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?
@kumizi Well, as I mentioned several cable companies allow for returns and you’re only out return shipping in most cases if you don’t hear a significant improvement, so what are you afraid of? Then again, you can’t hear any differences between a $100 and $5000 speaker cable so may just be a waste of time anyway, and it’s much easier to just bury your head in the sand so I’ll give you that. 🙄 |
Ah, if it was only that simple! Alas, you are conflating Ethernet with the Internet, but Ethernet is a Local Area Network technology while the Internet has evolved to connect a network of different networks 802.3 represents the international standardisation of Ethernet in 1982. Ethernet was co-invented by Xerox, Intel and Digital. At the time, Ethernet competed in the local-area-network space with IBM's token ring and another technology called token bus. The first implementation of Ethernet used a thick, shielded, solid core coaxial cable of 50-Ohms impedance, which could be up to 500-m long and was usually bright orange or yellow. I actually sold one! So that frozen yellow garden hose with a maximum length of 500-m put a strict limit on local for Ethernet! Up to 100 devices could connect to the backbone cable using physical "vampire taps" drilled into the cable to reach the solid core. The cable was marked at 2.5-m intervals, which is where taps could be drilled. The distance was carefully calculated to avoid signal reflections at the tap points. The ends of the cable were terminated using 50-Ohm resistors to avoid reflections. To distinguish from later generations of Ethernet, it was known as 10BASE5 where 10 is for the bit rate in Mbps and 5 is the maximum length in 100-m units. Like S/PDIF, Ethernet fits into the physical and data link layers of the Open System Interconnection model, and was retrofitted into OSI. OSI itself is an international standard very closely based on Digital Network Architecture (DNA) which is a seven-layer networking model introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation around 1975, implemented as DECnet. The idea behind multiple network layers is simple, Each layer wraps an additional data envelope around a packet of data. The envelope at each layer includes address information and other metadata relevant to that layer. For example, every Ethernet device ever made includes a unique address number known as the MAC. Every Ethernet packet includes the MAC of the destination and of the sender. Unlike an IPv4 32-bit address, the MAC is 48-bits long so there are enough unique addresses to uniquely identify every Ethernet device in the world. (This is a severe problem for the internet as it struggles to get IPv6 implemented!) If you wanted to extend 10BASE5 to say 1000-m, you could add a simple signal repeater feeding another length of frozen yellow garden hose, albeit with a time delay. To make a bigger network, you could add a bridge between two segments. A bridge builds a list of Ethernet addresses on each segment and only forwards packets when required. Put multiple bridges in one box, and you have a switch. Up the level, and you have routers which connect over Wide Area communications links. Up again, and gateways convert from one network protocol to another. Each level peeks deeper into the data envelopes, requiring more overhead, Digital Network Architecture is a brilliantly designed structure imposing an engineering discipline on how networks should be built. The Internet, on the other hand, is just evolving like topsy ... |
Thank you for all of the networking information. I'm sorry, with all of the opinions expressed about cable in this thread, I forgot yours. Was your opinion that more expensive cable with a higher quality of wire and sheilding would affect the sound, or that a $14 70 ohm cable covered in rubber would work as well? |
I just did another test between my $14 cable and nty $249 cable. It was pretty clear pretty quickly that the $249 cable has much more vibrancy. I'm playing Lynn Arriale's "The Eyes Have it," which is a very well recorded CD. The bass is tight and the cymbals shimmer. The cheaper cable deadened the sound and it was pretty obvious to my ears that a more expensive cable was well worth the difference. Of course, I still stayed in the lower strataspheres. |
