Samsung Finally Launches Its First Tizen Smartphone

[Rallos Zek]

... Gold has lower electrical resistance compared to more common substances used for plating, and aside from that most "HiFi" cables are thicker, allowing more more throughput. There's definitely a difference between those and the shitty $5 2cm-wide wires you'll get at a dollar store. It's not going to magically make your system sound better, but it's going to _help_ a very expensive system sound as good as it should.

Unrelated: "virus-protected HDMI cables"? Holy hell, what is the world coming to. I want to kill anybody who falls for that.

Gold plated cables will help as much as those virus-preotected HDMI cables. i.e. not at all. And yes those cheap 5 dollars HDMI cables will work as good as 200 dollar ones.

[TheBlackCat]

When it gets back to the pure analogue, then it changes up somewhat.

Not to any degree humans can perceive. As long as there is proper shielding to prevent interference (which pretty much any $3 cable will have), and there is nothing weird causing cross-talk between parts of the cable or other feedback (which again is the case with pretty much any $3 cable), fancy cables aren't going to help noticeably over practical distances, and gold contacts aren't going to help at all. Heck, simple lead solder works just fine for microvolt signals, so signals on the order of 1/100000 the amplitude typical audio signal voltage.

[pixo]

Ugh.. this again
Gold plating prevents corrosion which would create resitor and capacitor circuitry which degrades signal and create noise, this is important specially in some environment which promotes corrosion and you need precision.
You want to prevent this in analogue as its always affected by this, question is whats the level at which its disruptive.
For digital transmission it is only useful if you have long distances, you have to be able to tell what is 0, 1 and sometimes silence(noise).

Its common misconception that digital signal have only 1s and 0s, there`s also silence (or you have to use other method to indicate when you are not transmitting) and gray zone between 1 and 0 state.
You dont want to degrade to grey or process noise as signal.

So its always nice to have and in some cases must have but dont overpay too much for it as there is high chance that its not needed.

For analogue I would go for gold plated, also the card and cables will be useful for a long time.
Digital I dont care but if the price difference is small then i would consider it.

[dee.]

Ugh.. this again
Gold plating prevents corrosion

Yeah it does for all of the 5 days it takes for the gold to rub off or get electrolyzed out...

Its common misconception that digital signal have only 1s and 0s, there`s also silence

Nope, a digital signal can have any number of states, as long as the total number of possible states is known and the states are all discrete values.

Digital is not the same thing as binary.

[stiiixy]

Yeah it does for all of the 5 days it takes for the gold to rub off or get electrolyzed out...



Nope, a digital signal can have any number of states, as long as the total number of possible states is known and the states are all discrete values.

Digital is not the same thing as binary.

Curiously, when you signal along a digital cable, what else is being transmitted besides binary? Genuine question here. As far as I cared to know, you simply encapsulated the digital signal (binary in my interpretation) inside an analogue waveform, and so long as that waveform could maintain a certain level of *fancywordIforget*, digital signalling was happy to be carried along inside it without a worry. And that digital signalling was pretty much just binary. Fibre, wired, wireless, whatever, but that's my oversimplified understanding.

[stiiixy]

Not to any degree humans can perceive. As long as there is proper shielding to prevent interference (which pretty much any $3 cable will have), and there is nothing weird causing cross-talk between parts of the cable or other feedback (which again is the case with pretty much any $3 cable), fancy cables aren't going to help noticeably over practical distances, and gold contacts aren't going to help at all. Heck, simple lead solder works just fine for microvolt signals, so signals on the order of 1/100000 the amplitude typical audio signal voltage.

So what you're saying is there's still a chance (sorry, Dumb and Dumber style quote =)

What I never bothered to learn is what is construed as valid interference when and where analogue audio is concerned, and just how far shielding works. Plus a bunch of other questions, but they can wait =D For so long I've been told 'this' and 'that' and the cabling can easily receive crosstalk. But from what sources? Frequency, power output, sonic input, EMF, radio (wifi, mobile, satellite, sun). I was taught not to run network cabling parallel to power. Important if you plan on integrating all your wiring behind your gyprock (errr, plasterboard).

[bridgman]

Curiously, when you signal along a digital cable, what else is being transmitted besides binary? Genuine question here. As far as I cared to know, you simply encapsulated the digital signal (binary in my interpretation) inside an analogue waveform, and so long as that waveform could maintain a certain level of *fancywordIforget*, digital signalling was happy to be carried along inside it without a worry. And that digital signalling was pretty much just binary. Fibre, wired, wireless, whatever, but that's my oversimplified understanding.

Digital data is not necessarily binary-encoded on the link -- it's common to combine multiple bits of digital data into a single "change" -- typically 2 or 4 bits (implying the need for multiple levels / frequencies / phases / whatever on the link) but sometimes there's no direct relationship :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLT-3_encoding

Pretty much every new link technology starts with binary encoding but quickly moves to much more complex encoding in order to get higher data rates across the same basic link.

[gens]

k so

-gold plating is good if you live near a swamp as sulphor eats copper and probably aluminum
well it's not like aluminum reacts very violently with oxygen, for a minute of though
not that it matters much as for example 1A you need 1/10mm^2 of contact (too support full current constantly that is, so even less) and you get that and more when plugging it in (scrapes the oxide, np)
(1A for ~8W speaker, digital things need waaaaaay less current)

-digital things have got Schmitt triggers at input to clean it
-cables are usually in twisted pairs that practically eliminates interference

take cat5 eth for example, that i ran at 50m np (cat6 is still better, but not because it is thicker but because it is... how you call it lots of little wires)

i had a problem with 5m vga, but that was just a very shitty cable
hdmi, dvi and the likes should not have problems


audio is but a bit different
still there is no difference between cables, as long they are thick enough to not overheat

funny enough that if you use a long, thick cable for a tweeter it's capacitance can cause problems for the amp

@ Daktyl198
Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook, by Douglas Self
i won't say that you can find a pdf online, 5'th edition

also sound-westhost, lots of good articles

[pixo]

Yeah it does for all of the 5 days it takes for the gold to rub off or get electrolyzed out...



Nope, a digital signal can have any number of states, as long as the total number of possible states is known and the states are all discrete values.

Digital is not the same thing as binary.

Yes I know that you dont use only 2 states but i went with the simple explanation.
And as the number of states increases you also need better quality of the whole channel as noise, crosstalk and interference becomes bigger problem.
As for the longevity i cant comment as i dont know much about how long the coating take to get electrolyzed out or what are the requirements for it to happen.
Rubbing it out depends how often you are reconnecting and how thick is the gold layer.

But yes buying something overpriced just because its contacts are gold coated is stupid, specially if the cables are 2x in price.
For analogue i would still prefer gold plated, if its the price difference is small, as in 5 years i dont want to think that my setup is starting to die when all i need to do is polish the connectors.

[Daktyl198]

@ Daktyl198
Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook, by Douglas Self
i won't say that you can find a pdf online, 5'th edition

also sound-westhost, lots of good articles

Thank you very much, I'll get on that immediately