So, if I use the Denon cable for this:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/16/dog_lead_cat_5/

Will it make the dog barks sound better?

I've got a huge drawer full of the damn things - I wonder how many I can flog on eBay for £250?

I might get £300 for the 10m blue ones, but the half-metre yellow ones are probably worth less.

Now that's good and there is a generous discount of $1 off the SRP if you buy from Amazon, with a discount like that I must get one too.

Now will it make my downloads faster or make my kettle boil any quicker?

Yes that's my coat, the one with the Kimber PowerKord in the pocket.

"Aficionados of such gushing endorsements will, of course, be reminded of Peter Andre and Jordan's sensational album, the famous Oxo Tower and Playmobil's Security Check Point. "

And who can forget the amazon.com reviews of David Hasselhoff's meisterwork "Looking for... the Best of David Hasselhoff"? 1035 5 star reviews along the lines of, "...sounds like a herd of cows falling down a spiral staircase". Super.

Just read some more of the reviews on the Amazon page. Fantastic stuff, especially the one about font sizes...

"I'm quite positive that this cable uses a clearer font to transmit the 1s and 0s from between my components."

Classic.

XD

Looks like a cat5 cable to me!

All those comments were probably heartful and honest, just made by MAC users who don't mind paying 20+x the value of something.

Flame on!

It's a digital cable, for Pete's sake, why do people pay this much. If the system is made properly, any good quality low loss cable (with minimised crosstalk) should suffice to gave negligable BER.

Sounds like a case of the cart leading the horse. You paid a fair amount of money, so you convince yourself it's money well spent! I think the most expensive hi-fi cable I have seen, was some $7000, 5 feet copper effort from the States, more money-rich, time-poor morons raving about it too.

Can't be a wise investment though, as you get older your hearing gets worse and you hear the higher frequencies less and less clearly. One born every minute!

A $500 cable for DIGITAL signal transmission - would you Adam and Eve it?

Well done Denon for seeing the gap in the market and exploiting it.

There are other manufacturers making "superior quality" digital cables, notably HDMI, but the audacity of charging $500 for a cat-5 is to be aplauded.

So thats where this sequence of comics comes from. I thought it was some canadian thing I didnt understand.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080618

Not a new idea to take the mick on things like this - i remember when ebuyer first introduced reviews on their products - the bog standard IEC lead ended up with hundreds of reviews all basically a discussion thread on why it didn't come with an instruction manual and why it wasn't linux compatible!

Transparent Opus MM is in the £20k mark. For an interconnect:

http://transparentcable.com/products/audio/opus_mm_interconnects.html

Denon are just doing the usual cheap Japanese clone thang

I am put in mind of the Golden Sound "Intelligent Chip", which is a small wafer of plastic that costs hundreds of dollars; you rest it on top of your CD player - with a disc in the tray - and it upgrades the compact disc so that it sounds better. But you can only do this ten times before the magic wears off. I believe there is an upgraded version that has a laser, or quantum dots, or something. You could probably write an article about high-end audio nonsense and I reckon that some people already have.

Can I please issue the following statement from the US Government.

"We must insist without prejudice that all purchasers of the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable must immediately cease usage and return this product in secret to "Ali-Disect-Team, Area 51b, Nevada, USA, 80085'. This product uses stolen military technology taken from a research lab at a base somewhere near Roswell, New Mexico, and has been in development since 1947. Failure to return the cable, or discussions with others about the nature of these cables will result in severe penalties including extraordinary rendition, military invasion of your country and having dinner with a Mr George W Bush.'.

Some of the comments are hilarious. Truly, the AKDL1 is the new Chuck Norris.

Can we have a new icon for the cable?

That's why the company is called 'Transparent', we can see right through them.

Do you think that the engineers who design these things ever get embarrassed or feel any shame when they see the marketing drivel? I know I would.

the cost goes into the materials to make it so awesome!! It must be shielded with the hair of paris hilton, only that could give this thing the magical quality's that the reviewers claim!!

Paris - gearing up for another plucking

Bo11ox

FREE POSTAGE!!!!!

Mind you, this cable is actually quite cheap; I have seen Hifi cables selling for £1500 PER FOOT!!!!

"it's designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration"

"the insulation is made of a fluoropolymer material with superior heat resistance, weather resistance, and anti-aging properties."

Where the holy feck do they think people are going to be using this thing?

Sure as hell I'm going to need "weather resistance" in my living room! Anti-aging properties? What, my lines and wrinkles will appear reduced in just two weeks or my money back? Superior heat resistance is important, though, since I actually live in a secret lair hidden in the bowels of a volcano.

Don't blame the engineers...

...blame the marketing department

I particularly liked the "whilst connecting the cable I failed to correctly observe the directionality arrows and my music played backwards". I nearly spat coffee all over my monitor.

Now, if I had a monitor coated in special weather resistent....

