Digital cables are ALL different, and they make a huge difference..
Yes, digital cables matter too
On a suggestion from another Agoner, I recently spent a fair bit of time sorting out the coaxial cable situation connecting my Bluesound Node (gen 3) and my Chord QuteHD dac. I ended up enlisting outside help, but I learned quite a bit, and I am certain my system will be in a much better place as a result once I pull the trigger on one of the cables evaluated.
I went into a local dealer to buy a different item and mentioned in passing I was interested in trying a different digital cable, and he immediately handed me three and told to take them home and try them out. My initial impressions were so positive I went to another local dealer and they handed me another five cables to try. Combined with two coax cables I already had at home, that was a total of ten new and used cables priced from $25 to $1,500 to compare. Cables were: Pangea Premier Digital, Blue Jeans X ‘Better’, DHLabs Silver Sonic, naim DC-1, Chord Shawline, current and past Chord Signature Digital Super ARAY models, and Nordost Blue Heaven and Heimdall 2.
I have bought or assembled and evaluated a number of different PC, digital and analog cables, but until I got the Node, I had never really experimented with digital coax cables. I have developed my own method for comparing cables that includes making sure all cables have been played recently in my system for st lesst a day, and then listening to a few cuts of various genera and styles of music with each cable and taking general notes. I enlisted my son who has a very good system and good listening skills for blind testing a few of the cables.
I will touch on some if the highlights here.
First, I have never listened to either Chord or Nordost cables in a controlled context, and at least for their digital offerings, I am impressed. I had thought that my DHLabs Silver Sonic coax cable sounded pretty good, and it is often recommended as a good budget cable, but it was left a little bit behind by most of the others I tried in my system.
Second, some of these cables sounded dramatically different, and you get what you pay for. My son easily identified as his favorite cables the two most expensive cables tested in a blind listening. The amount of detail and nuance on offer made that result a near certainty.
Third, putting these high quality cables between the latest iteration of the Node and the Chord dac indicated how good the Node functions as a server for HD, 16/44 and mp3 files, and proved to me that digital cables make a big difference in this context.
The lower level Chord Shawline and Nordost Blue Heaven are both lovely cables. The Shawline is balanced with good spatial detail and broad soundstage. The Blue Heaven is super musical with great PRAT, an emphasis on leading edges and a lower center of gravity. Of the two, there’s a bit more detail on offer from the Shawline. Compared to my Silver Sonic, both had less grain, sounded more organized and less shouty. Either would have been an improvement, and I probably would have bought the Shawline if I hadn’t listened to cables further up both lines.
The naim DC-1 is a nice cable and a slight step up from the Shawline and Blue Heaven in terms of spatial resolution and detail, but interestingly, the naim wire had less PRAT and drive than either of the Nordost products.
The Nordost Heimdall 2 is a really lovely cable, similar PRAT and flow as the Blue Heaven, but more high frequency information, better tone, oodles of detail and very accurate placement of instruments and voices in the sound stage, all without sounding lit up or over the top. It took this cable a few hours of playing to get to this point. When I first dropped it in, it sounded a little thin.
The Chord Signature Super ARAY is also a great cable. My son in the blind listening described it as not quite as punchy on leading edges as the Heimdall 2, but he felt the midrange was to die for, and this cable did voices better than any other cable in my test. Very good tone, and detail and spatial resolution were also convincing with this cable.
One surprise in my listening was the Blue Jeans digital cable made specifically for Hawthorne Stereo. At just shy of a hundred bucks, this was a very good deal. It lacks the PRAT of the Blue Heaven, but it was smooth, good tone, sound stage and separation and bass definition. The treble is a bit tipped up, but no jitter glare. It doesn’t set a foot wrong, and especially for the price. I did have trouble getting the RCA connectors to grip the socket on the Node, and the cable is stiff, which didn’t help.
So, in conclusion, yeah, trying different coax cables with the Node was a real ear opener. When I first thought about upgrading my coax cable, I never considered spending up to half of the combined value new of my streamer and dac, but now I plan to buy one of the more expensive cables I tried, because after listening to them in my system, there is no going back.
kn
47 responses Add your response
Try this. Buy it used for $275 ($660 retail) and if it doesn’t blow you away just turn around and sell it for little/no loss. I’d offer $225 and see what he comes back with because it’s been available for a bit. I have one and it’s really incredible and does everything well. Read the reviews.
|
Well done, a lot of thought went into your audition process. I'm not here to influence your selection, but I had to comment after seeing what @soix had to offer. The Acoustic Zen was one of my favourites during my auditions. It was beat out by my current cable which costs twice the price. And I had no trouble reselling it . That is all. Anxiously waiting to see what you choose.
