Looking for a Giant Killer Digital cable

@in_shore

My curiosity grows on the PSA WAVE setup. Albeit, given the biz with DSD vs all other formats, I believe I’ll aim for merely Red Book playback DACs. If they have more attributes or support more BR and SR then fine.

Have you found via comparison sake, between two identical titles, one off SACD disc, one streamed via the I2S one is best on all accounts?

That question seems loaded, as there are a few variables, but generally speaking if the I2 and USB cables in play are the exact same level from the same maker, it should be a close enough experiment I would suspect.


LowRider
RE “its great with video”

At $700, it ought to be. I’ve found too merely adding a nice upscale Power Cord on the rendering device vastly improved the video. Good to very good will suffice for my needs, its mostly for company or a date night anyhow. I tend to use the Narrative Audio track now on many BR discs. Using this optional audio track, it is almost like old time radio. Most things are verbally explained during the film by a separate voice. Even in the chasing, combat, and fighting scenes. Description rests in between the standard dialog.

It’s a brave new world sports fans!
. . . . . .

 
@mr_m
Thanks. Yeah. I did not mention optical on purpose. Although I’ve had somewhat similar results to your own with various low end TOS links.

One issue arises in what your post says… ‘glass’.

It is my understanding the glass refers to a different connector or interface than simpler TOS cables.
Is this your own EXP with the one you mention? Did it come with adapters if so?

With various iterations of el cheapo TOS links from the early ‘s, $20 - $40, the sound was hard on most discs, and from CATV boxes via bit stream except for greater sampling rates above 44K.

Surprisingly, a 6ft TOS I picked up at Wally World in a pinch eased up the stern presentations of the shorter thinner 1M links from Best buy or online outlets. In fact that wally cable became my go to TOS for CATV boxes and Megga CD changers. $15 I think.

you can buy glass tos cables, not just glass ST link cables.

speaking of that, I must have a few thousand feet of st link glass terminated cables. Found a pile of  it a few months back, can't bring myself to throw it out....

Blindjim,

The glass optical cable has the standard ends of a inexpensive toslink, but are highly polished on the Wireworld. Standard cheap toslink ($15 to $30 variety) usually comes with one thick plastic line to transmit the signal. OTOH, a high quality glass optical is made up of hundreds of small glass threads to carry signal. The Wireworld has approx. 330 of these minute glass cables bundled into one. This makes for a much more expensive interconnect, but is vastly superior to a standard cheap toslink. I have done extensive comparisons with both. YMMV.

BlindJim 
Like some I prefer physical ownership of my music and I guess I could rip my CDs and store my collection away however I don’t mind plopping a disc in a tray.
When it comes DSD , Sacd and jacked up music files sold as Hi-res music I’m highly sceptical of it well most anything the industry pushes I’m weary of .
Back to the subject I did manage to borrow a DH silver sonic coax cable and compared it to the I2s and found little difference with the I2s I’m hearing it in low level information and perhaps a bit more realistic sounding human voice and vocalist however that was just one evening of listening .

When looking at dac cabling one has to also look at the given reclocking scenario that may be in play.

Quite a bit of the modern gear reclocks at one end of the transmission chain, or both.

this will narrow the differences in cables to some degree.

Then one is left with figuring out if the reclocking on board the given device ...is substandard or not. And whether that given reclocking is messing up cable qualities analysis, or not. Or by what degree, is the usual reality.

This is why one has to be careful in what one thinks they hear with a given cable/dac/source combination which is in play.

Beside the issue of whether the given listener has the mental/physical wherewithal to have discernment or preference for the given scenario that is at hand.

traditionally, relocking is not there, so older dacs with lower resolution can many times have more of the given cable’s intrinsic qualities come shining through.

This is due to the external coaxial cabling and system of transfer, was originally intended to never leave the confines of the given CD player. It was meant to be an internal hardware method of moving the bits off the cd proper and into the DAC chipset proper. It was never meant to be externalized into what it is today. Most importantly, the clocking data was embedded into the signal and transferred by the internal cable. Which is now an external coaxial cable. so the jitter of the transport/read... became the jitter of the dac. bit-word timing was determined by the cd read hardware and the spinning disc system itself. Coaxial is legacy hardware from the literal first days of digital audio on the CD format. Modern implementation has re-clocking at the DAC receiver end of things. If you read carefully, you see that the jitter of the cable, it's complex set of overall characteristics... comes into play in such a system of signal transfer.

Just...sort of ...restating the argument of the whole process, with regard to fundamentals.