuming you have decent (but let’s be clear, there is no such thing as PERFECT) cable, it’s unlikely you’ll notice a difference between a $25 USB cable and a $250 one. In fact I would suggest it would be hard to notice the difference between the one that came with your printer and a $250 one.

Save your money and buy more vinyl!

Agree with 1 and 3 – but 2 would be the exact opposite to my mind (unless the signal path from the sound card to the rest of the mixer was analog) – as you point out most of the mixers with built in sound cards are digital/DSP based.

The observation is that most if not all of the boutique rotaries I’ve been looking at give the impression that they are analog based – i say “the impression” only because as you point out, some of them such as the Rane MP series give off a distinct analog vibe with their wooden side panels, but hide a very digital product beneath them.

Other’s such as the DJR400 – well I still can’t figure out what is going on there!

What I do like about the mixers that feature an adjustable isolator/cross-over (the technical term eludes me!) is the way your can really shape the sound to suit the track – I found this really helped bring some of the older tracks with less bottom end back to life when compared to their modern cousins.

@DJ Vintage – the two standout features that I see on the more desirable rotary mixers are;
1). adjustable crossover (see RANE for example)
2). they are often analog and/or highly quality components (and hella expensive as a result)

But before anyone points it out for me, none of either of those is guaranteed just because it’s a rotary mixer. The A&H 92R is a lovely piece of kit, but doesn’t offer an adjustable crossover (that I know of!).

Having said that, I like the look of this little gadget primarily because of point #1 above, can’t wait for the review on DDT!