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Customizing sound through digital interconnect

Hi all, I would like to know your opinion about the following. Many audiophiles dislike the thought of tailoring a system's sound through cabling. I personally do not belong to this majority. I do use cables to "customize" the sound of my system. I know this could be achieved with interconnect and speaker cables and also power cords. But is it to a certain degree also possible to taylor a system's sound through the use of digital interconnects? In what way could a digital interconnect "alter" the analog sound? Another related question is: can someone design a digital interconnect so that it sounds more warm/less warm, more detailed/less detailed, more 3D/less 3D? What are the measurable parameters to guide you through this design process?

Chris
dazzdax
tabl10s's avatar
tabl10s
1,073 posts
 
M.I.T. has two digital IC's that allow you to change different parameters to alter the sound. One goes for $1495 and the other $2995.
undertow
1,033 posts
 
Look at the Cardas Lightning 15 Cable, it is about 200 street price.. Used even cheaper, this is a firehose sized digital interconnect that has a very full bloomful organic sound, super deep bass, and very airy soundstage.... I put this cable in the past against quite a few hi end pieces, including wireworlds top of the line digital which cost a small fortune, yes this will change the sound using certain digital cables no doubt. Why I can not explain.
dazzdax OP
599 posts
 
It is still a mystery to me that a digital interconnect cable can alter the "frequency response" and frequency/amplitude behaviour of music signal while it is only transporting 1's and 0's. Can anyone explain this? Any expert in the field of digital transmission maybe? Thank you.

Chris
amfibius
282 posts
 
Dazzdax, digital cable is even more sensitive to imperfections than analogue cable. For one, the 1's and 0's are square waves, and square waves consist of the fundamental + an infinite number of harmonics (as per Fourier). So the frequencies transmitted by digital cable are in the order of several MHz. Contrast this to analogue cable, which "only" has to deal with 22kHz.

At these frequencies, skin effect becomes more of an issue. Higher frequencies may experience delay in transmission, which would be worse the longer the cable and the smaller the diameter of the cable. This will affect the shape of the square wave.

Also, the cable needs to be impedance matched. If it isn't, reflections can occur in the cable. It is possible to hook up an oscilloscope and see a ghost image of the transmission, which surely can not be a good thing.

Having said this I do not buy into the overpriced cable market. I would only buy a cable which is "good enough". I have learnt my lesson.

My reading suggests to me that the worst source of jitter is in the interface between the transport and the DAC, particularly if you are using transports and DAC's from different brands. For this reason it is sometimes worthwhile to have a one box CD player.
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