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...because it's Christmas!
Now I should probably add the disclaimer that the views posted here by me are purely my own and they are opinions, albeit far from humble ones. I don't want any fighting, now... just friendly raging towards other.
An acquaintance of mine linked to this via G+
http://www.lessloss.com/blackbody-p-200.html
Hats off to them for marketing a black box that absorbs electromagnetic radiation. I would love to see what's inside that thing. Seriously, read the lengths that they've gone to do explain the principles behind it. And then there's a demonstration of just how black that box is. Why, it's the blackest thing I've ever seen.
But of course there's no measurable demonstration of how it in any way improves the actual audio experience... funny, that.
Let's also examine these bad boys: http://www.lessloss.com/digital-cables-c-70.html
My favourite bit from the description is the invocation of MATH!Except you don't. Well, you can't, because a true square wave consumes infinite bandwidth. Therefore you don't... your wave is more trapezoidal - it has a rise and a fall time, and these have measurable effects and tolerances in the digital world, which is why cables have specifications... meet them and they'll work. Longer cables need tighter specifications because you're exposing yourself to more noise, more signal loss and in high speed transmissions multiple edges on the wire at one time. But come on... 16MHz is a 62.5nS period. You've got at least 10 metres between edges on something like 75Ohm coax.It is known through math (FFT transforms) that, to transfer a square wave running at 16 MHz, you need to have absolutely controlled electromagnetic circumstances in the surrounding EM field way up into the multi-gigahertz range.
So I don't know how you prove that an EM absorbing box is any good or not. The ear doesn't integrate like the eye does, so it's easier to pick up discrepancies. But I suspect the neurologists will be able to tell us what the SNR of the ear and its associated brain functions is. And at that point we can take silly humans with their subjective observations out of the equation and say, even if there was a difference, that it wouldn't be perceptible because it's far below anything we can hear... assuming there is any kind of difference, other than the contents of the room having changed slightly.
As for digital cables, well that's easy. The easiest one is to tx/rx some audio over a bunch of different cables. If the raw audio at destination is the same as at source... hooray. Observing the behaviour of different cables with an oscilloscope would be fun too, but ultimately who cares what the scope says if the audio was bit-perfect? I guess you could probably conjecture some sort of bit-error rate from the scope observations. That'd be fun.
I guess my last bit of advice would be, if you're planning on spending more than £15 on less than 5 metres of cable, you should probably be giving that money to charity instead - it's money infinitely better spent, with a more tangible, longer lasting boost to your sense of decency.
Hooray, rant over!
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Originally Posted by this_is_gav
) I've ever spent. I don't think I'll be getting a little black box to go with them though (unless you count the DI boxes I'll need for my rig 