|
@soix thanks for the tip, I will check out that cable. @lowrider57 thanks for the original suggestion for me to explore other cables. Good advice! I have a pretty conservative budget, so it may take a bit to get the cable I want. Used is certainly a good option. kn |
Thanks for sharing your review and findings, and including your son. Awesome! While comparing other type ic and speaker cables for too long, some digital cables always sort of puzzled me until this past year, reconfirming similar type findings. |
Digital cables sound different because we're still transmitting audio using non-ECC transport. PCM just streams the bits with no packetization or error correction. MQA, DSD, and all the rest also do not do any error-correction, just compression on top of the transport. It made a lot of sense, when digitized audio first came out, to stream without error correction. Slower processors and physical layers couldn't handle it. Nowadays, however, we've got processors that can handle the speed with cycles to spare. I'd love to see a newer standard that can negotiate back to PCM if talking to older gear, but handle some form of error correction, if available. Of course, monkeys might fly out of my butt, also. |
Great review of what you had on hand and a testament to the labors involved. I only tried 3 Coax cables and when I realized just how different they all sounded in matters small and large, I gave up and settled on a RCA cable that I really like (heresy, I know) as it outperformed the Coax cables (handily). I know there's much more out there but even the maker of the cable told me he doesn't use any coax cables either, even though he makes them. Funny that. All the best, |
Very nice info in that post. Like some I rely on USB cable for my bluesound to dac, because it is the only connection that will use the dac's clock vs. bluesound's clock. And my Gustard X26 PRO clock is superior to bluesound. Simple as that. However, even so this post doesn't apply to me, it has very valuable info for the ones who use coax. |
I have some Nordost cables that're a tier up from those and I can appreciate the way you describe the character. What I've been told is that their technology lets whatever components you've chosen to really come thru. So if you've chosen well, they're gonna blow you away with what they reveal. And if you've chosen poorly, it'll let it come thru also and will reveal the lack of synergy in your system thru hardness or a fatiguing sound, various ways. And once you hear your system come together you'll understand the difference. My power reconditioner, it's a P15, which was my final piece truly brought everything into focus. It was like layers upon layers were revealed. It was very very fine, but striking in effect. In my own system, it's my belief that the Nordost cables sort of allow whatever music is coming thru the system, to present itself extremely naturally, if you will. That's my experience. |
Thanks for all the feedback folks. It was a lot of time, but not all work;-) @baylinor interesting comment on the Node not clocking the USB output. I use an iFi iPurifier 2 at the coax input into my Chord dac to reclock the Node output, and it makes a big positive difference. As a control. I took the iPurifier out of the circuit for the side by side cable comparisons, but put it back in for just listening to music and it improved the performance of all the coax cables in my system. I cannot use USB out of the Node because my SSD drive is using that port so I can use the Node as a server. |
Digital cables usb, Ethernet cables IHave documented changes ,improvements as they breakin , being only 5 v as many mfg have said I feel between 200-250 hours is when it’s finally settled in well even Ethernet cables can be a nice improvement And a bunch of other things such as a decent linear power supply on your modem- router combo , if you have single units get rid of the, I bought the newer motorola 8702,whaich has the latest docsis 3.1 older 3.0 pare 4 x slower and excellent wifi for your TVs |
Digital cables usb, Ethernet cables IHave documented changes ,improvements as they breakin , being only 5 v as many mfg have said I feel between 200-250 hours is when it’s finally settled in well even Ethernet cables can be a nice improvement And a bunch of other things such as a decent linear power supply on your modem- router combo , if you have single units get rid of the, I bought the newer motorola 8702,whaich has the latest docsis 3.1 older 3.0 pare 4 x slower and excellent wifi for your TVs |
Thank you for sharing, it was very interesting. My question would be: was there any difference in the length of the cables you tried? If yes, could you observe any correlation between the sound quality and the lenght of the cables? I have very limited experience with digital coax cables, but when I did some research, it appeared to me that people tend to like cables of 1.5 m. In those days, I was using a 0.5m Blue Jeans cable, and since it is really cheap, I thought I would just try the 1.5m version of the very same cable (same cable, same Canare plugs, same seller), so that the only difference should be the length between the two. In my system too, the 1.5m cable easily outperformed the shorter one : it was more balanced, more relaxed, and I could hear better spatial separation of the instruments. As for the importance of the digital cables, I'll share this little anecdote. With two of my friends, we have compared our DACs recently, using the host's digital IC cable. We could hear clear differences between the 3 devices, but at the end, I proposed that we could try my 1.5 m BlueJeans cable as well, just to see how much the cable mattered as opposed to the DAC. We all agreed that the difference was at least as substantial between the two cables as between any of the DACs we auditioned, and we also agreed that the 1.5m cheap cable was way better than the shorter one (roughly four times the price...). Of course, there we were comparing pears to apples, because ideally we would have had to compare two cables of the same length, but alas, that's what we had. It was still an interesting experiment. |