"the insulation is made of a fluoropolymer material with superior heat resistance, weather resistance, and anti-aging properties."

i.e. PTFE aka teflon aka non-stick pan coating. will work well in your lair providing the ambient temp is <250 oC

Yes the engineers get upset when marketing gets involved. I've seen people quit over the way "their" design was used.

But that's the way it goes. Engineers can't sell and marketing people can't engineer. It takes teamwork.

(Sorry that last bit sounds so corny, but it is true)

Oh man.

First of all you're not playing music though the cable your streaming data. And data is digital. The packets are either there or they're not. And if they're not there it will re-try at such speeds that you wouldn't notice. The music will still sound the same.

And if your network connection is so crappy that you ARE noticing lag or choppiness on playing back streaming audio then you need a $40 Gig switch or perhaps even a new $5 CAT5e ethernet cable from your local Best Buy.

More proof that audiophiles and computers don't mix. They're still living in an analogue world.

Oh oh! How bout I go get some thread from Wal-Mart and wrap some old $5 CAT5e cables and sell them at the discounted price of ONLY $199.95. And hey, cause I'm generous I'll even throw in free shipping too.

Honestly, do you think anyone actually *designed* this cable? At best, it was "specified" (probably by choosing cable stock and connectors from a catalog). I imagine more design work went into the packaging than the product!

"Engineers can't sell and marketing people can't engineer. It takes teamwork.

(Sorry that last bit sounds so corny, but it is true)"

No. I was a software engineer, writing real-time trading systems in C and C++. More recently I worked at a certain place not a million miles from Stonehenge writing stuff I can't discuss for people I won't name.

Now I'm a freelance marketing consultant. I can go both ways, so to speak -- I still write the odd bit of Perl and PHP for my own websites and whatnot.

So there.

The Amazon reviews are bloody funny, however this is beyond funny!

1 pair of 12 foot speaker cables....$7250! This is no joke, this utter tosh is genuine!

http://www.pearcable.com/sub_products_anjou_sc.htm

Should get them for a seventh the price at PC World. Yep, only £35 for 5m.

Read the review at the link above.HEH,Tappity Tap.

Denon is a high end audio company, so the price is what I would EXPECT from them.

Would I pay that much for a cable, maybe if

the conductors were 24 karat GOLD,

Each pair was shielded with a GOLD foil shield,

overall there was a GOLD foil shield,

the insulation was teflon,

the cable's capacitance was extremely low,

and the cable could pass a 1 GHZ SQUARE WAVE without any tilt.

Otherwise - forget it!!

...was the third review written by amanfrommars? It makes about as much sense as he usually does.

El Reg seems to have missed this particular gem, the Amazon "Kid's Pimp Suit"

http://www.amazon.com/Kids-Pimp-Suit-Costume-Size/dp/B000QDXZZ8/

And in the great world of HiFi overcharging, nothing comes close to the "Special Black Wax" sold at £250 for 5ml, from a website which also offers red and green pens to colour in the edges of CDs. Spread the wax on your credit card then wipe it off and it improves the sound of your HiFi.

I'd give a URl, but the site in question is down ATM.

Paris, because even she wouldn't be fooled by this stuff, would she?

... with all that quantum level technology, can it do better than warp 9.75?

Hmm, 100m of Cat5e sitting in my shed. Got some RJ45's somewhere as well.

Should have my mortgage paid off after making a few of these cables and selling them on ebay....

Mine's the one with the £50 notes falling out of the pockets.

"You could probably write an article about high-end audio nonsense and I reckon that some people already have."

I remember reading just such an article in a radio amateur's magazine in the late 80s that was laughing at all the pseudo tech babble audio magazines write. My favourite bit was about an audio journo suggesting that cables were directional and worked better one way round than the other.

So quick everyone go pull all the ethernet cables out of your office walls and turn them round, you might get faster download speeds! :D

Time to get on over there and post some phat Reg-style comments.

Well they're analogue cables, fully balanced.... so could well be of some sonic benefit, i've sat and listened to some extensive blind test demos of Nordost and Chord interconnects and painful as it may be they do make a difference, i could never justify the costs of some cables but if you can hear a difference in a blind test and can justify the expense go for it...

An RJ45 digital cable is likely to have somewhat less improvement... but hey.

IT and Audio - rarely get on....

If by "likely to have somewhat less improvement" you mean "scientifically provable to have absolutely no improvement whatsover because that kind of thing is impossible", then yes, I agree with you completely.

If not I'm keeping my pear anjou cables....

Holy crap.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080621

When I saw this on Amazon I thought it was either a typo or some company trying to rip off idiots. However Denon actually has this on their web site!

I think it is time someone started selling "AK-DL1 100% compatible" cables for the discount price of $200!

http://usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp

Someone should really come up with a compendium book of comedy amazon reviews.

Those for the book "Penetrating Wagners RIng" had me in stiches for days.