Malcolm Steward’s a veteran hi-fi writer – his website says he’s been involved in this sort of journalism since the early 1980s. I don’t have much of an interest in high end hi-fi equipment, but Ben Goldacre posted a link to a PC Pro article linking to a blog post by Malcolm Steward. Unfortunately, that post has been removed now, but you can still see it in Google’s cache. I’d heartily recommend reading it, as you may not have been aware that sound quality can be improved by using ‘Super SATA’ cables which have been “irradiated […] to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors”.

These are the cables connected to a hard drive. There is no way that changing these can create “increased naturalness in both the sound of instruments and voices”. If your SATA cables aren’t working properly, you will not read the hard drive. This isn’t something where you get a different set of ones and zeros if you use a different cable – data is data.

As I said, he’s taken the blog entry down, but I recommend you read it. His huffy follow up post has this glorious line:

“I know full well that it is ‘scientifically’ not possible for a data cable to exert such  influence  but I know what we heard and hoped that maybe someone might be able to throw some light on what might be going on.”

If you know it can’t be true, don’t put up a blog post saying it’s true.