I try to recommend auditioning a cable at a price point above your "budget", provided there is an option to return. You may discover a level of performance you had never imaged, which presents 2 options: 1) you find a way to up the ante on the purchase, or 2) you returning it, knowing what your next upgrade will be when "the right time" presents itself. If you are not blown away with the cable, the worst case is you return it and feel even more confident in your selection of the lower priced cable. |
Yes they make a huge difference. Coax too…no toslink. I went from an Analysis Plus Digital Oval which is an excellent cable in its own right to a Nordost Valhalla digital when I had my node. It was like someone remove a mussel. The only other issue, and it’s not really that bad of an issue, is the break-in time with digital cables is very long, so you really have to wait to put some time in to get the full effects. |
Thanks for your work and reporting. I recently did an ethernet cable shootout on another thread and not only were there distinct sonic differences between cables, but each cable was directional, and all unmarked. I had a friend over for listening and discussion and I realized I had never tested my Pangea Premier SE coaxial cable between my Esoteric DV50 and Benchmark DAC3B for directionality. When I reversed it the music became less organized and was tonally a little bleached. So, I had it right by blind luck. Make sure to do this test! |
@renatus all the cables are 1M except the Pangea which is closer to 0.5M. I have read that 1.5M length is a sweet spot for digital cables between reflections and data loss. https://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue14/spdif.htm I have about 4 or 5 Toslink cables and they all sound different too. I prefer glass over optical plastic fibers. DHLabs is my favorite so far for Toslink, but I have not tried any super expensive cables. I don’t like the format on the grounds that cheap parts are converting your signal twice. |
@singingg Agreed. My prior digital cable was directional but very faintly labeled, and one night I inadvertently installed it backwards while switching out a component and my system sounded like crap. It took me about a half hour, which was an awful half hour BTW, to figure it out and once I reinstalled it properly everything was back to normal. There is another thing at play here in that if you’ve had your cable installed the same way for a while, even if it’s a non-directional cable, it settles in that way and if you reverse it it’ll sound bad for a while until it settles in again. I will never do this as there’s really no point, but just something to keep in mind. I know if I had a non-directional cable I’d label that sucker with some tape on one end to avoid potentially running into this nightmare. Just FYI and FWIW. |
I prefer glass Toslink over coax and RCA for digital out and discovered that cable length matters with Toslink as well. The ones I tried were Supra Zac, Lifatec and Unique Products. The Supra Zac are a proprietary strand of plastic with an highly polished and curved end that has a very pleasant sound. A bit soft and forgiving with some rounding of the base. The Lifatec is from a medical grade manufacturer back east whose owner does the Toslink cabling on the side. It’s gotten very favorable feedback and has a more focused, tighter and detailed sound than the Supra. It uses 470 strands of glass fiber and has in house made connectors that are the best in the business. They just snap into place for perfect alignment. What surprised me was the Unique Products glass fiber Toslink from Amazon. It uses "only" 280 strands of glass and outperformed the Supra and the Lifatec. The only caveat is to get the 6’ length as it has a much fuller and richer sound compared to the 3’ length with no loss of detail, air, ambience, pacing, etc. and it goes for the heady price of $40.00. That’s about $30 less than the Supra and $120 less than the Lifatec. I also tried these on my TV’s audio out via Toslink to gauge their mettle and the 3’ Unique Products was too revealing and unforgiving (a home improvement show sounded like it was way too raw) and it was somewhat of a tie with the Lifatec and the 6’ Unique Products with the Supra coming in last. I ended up with the Lifatec on my TV and the 6’ Unique Products for my digital out on my Tecnics SACD player to my Technics SU-G700M2. It even bested the Darwin Cables Enlightenment RCA that I was using for the Coax connection, and I thought nothing could better that. All the best,
|
@nonoise Isn’t Toslink limited to 24/96? What SPDIF or AES/EBU cables have you compared it to? |
