Originally Posted by Puma Cat
Ohhhh, yes.....
My first USB cable was the Belkin ones with the purple ends, I think they were called Belkin Gold? It was okay, but sounded somewhat dark and muddy, though I had absolutely no reference other than my TT. My next one was a Kimber USB Silver cable, it has a blue jacket. It sounded better, more transparent than the Belkin, but was kinda bright-sounding. The next one, that I stuck with for a while, was an Audioquest Carbon. It was better than the others, more neutral, natural and pleasant to listen to.
None of these cables, on the whole, were what I would call significantly better than one another, though. I was thinking the old "bits is bits" thang as it applied to audio was true...man, was I wrong.
Then I heard an AudioQuest Diamond USB cable at friends house. IIRC, at the time a, 0.75M cable AQ Diamond sold for $500. And, actually, I see a 0.75m AQ Diamond is now $600; looks like AQ raiased the price from 4 or 5 years ago.
The AQ Diamond was significantly better than anything I had heard up to that time. In fact, it was so much better, that I had a rather hard time accepting it. And, at $500 for a single short cable, I didn't want to. It was the first digital cable I heard that convinced that when it came to digital audio, the hackneyed "bits are bits" refrain one hears simply did not apply. Another friend of mine was also present for the audition and when he heard the Diamond, he was really pissed, as the improvement was really clear to him as well, and he was quite upset as he could not afford an AQ Diamond USB cable. We discussed it coming back in the car after leaving my friend's house and were going, "Goddam It! That's not the result we were hoping for!"
Problem was, you couldn't find a used AQ Diamond on the used market, at all. As soon as they came up on the usual sites, they were gone literally in hours.
I finally found a used AudioQuest Coffee USB, one model lower than Diamond, for $180. I snagged it immiediately, and it was quite a bit better than my Carbon. I used that until I finally found a used AQ Diamond used for $350, which was somewhat better than the Coffee, but not a lot. If the Diamond was "100" with respect to sound quality, the Coffee was a solid "80". If I had to pick one, I'd say the Coffee offers more performance per dollar than the Diamond.
I used the Diamond between my Sonore microRendu and Schiit Gumby until just a few weeks ago, when I decided to try the very short USB A/B "hard coupler", which is just a molded USB male A to USB male B adapter. It sounded better than the AQ Diamond, so I stayed with that until last night, when I installed a Shunyata Alpha USB cable...and was gobsmacked/blown-away/floored by the degree of improvement. The improvement it brings is on the level of a significantly better and quieter DAC or preamp. Just astonishing, and very, very beautiful-sounding. See my post from last night in the Shunyata forum.
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