Digital Cables - I must be nuts...

[jaxwired]

When I purchased my benchmark DAC1, I also purchased a coax digital cable since it requires the odd combination of RCA to BNC. The cable that benchmark sent me sounded really great and it looked well made also, with a canare connector on the RCA end. The cable was very inexpensive.

So, even though I thought all digital cables should technically sound identical, just for comparison, I purchased another cable from one of those "we hand make cheap cables just as good as the expensive audio cable companies" kind of web sites. You know what I'm talking about. The cable arrived 2 days ago and it looks like a very serious cable.

Well, I've A/B'd the cables many many times until I can't stand switching the cable anymore. It truly seems to me that the benchmark cable has more open high end and the new hand made cable has less high end, but more pronounced bass. This makes no technical sense at all. I really feel like I hear the same difference every time I switch the cable, but it could easily be self delusion. For now I'm sticking with what seems to me to be the livelier cable.

 

[Frank Harvey]

I think you were open to the fact that there could be a difference - which was why you bought the second cable to try. If you steadfastly believed there is no difference, you wouldn't have bought the other one.

The cost of a cable can be irrelevant most of the time - it can boil down to synergy. Meridian used to give away a thin, feeble looking blue digital interconnect with their equipment. If you saw this cable, there's no way you'd pay a fiver for it, and the only giveaway of any quality was the Deltron (I think) plugs. But tryas I might, I could never find a digital cable to improve on it. I'm not saying it's the best digital cable you can get, but it just matched the system, and that synergy can't be beaten.

I've heard differences in digital cables many times, in differingly priced systems. Some will categorically state there can't be a difference, which is technically true. But then, some people say that ghosts can't exist. Who knows?

 

[Anonymous]

If the same information (bits) is getting delivered, at the same time (jitter) then what else is there? Or is that a gross oversimplification?

 

[Anonymous]

I wonder whether the same applies to digital optical cables..............

 

[lordmortlock]

I can certainly hear differences in speaker cable/interconnects but I've had several different optical cables betwixt airport and dac and can't hear any difference.

 

[aliEnRIK]

FrankHarveyHiFi:
I think you were open to the fact that there could be a difference - which was why you bought the second cable to try. If you steadfastly believed there is no difference, you wouldn't have bought the other one.

The cost of a cable can be irrelevant most of the time - it can boil down to synergy. Meridian used to give away a thin, feeble looking blue digital interconnect with their equipment. If you saw this cable, there's no way you'd pay a fiver for it, and the only giveaway of any quality was the Deltron (I think) plugs. But tryas I might, I could never find a digital cable to improve on it. I'm not saying it's the best digital cable you can get, but it just matched the system, and that synergy can't be beaten.

I've heard differences in digital cables many times, in differingly priced systems. Some will categorically state there can't be a difference, which is technically true. But then, some people say that ghosts can't exist. Who knows?

If its the same digital cable I bought off ebay then id have to disagree

 

[Anonymous]

It can depend on if there is any parity checking on the data transferred. On your home network, if some data isn't received intact for any reason, the recipient can re-request the packet from the sender, and the data is then rebuilt correctly and completely intact on the recipient device. Obviously this process can take time, which contributes partly to 'lag'.

HDMI and S/PDIF is one way communication so if a piece of the data is corrupted too much, it is lost. For S/PDIF, it depends on the type of signal being transmitted, but I know HDMI uses BCH ECC parity checking to correct minor degradation in the data. This means, for every 'word' of information there is an extra 'bit' of information. This can be used to calculate if there is a 'bit' in the 'word' that has been corrupted (changed from a 1 to a 0 or vice versa). The receiver can then change that bit, eradicating the error. The drawback here is that if the data is corrupted too much, the error checking is useless.

I think, but I'm not sure, that interpolation is used to make an 'educated guess' if digital audio information is missing from a digital audio signal (over S/PDIF). Whether this is done by the receiver chip or DAC i'm not sure, Tony_R can probably tell u that.