Do I need an expensive digital cable?

Thank you for all your inputs. The reason I ordered the Purist Genesis Luminist digital cable was that it received decent reviews in the mid-tier category. My budget was around $150 and that's how much it was. It wasn't a cheap Audioquest that @audphile1 said would not be better than the $14 one I ordered. 

Why did I need a budget if I could return more expensive cables? Because if it sounds better, I'll probably keep it, and right now my wife/accountant is in no mood for stereo expenses. I spent a lot of money over the last few years on Sonus Faber speakers and the Moon streamer, plus while we were into the giddy tens of thousands, my dealer threw in a lot of expensive cables. So, I'm pretty much on a stereo budget now. Real world, folks, for any of you who have wives or children or grandchildren, as I do. 

Let's see if either 70 ohm digital cable performs better than the 50 ohm analogue cable I'm now using, and which sounds awfully good. I'm now listening to Bernstein conduct Shostakovich's 7th symphony, and I couldn't be happier. But, of course, I was happy listening to music on my $300 rig when I was 20.

The big question is does this relatively modestly priced Moon 280D really have a fully asycnchronous DAC. Moon says it does and chatgbt says it does. I think my experiment should tell.

Expensive is relative.

If you’re stressed out about a cable being the weakest link, stick with a professional cable like the Canare LV-61s with Nuetrik BNC Terminal and use an Canare 75 Ohm BNC to RCA Adapter. This is much preferred to using pre terminated RCA because most brand preterminated RCA’s can’t be true 75 Ohm.

You can get a custom made lengths at a very reasonable price and use that as a solid baseline.

Cables testing takes alot of experience and a very long time trial to really understand what it’s doing to your sound. The main variable is you and what kind of sound and level of clarity you’re looking for.

With more experience you’ll define for yourself what is an expensive cable.

Me, I use to think $150 was expensive but I’m way past that. That said, I still use Canare Cables in my system due to synergy.

@audio-b-dog you did say you were trying a different tier cable to test against the lower priced model, I missed that. Good idea. Will be interested to see what your tests reveal in your system.

kn

In this test, the RCA analogue 50 ohm interconnect is the bottom cable. The $15 75 ohm digital cable will let me know if there is any difference between the analogue and digital cable. The "high-end" cable that normally sells for $249 (I think) has been reviewed as a good, solid mid-tier cable. If there is no difference between the analogue cable and the top digital cable, then I would say that the asynchronous DAC is fully asynchronous, clocking all inputs, including SPDIF.