Kimber Kable: Another company loses my respect & business
Back in the late ’80s, I used Kimber Kable speaker cables. Good stuff. Reasonably priced. Sounded great. No hokey electron snake oil marketing crap.
Looks like times have changed.
Kimber is now offering a USB cable. But not just any USB cable. This USB cable is optimized for audio use with extra fat conductors, nitrogen infused polyethylene signal conductor dielectric (huh?), and gold connectors.
All for the price of 29 pounds for a half meter length of cable.
Sigh. Idiots. Yeah, the rise of digital devices has been tough on premium analog technology companies, but that doesn’t justify going the snake oil route.
Maybe I’m just jealous that these people are likely successfully selling $4 cables for about $60. Nice profit margin.
May 13th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
“The ferrite noise reduction beads help the cable to preserve the delicate data stream”
I was expecting the next line to be “counterpoints the surrealism of the underlying metaphor”. Silly gits.
-jcr
May 20th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
It is true that not all USB cables are created equal. USB has signal integrity problems all the way from the chip to the end of the cable. I tested a bunch of USB cables with a TDR scope and found some have really bad reflection problems. Belkin turned out to be the best.
May 20th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
Sure; there are certainly USB cables made so far out of spec as to not reliably carry data.
But once you make a cable “good enough” to get the data from one device or another then you are done. No amount of super spastic uber aligned copper molecules is going to make digital audio over USB sound any better.
You could go down to CompUSA and grab a $5 USB cable on closeout that would work just as well, assuming it is made to spec.
May 28th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
The worst offender of the cable snake-oil variety is the outfit which claims to have a special technology that uses *light* to shield the audio signal from interference. I suppose there’s some fiber wrapped around the copper, which carries light from an LED source. That is, if they even bother doing that much and don’t just run a fiber along parallel to the copper so that the light can come out at the other end.
And for this, they charge something like $10,000 per meter for interconnect cables.
“The Radiant Light Cable System, newly introduced by Purist Audio Design in 1998, is the only system of its kind in the world. It takes the already superb Dominus cable and adds a special form of radiant-optical fiber. These optical fibers are illuminated by a specially designed light source and radiate light around the conductors. The light changes the properties of the insulation surrounding the conductors, thus minimizing distortion in music reception.”