Do I need an expensive digital cable?

@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.

@richardbrand 

My McCormack UDP-1 is a multi-disk player, CD, SACD, DVDA. From my experience a well-recorded CD sounds better than SACD. My Moon 280D streamer will not receive anything but a CD signal from the McCormack. I have set up another channel on my preamp for SACD and DVDA. I do not play them for a better sound. I play them when I want to hear whatever is recorded on them. The Lynne Arriale CD I told you about sounds better than any SACD. I do have one Fleetwood Mac DVDA that sounds fantastic. But maybe it would sound just as good on CD? So, my empirical knowledge agrees with your theoretical knowledge. Maybe we can work on my physics theories. I believe that space is the prime element in the universe, and that everything comes from space. 

@audio-b-dog 

Maybe we can work on my physics theories. I believe that space is the prime element in the universe, and that everything comes from space

You are absolutely right on this one!

In a rather strange way, space is negative energy.  I'll try and explain this below.

Given that physics believes that in our universe, energy is conserved. When more space is created (more negative energy), a balancing amount of positive energy must be created.  After the big bang, which created space, some of this balancing positive energy condensed into the matter we are familiar with - protons, neutrons, electrons.  Some of it exists as electromagnetic waves.  Some of it we cannot account for at the moment.

Quantum theory contends that there is no such thing as truly empty space - subatomic particles appear and are annihilated out of otherwise 'empty space'.

How can space be negative energy?  Imagine you are standing in a level field.  Somebody digs a big hole alongside you (creating space).  You have now acquired potential energy which you can use by falling into the hole, which represents negative energy.

The starting conditions for the big bang involve about an ounce of matter, incredibly hot and small.  From this, all the space-time we can observe, and all the stars and galaxies in it, arise naturally from the balance of energy between things and space.

@richardbrand 

I may be a little farther out on this theory than you are. Cosmologists now talk about the universe expanding (at an accelerating rate) because space is expanding. When I was a kid, a long time ago, people thought about the universe expanding because matter from the Big Bang was still hurling "outward" pushing the envelope of space. I do not hear any cosmologists saying this anymore. They say it's space expanding and that expansion is creating new matter. Could it not be possible that the Big Bang was actually an expansion of space which in turn created energy and matter?

@audio-b-dog 

From my experience a well-recorded CD sounds better than SACD

You have an astonishing ability to generalise from your own highly biassed 'experience'.

The audio chain you listen to CDs on appears to be completely different to the one you use for SACDs, from the player on.  If you contend that a well-recorded CD played through a very expensive DAC sounds better than SACD played through an ordinary AV system, most people would probably agree with you - at least if you only use two channels.

But take a well-recorded hybrid SACD and compare it with the CD layer on the same disk, played through the same audio chain where both are in their native mode (DSD versus PCM) and the improvement over CD can be astonishing.

I'll just note that for the price you paid for your 'digital' cable, you could have bought a universal disk transport (including Pure Audio Blu-ray and multi-channel SACD) and an additional HDMI cable.

I'll also note that the only way you can get native SACD output from your McCormack is via six analogue outputs for 5.1 or 2-channel sound.  Trying to output SACD via S/PDIF can only be done with lossy conversion.  No surprise CD sounds better if that is what you are comparing.

Please try to refrain from posting highly misleading generalisations based on personal observations from extremely poor experimental designs