Are there differing qualities of optical cable?
How long is the Cardas COAX? If it's too short, you could be experiencing signal reflections back to the spdif transmitter. I have also experienced differences in quality of toslink cables. The cheaper ones will have a single plastic mono-filament. The better ones will have a high count glass fiber medium. Look at the Lifatec cable, or the upper end Wire World cable. For the COAX, try a 6 foot Blue Jeans cable Beldon 1694A. Or move up to something like a DH Labs D-750 cable. |
The Oppo does use a switching power supply for the digital board. Some of this switching noise could be making it into that COAX (if you are using the Oppo as a Transport). The toslink fiber cable electrically disconnects the DAC from the transport, so it could be insulating your Gungir DAC from that switching power supply noise. Just a theory. |
Yep, willemj has been a strong proponent of publishing measurements that are supposed to indicate the be-all-end-all of audio quality. After 17+ years of listening in this hobby, I do not agree with him at all. The following link was found by another poster when he was trying to find some documentation after I told him that toslink was not as good of a interface as digital coax. http://www.lampizator.eu/LAMPIZATOR/TRANSPORT/CD_transport_DIY.html When you read through and get to the measurements of the toslink interface, I thought it was really interesting how bad the toslink waveform was. You would assume that light transmission would be better than electrical transmission, but in truth the LED light emitting diode just cannot "light up" fast enough to keep the true square waveform. It also shows that not all SPDIF outputs are created equal. lol. |
