Do you find streaming CD rips sounds better than streaming it from Qobuz or Tidal? I don't think I own a CD that isn't on one of those services, and I own a lot of obscure CDs. Streaming some albums at 44.1 sometimes seems flat to me. I will go to my CD and play it on my transport and it often sounds better.
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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In the post where I quoted from a review, I also put a link to the original so anybody interested can see the full context, which I took to be a generalisation across the industry. You have identified one way in which digital sound quality may genuinely differ depending on the source. There must be a surefire way of finding out - stream to a file and use a computer program to do a word-by-word comparison, maybe? I very recently bought my partner a set of Barbirolli conducting Elgar on CDs, some of which are famous recordings which have been full price in the catalog for decades. The new set did not sound right and it turns out they have been remastered in 24/192, which possibly means remixed as well? Another way for digital to differ is if what arrives at the dac, differs from the source. If any digital link in the chain does not implement full error detection and recovery, that’s a potential variance. Any digital that travels over an I2S cable connection is suspect. Same for Ethernet unless it is within an end-to-end error correction protocol. If you can be sure your digital is arriving perfectly (which requires a memory buffer and an on-board clock), the next potential source of variation is analogue variability and interference. After that, differences can only be psycho-acoustic in my book.
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You are right, of course; and in an ideal world, that approach would work every time. In reality, when folks start asking diplomatic but pointed questions, more often than not they get the brush-off or are roundly ignored. That’s understandable, in a way; when people are heavily invested in a certain paradigm, the last thing they want to hear is that that paradigm might be flawed.
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