Does a USB cable affect the tone?

Does a USB cable affect the tone?

  • Yes It may affect the tone

    Votes: 5 3.8%
  • No

    Votes: 44 33.1%
  • It may affect only noise level by ground looping

    Votes: 26 19.5%
  • Are you kidding me?

    Votes: 58 43.6%

  • Total voters
    133

rr32btg

Inspired
It drives me crazy - some people believe that USB cables directly affect the tone, the volume, the highs, the lows, and the compression. And I can't convince them that all that may affect the sound regarding USB cables are ground loops which can only affect noise level, not tone. No matter if the cable costs 2$ or 200$. The USB cable transfers digital data and it might work, might not, and nothing else. Cables made with violations of standards may work unstable.

If one cable sounds better than another then something wrong with your electric network and it should be solved by fixing the issue of the electric network. If the problem is not solvable on the electric network side then you should use a galvanic break device (don't try to do the handmade ground lift on USB by isolating/breaking USB pin, because it may be dangerous).

Am I wrong? Link on measurements and scientific data are welcome.
 
Of course USB cables affect the tone. To see it for yourself, simply buy my pure silver USB cable with strategically placed swarovsky crystals for enhanced harmonic resonance for the cheap price of 300$/meter - once you've paid that much for a cable your brain will make you think it sounds better, even if it doesn't.

But seriously, USB and other digital protocols such as HDMI transmit digital data. While the analog representation of that data (the currents sent over the wires) can be adversely influenced by the cable quality, this has no effect unless the signal degrades so much that the a/d converter on the receiving end cannot deserialize the same bit values that were put on the wire. And even in that case, all modern digital protocols use checksums and/or error correction data to catch and/or fix those issues. In the case of USB, afaik it uses a CRC16 checksum and requests retransmission of the package if the checksum does not match the data. On that note, grounding issues or other electrical problems with the USB cable are just another cause of signal degradation and would also not have any effect on the tone, unless they influence the speaker directly (e.g. your USB cable turns into an antenna an causes noise in the speaker).

So no, a USB cable has no effect on the tone. The only thing it influences is if you have a reliable connection to the USB peripheral.
 
Oh I’m sure there’s somewhere out there who claims they can tell the difference between an expensive and inexpensive USB cable.

Does Eric Johnson have any offspring? This sounds like the perfect scenario for some Gen-Z Johnsons.
 
Oh I’m sure there’s somewhere out there who claims they can tell the difference between an expensive and inexpensive USB cable.

Does Eric Johnson have any offspring? This sounds like the perfect scenario for some Gen-Z Johnsons.
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The USB spec has a flaw in it that can cause a ground-loop, which will generate noise in certain conditions. But, that's not common so, aside from that, the signal being transmitted down the wire is digital which is immune to noise.

If USB could cause or add noise, then our USB attached printers would spew garbage and our USB attached drives would have corrupted files. Do they? Nope. They'd be useless to us if they did, so besides that wiring flaw, what goes in comes back out.
 
EVERYONE knows that the thing that actually affects guitar tone is what kind of socks you are wearing.
And before someone asks the next obvious question, what if you aren't wearing any socks?

If you are not wearing any socks then any tone that you might be hearing are from all the other players who ARE wearing socks. Your tone to noise floor is zero in bare feet.
 
No. It's digital. Cable either works or it doesn't. That's probably the best reason to use a USB or SPIDF connection in the first place, though...to eliminate neuroticism about whether your analog cables are influencing the tone. One less thing to wonder about.
 
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