Yeah, but the comment you replied to was making a point that the conductor doesn’t really matter if there isn’t any noise present. What makes a good cable has much more to do with proper shielding, because electromagnetic interference is what will muck up your signal, not a lack of gold plated connectors
He’s talking about the electromagnetic shielding in a cable, not the contact-points. Usually a copper mesh sheath housed underneath the outer-most rubbery layer and runs around and along the entire length of the signal-carrying wires inside the cable. Works like a Faraday cage, helps prevent electromagnetic interference from large power sources, other unshielded cables running parallel, or anything else that can generate an electromagnetic field near the cable.
Very important to protect signal integrity, widely used even outside the audiophile world (although there are of course plenty of audiophile gimmicks related to shielding).
Basically, if you have a bunch of live unshielded cables bundled and zip-tied together along with your speaker wire, you’ll definitely hear it. Run the signal through an oscilloscope, and you’ll even see it
V-Sauce had an incredible video on this, outlining exactly how unfathomably colossal the number 52! actually is. If I remember correctly:
Stand at the equator and set a timer for 52! seconds, press start, then stand still and wait for 1 billion years. Then, take one single step forward, and wait another billion years.
Continue walking at this pace until you’ve made your way around the Earth and back to your original starting position, then remove one drop of water from the Pacific ocean, and set it aside.
Repeat this process until you’ve completely emptied the Pacific Ocean drop by drop, then set a single sheet of paper on the ground beside you. Refill the Pacific Ocean again (instantly), and do it all over again.
Continue this process, setting each sheet of paper on top of the last, until the stack of papers reaches the sun. Then tear it all down and do the whole thing over again, 999 more times.
At this point, the timer would be about a third of the way to 0 seconds.
The video continues with an alternative mind-boggling process to kill the rest of the time while you’re waiting for the timer to reach 0, which involves dealing yourself 5 cards from a well-shuffled deck once every billion years, and buying a lottery ticket for each royal flush you deal yourself. If that lottery ticket hits the jackpot, you’d (EDIT: throw a grain of sand into the grand canyon, repeating until it’s full - forgot this step) then remove 1 ounce of rock from Mount everest, and repeat all of this until Mount Everest is completely leveled.
After doing this 256 more times, then the other two-thirds of the timer will have elapsed, and it would finally reach 0.
That’s how long 52! seconds would be.
FIVE THOUSAND?!
Jesus nun-fucking Christ, what an absolute scam. I bought a 1070 for $220 in the first few months after release. Guess I’ll just have to hope it can run for another 10 years…
Came here to say Peep Show, what an absolute treasure
Simply put, both protect against certain types of interference in different ways, and each is effective in ways that the other is not.
Mesh shielding is going to help prevent electrical interference from being introduced via the wire itself from an external source. Like other cables carrying signal and running very near/parallel, or electromagnetic fields generated from other devices, certain electrical components, household appliances, etc.
The ferrite beads protect against radio-frequency interference (RFI) via induction, acting like low-pass filters which attenuate specific bandwidths of very high frequency signals. Essentially, they intercept and absorb high-frequency electrical noise, and convert that energy into a small amount of heat instead of letting it pass through further down the signal path. This kind of interference can be from an external source, or generated internally from the various electronics/components in the signal path (which mesh shielding would do nothing to protect against). They also help dissipate any RFI that the mesh shielding itself may be carrying, so you often see both ferrite beads and mesh/foil shielding, like on laptop chargers or USB cables for example.