Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable
Solved Global Warming Locally, June 16, 2008
After I took delivery of my $500 Denon AKDL1 Cat-5 uber-cable, Al Gore was mysteriously drawn to my home, where he pronounced that Global Warming had been suspended in my vicinity.
Yes, I had perfect weather: no flooding, no tornadoes, the exact amount of rain necessary, and he pronounced sea levels exactly right and that they were not going to rise within five miles of my house.
Additionally, my cars began achieving 200 mpg and I didn’t even need gasoline. I was able to put three grams of cat litter into the tank and drive forever.
What’s more, the atmosphere inside my home became 93% oxygen and virtually no carbon dioxide. In fact, I now exhale oxygen.
One heck of a cable.
Didn’t notice any improvement in audio quality though.
The $800 Apple iCable is clearly superior.
Do not taunt the AKDL1, June 15, 2008
Potential warning to other users:
I made the mistake of taunting the AKDL1.
I am a battered shell of a man.
Though, I must admit, I do appreciate the crisp highs and thundering lows.
Amazing cable, but you can make your own for less., June 14, 2008
This is a truly amazing cable. I had to borrow a engineer friend’s oscilloscope to believe it, but the signals propagate down this cable near the speed of light. When used with a set of Pear Anjou speaker cables, you can kiss those annoying audio/video sync problems when viewing Blu-Ray movies in your home theater goodbye!
My friend pointed out that the secret is in the blue dots on the cable, not the cable itself. Apparently, this is a metallic pigment which helps negate the resistive losses in the cable; resistive losses are why you need bigger wires in the higher amp circuits in your house. The dots add capacitive coupling in key spots. I couldn’t quite follow the math he was getting at, but apparently it’s the same technique used in those cell phone signal booster stickers.
Nonetheless, I spent an evening carefully painting 1/16″ stripes on one of my existing ethernet cables, spaced 3/4″ apart, using metallic paint (Testors Green Metal Flake #1530 works well). I let it dry overnight and, sure enough, this formerly ordinary cable was now transmitting at near the speed of light, too!
The home grown technique does take a bit of time, so it’s not for everyone. But for me, $5 cable + $2 paint + 4 hours of time adds up to a lot less than $500.
Audio Quality Aside…, June 14, 2008
For $500, you’d expect that they’d make the top plastic tab into metal and at least cover it with a rubber hood to prevent it from bending or breaking.
It’s sad that this cable’s plastic tab breaks as easily as a normal $10 cable. Not to mention the marketing and the the rationale for the price is just ridiculous.
If anything, all this product does is drag Denon’s name into the mud.
Perfect for voice over IP, June 15, 2008
The Denon AKDL1 is absolutely the best CAT5 cable I have ever used, bar none. Since it’s an audio cable (NB: it’s not for computers!!!), I plugged it into my voice over IP phone and now the voice quality is incredibly clear!! No more dropouts, echos, or any other audio quality problems. I couldn’t believe a cable could make so much difference, so I connected a cable tester to it and saw that it rendered the 0s and 1s perfectly. I’m even getting some 2s and 3s!!! None of my other ethernet cables have ever done that. I only wish this cable would come in 15,000m lengths so I could connect my VoIP phone directly to my office for faster speeds (I speak very quickly, so I need the extra throughput). However, at the current cost per cm, that would run about $5 million. I’m not sure I could afford that even though I’m sure the voice quality would be awesome.
Not pre worn in, June 15, 2008
For $500 I would have expected these cables to be worn in. They aren’t. The procedure for pre use wear in of digital cables is significantly different to analog cables. They should be worn in for a period of 24 hours in each direction. Use a unidirectional protocol! _Never_ use TCP for wearing in digital cables, as TCP uses return packets for acknowledging, causing interference in the uplink channel being pre worn. Use UDP or ICMP (no ping) for wearing. Preferable use a payload of 64Kb with a datapacket consisting of consecutive 1′s and 0′s to settle the electrons. After 24 hours, reverse the cable and repeat. Always make sure that the cable is connected to a sender and a receiver, as Layer 2 will prevent data transmission if there is no positive ARP response from the receiver.
This process is quite delicate and difficult, and I would have expected it to be performed by the manufacturer for this pricetag.
