NOOOO!!!!!! Don't do it. Any basic 75 ohm cable will to the job. Don't drink the Kool-Aide. I did and wasted lot's of money I could have spent on music, dinners, and perhaps larger donations to a charity.
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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@kumizi Why are you looking for evidence? How about the hundreds of very experienced people here who’ve clearly heard differences? Do you think they’re all fooling themselves and making it up? There’s absolutely no reason you can’t just try a cable from Veritas, DH Labs, etc. for little/no risk and hear for yourself. Or you can just keep looking for scientific evidence. 🙄 |
@soix yes I do Most of these people that claim the virtues of digital cables are buying things left and right without much thought and don’t come across as credible. I have yet to hear anyone I consider credible say expensive digital cables sound better. I have spent $4000-5000 on expensive speaker cables (both Nordost and Cardas) and they didn’t sound any better to me than $100 Belden cables. There was less difference between $5000 and $100 cables than toeing my speakers in or out by a couple inches. Im trying to figure out if I’m the crazy one or if 90% of audiophiles are full of **** or just gullible. I see pictures of people's systems with horrible speaker placement and no one has ever taken a measurement of their frequency response. But a USB cable or power cables "completely transformed their system."
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I have a question for our science/networking folks. Chatgbt told me to try an analogue 50 ohm cable because I didn't have a digital 70 ohm cable to connect my CD transport to my streamer's DAC. Chat said if I heard music come through and there were no lapses, then I probably didn't need a digital cable. I did hear music come through a mid-priced analogue cable. I liked it. It sounded all smeary good like tubes. Then this forum talked me into trying a digital cable. I bought one for $14 and a used one that sold new for $249. Boy, did things tighten up a lot. Much more solid bass. No smeary tube sound. I did a quick comparison of the $14 one and the $249 one and thought the $249 sounded a bit more solid. But since I was keeping the $249 one, I just use it. I'm tired of the testing. But science/network folks, if the analogue 50 ohm cable did work to pass along the digital signal, what was all that smearyness from? You couldn't mistake it. I didn't need John Atkinson or anybody else. It was a night and day difference. Still the analogue cable did work to allow the digital signal through and give me music. And saying, "Well, it was a 50 ohm cable not made for digital" isn't scientific enough. The digital signal did pass through it, and digits are digits, and the digits are double checked to be correct. Does that experiment suggest that a cable does matter in certain ways and circumstances? |
Unless I am completely mistaken, your CD connects to your DAC using S/PDIF over copper wires. S/PDIF defines the physical connection and the data link layer. These are the lowest two layers of the seven-layer OSI network model, and the data link layer is the lowest layer of the IP network model. There is no requirement for the data link layer to detect or correct data errors. That is typically done by higher level protocols operating at higher levels in the network stack. Your assertion that "the digits are double checked to be correct" is not true for S/PDIF, any more than it is for I2S. As others have stated, all cables carry analogue signals, so there really is no such thing as a digital cable. The confusion arises because of the characteristic impedance required. S/PDIF specifies 75 Ohms whereas most RCA cables are nominally 50 Ohms. All that happens when impedances mismatch is that more of the signal gets reflected back into the cable at termination points, and less gets through. This makes it harder to determine when the signal has transitioned between on and off, or vice versa. In turn, that makes it harder to synchronise a clock over the cable. It does not stop a digital signal being retrieved, which is what you observed. It does not mean that all the digits are received correctly, so the sound quality may well vary, which is what you report. You really should read up a bit more on networking, and what the various layers do.
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