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Careful!

Getting rid of the V+ connection won't hurt anything if it's not used by the downstream device. But getting rid of the ground connection is playing with fire!

As long as both the computer and the DAC have 3-wire power cords with functioning safety grounds in a house that has functioning safety grounds, you can probably get away with it. In that instance the safety ground will hold the two pieces of equipment within a volt or so of each other.

But if you *don't* have functioning safety grounds on the equipment, or you *don't* have a newish house with functioning safety grounds, or you are using "cheater" plugs for correcting the AC polarity or improved sound, then you are simply going to blow up the USB receiver chip on the DAC. In any of the above situations, you can easily see several tens of volts on the input pins of the USB receiver chip (common mode, but in this case it doesn't matter). That is far more than any USB receiver was designed to handle.

Whoever designed that cable only knows enough about electronics to be dangerous. A differential input (such as is found on a USB receiver chip) has a thing called a "common-mode input range". It is typically less than 5 volts even on things designed for that kind of service. But no USB receiver chip is designed to accept any common-mode voltage to speak of. Use this cable at your own risk!

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