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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?

audio-b-dog
audio-b-dog's avatar
audio-b-dog OP
782 posts
 

@richardbrand 

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?

audio-b-dog's avatar
audio-b-dog OP
782 posts
 

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.

richardbrand's avatar
richardbrand
1,376 posts
 

@audio-b-dog 

When you asked what I did in my system, I replied that I now exclusively use native HDMI for all digital interconnections between components.  Absolutely not I2S over HDMI, and not any variety of S/PDIF.

S/PDIF is only designed for two channel PCM. Lack of any data error detection or correction implies that a really bad cable could definitely affect the digital transmission between your CD acting as a transport and your DAC. I have no way of guessing what the threshold of really bad is, in your system.

Equally I have no way of guessing the effects of EMI on your coaxial cable, or from your cable to other components.  Note that balanced twisted pairs in theory eliminate the effects of EMI, and need no shielding.  Shielding increases the capacitance of a cable, altering its analogue frequency response.

All I can say with some certainty is that your "bits are bits and are double corrected" is a false assertion in the S/PDIF context.  What matters is that you are hearing differences that are real to you. Physics supplies supporting reasons for differences you hear, but not necessarily your characterisation as "smeared".

Note that HDMI uses unshielded twisted pairs for very high speed digital transmission.  So do later incarnations of Ethernet from 10BASE-T on. This is why one of the HDMI pairs can be used for Ethernet.

Think about what happens when you make cables longer. Eventually they don’t work. Sometime before not working at all they will not sound good!

audio-b-dog's avatar
audio-b-dog OP
782 posts
 

@richardbrand 

Thank you for the information. Unfortunately, I can't use HDMI on my sytem. I'm kind of at my limit dollar-wise. I read reviews of my cable and they were pretty good. I was listening to a CD and it sounded really good. Very present. At 44.1 it sounds close to a record. So, I guess my "expensive" ($249) cable is okay. But I think from my test and from your expertise on networking, I can conclude that a person should purchase something more expensive than the bottom-of-the-line $14 coax cable. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

b

richardbrand's avatar
richardbrand
1,376 posts
 

@audio-b-dog 

From my perspective, North Americans in particular have been fed several loads of garbage, including

  1. There’s no aural advantage in going to more than 2-channels
  2. SACD has failed in the market
  3. SACD players only need to output 2-channels
  4. SACD transports are expensive
  5. HDMI blocks SACD content
  6. Expensive HDMI cables are better than inexpensive ones
  7. I2S is all you need for digital transfers

Happy to expand on each of these points if anybody is interested.

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