Digital Cables

Yep, it is pretty shocking how much difference a good digital cable can make. It shouldn’t, but it does. I have had the best results with pure silver, preferably OCC, for digital.

Recommend DH Labs also.   I use their Silversonic coax.  If any questions/issues, Greg is quite easy to deal with.  I would be to if I lived in the middle of Florida this time of year!

Lawrence From MI

maprik

Yes everything matters, and keeping the I2S cable as short as possible does as well. My 18" Supra 2.1 HDMI is pretty close to my 1 meter Audioquest Vodka 48 8k/10k HDMIcable (which I was lucky enough to get on sale at Best Buy a couple of years ago).

The Vodka still betters it, but Supra does make some really good cost effective cables. The Supra HDMI-HDMI AOC 2.1 Optical Hybrid Cable looks very interesting (and I bought one), but I won't be able to try it until I set my system up again after my audio room is complete......which FINALLY appears to be the end of April.

It depends.  The issue is probably not the bits but timing errors induced by interference and transmission line effects.  AKA Jitter.

25+years ago the quality of a coax cable between the CD transport and the DAC was critical because the DAC's clock that controls when the words/bits are presented to the actual DAC chip/circuit was derived from the timing of the bit's arrival at the DAC.

My recent experience is with Esoteric K-01 components, currently the XDSE, over asynchronous USB.  The critical cable component here, for my setup, is the BNC cable from the Stanford Systems Research FS725 rubidium clock to the Esoteric DAC;  I am considering switching to the Esoteric 7N-DA3100ES MEXCEL cable. Notably, Esoteric does not support I2S for digital connections.

Modern USB DACs have a buffer and use their own clock and so are isolated from jitter in the source.  Similarly the better DACs have galvanic isolation to prevent noise picked up by the cable from affecting the sound.

I would argue that for USB, therefore, the better your DAC's engineering the less important is the cable.

I2S, however, has clock signals travelling along the wire and so I can see that I2S is critically dependent on the cable since the clock is coming from the source.  Further, by design, I2S does not buffer the stream.  

If you Google "usb vs i2s for digital connections" you get a good summary - for I2S sound quality depends on the source and critically on the cable.  For (async) USB SQ depends on the quality of the buffering and clocking of the DAC.

This, perhaps is why I2S users see huge differences in streaming sources and async USB connections do not.

@vthokie83 I have ordered the Supra (not optic fiber) for a nice mid-priced comparison between the cheap stuff and the DH Labs in the hopes that it will be at least as good as the DH Labs and I can possibly save some $$$.