Op good digital cables do make a difference Soix is right.
Do I need an expensive digital cable?
I have been using a fairly inexpensive optical cable to connect my CD transport to my Moon 280D streamer. I was told that an SPDIFcoax cable would sound better. For an experiment I purchased an inexpensive Pangea coax cable. It didn't sound at all because its terminator ends did not fit snugly in my equipment. I consulted chatgbt who often gives me audio advice. It advised that for the short run of 1 meter, an RCA interconnect would work. It did. And sounded much better than the optical. Chatgbt said that RCA interconnect was good enough.
Now, there is a twist to this story that might make those doubters think twice. A digital cable carries packets of information that are rechecked to assure that the streamer is recieving correct information. There is the timing concern, though. But my Moon 280D has an asynchronous DAC with a clock as part of the DAC. Any information sent by my transport, whether it is clocked by the transport or not, will go through the Moon's asynchronous DAC's clock. So ;there shouldn't be a timing problem. Should there?
Can anyone make a case that I should buy a "better" coax cable?
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@bigkidz I no longer have a streamer and a CD transport. Thanks for the offer though. |
You are going to try a $14, 75ohm cable as a starting point to determine whether a coax cable can improve the sound. I don’t think this is going to reveal much. I was skeptical of the value add for digital cables and did a blind test of a wide range of cables with another listener and there was a wide range of performance and the differences were not subtle. The least expensive cable in the test was the bottom tier Pangea offering which did not perform well compared to all of the other cables tested. My reference at the time was the DHLabs D750 and I was disappointed in it’s performance compared with more expensive models from Nordost and Chord. I ended up finding a higher model in the Chord line up that cost as much used as my streamer did new and I have absolutely no regrets. if you watch the YouTube video about streamers referenced in my last post, the narrator goes into great detail about the importance of electrical noise affecting analog circuits in your DAC and other parts of your system downstream. I think one if not the main thing good coax cables do for sound quality is help keep noise out of the signal path. If sound comes out, the digital signal has been preserved. If one cable sounds better than another, it’s because it is likely doing something to reduce your system’s noise floor. A $14 cable is not going to tell you very much about that. kn |
Get yourself a CeriousTech Lumniscate cable and specifically an AES/EBU cable if your SSP or preamp will support it. Utterly transformative. Not inexpensive but prices fair in the context of the massive bump in SQ. I use from my Antipodes K22 player out to my Lyngdorf MP-60 and out to my Accuphase A-80. |
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