OP et al After not finding a consensus between which was superior 1.0 v 1.5, I bought a 1.5m Pangea Premier SE coax cable, which I used for over a year, then I came across the forum about Counterfeit Chinese Cables and bought the knockoff Nordost Odin 2 coax, which were so cheap I bought both 1.5 an 1.0M to test (as I recall, the 2 were less than the $169 I paid for the Pangea!). First I replaced the1.5M Pangea with the 1.5 Odin 2. No contest. The Odin was hugely superior, so much so that I never got around to comparing it to the 1.0, I finally did that just 2 weeks ago, many months later. WOW YMMV when comparing 1.0 v 1.5 |
@nonoise I have a Unique Products Toslink cable as well, which was my favorite for quite a while and bested cables from Audioquest, Chord, and one recommended by Steve Nugent from Empirical Audio the brand of which escapes me. I like the DHLabs cable better than the Unique Products cable in my system. It is 1.5M, so perhaps that is the whole story right there. kn |
@soix about half the cables in my test were directional, and half were not labeled. However I placed them in my system, the sound signatures were repeatable and consistent between cables, but the point of testing directionality for any given coax cable is well taken. kn |
@tweak1 Chinese cables. I could write an essay on that. Suffice to say that I have had great but not necessarily consistent luck with both counterfeits and Chinese house brands, particularly for power cables and connectors. Some of the cables I have tried in the $100-$120 price range blow away anything I’ve used premade or that I’ve built from retail U.S. or Japanese manufacturers up to at least $700 or $800 bucks. The Chinese sophistication in materials and manufacturing I have noticed just in buying finished cables and parts is scary good. Amazing what outsourcing of western technology and manufacturing over the last 40 years has done for their capabilities. Not sure the U.S. wants to tangle with them anytime soon, but that is a whole other story for another thread on another site. kn |
@soix , When I use Toslink for my TV feed, it shows a 48Hz lock on my Technics readout but when I play CDs, the readout shows a 176.4 Hz lock on the signal (the SACD player oversamples all signals) The Technics SU-G700M2 is a completely digital integrated (with only one analog stage at the speaker outputs) that does more than just pass a signal.
As for AES/EBU, I have no out/inputs for that so I can’t say. I believe what the Technics does with a digital signal is not really appreciated by most and they probably felt that AES/EBU and HDMI weren’t needed with the results they got. Can’t really say as I don’t really know.🤔 As for Coax, I only tried a Zu Mission Coax, an Audio Envy Coax, and one made for me by a recording engineer (it was a Supra brand cable with WBT locking connectors). And no, it’s not total nonsense. All one needs to do is listen to the results of this kind of set up. All the best, |
@knownothing Thanks for the heads up on the DH Labs Toslink. Before I think about getting one can you tell me if the Unique Products Toslink was a one meter length, or was it longer? All the best, |
@nonoise my Unique Products cable is 1.0M. The medical grade cable recommended by Steve Nugent was 1.5M and I was unimpressed with that. As mentioned previously, my DHLabs Toslink cable is also 1.5M, so take the direct comparison in my system with Unique Products with a grain of salt, being 1:1.5 versus 1:1. The DHLabs cable was recommended by the sales team at Cables.com, fwiw. kn |
@knownothing Thanks for the follow up. I'll check out the DH labs but stay content for the time being with my Unique Products Toslink. All the best, |
If anybody is interested, my only experience with digital cables even slightly relevant to this discussion is mostly with USB, and some with AES/EBU balanced XLR and I2S HDMI, the latter two which I found to be notably superior to all the SPDIF coax digitals I tried. I also have found dramatic differences between brands. My present favorites are the ridiculously expensive Shunyata Omega USB for source to digital-to-digital converter (DDC), and the Audio Envy AES/EBU for DDC to DAC with Crystal Cable I2S HDMI as an additional option. I found that length is critical, too, even with these non-SPDIF digital cables. The 1.5m rule is supposed to be mainly based on reflection effects with SPDIF coax digital cables, but I found that this rule also applies at least as much to these other three digital cable types. With USB, I experimentally compared inexpensive short 1/2 m generic USBs from Amazon with the same brand in 1.5m and 2m length, and the 2 m lengths always won hands down. To save money on experimentation I did something similar with the AES/EBU and I2S cables, with similar results. The short cables always came up inferior due to being flat imaged, slightly edgy and thin tonally, compared to the 2m versions which always had a much fuller naturally bodied sound with much less edginess and thinness. This phenomenon must also be due to reflection effects. |
@ambr1600 Your findings on i2S cables is surprising as it’s widely held that optimally i2S HDMI cables should be 1 foot or less as that signal was initially designed to work inside pro components and therefore didn’t need to run more than a few inches. But, you obviously heard what you heard. |
Just wanted to note that I went back and tried the shorter (1 meter) version of the Unique Products Glass Toslink cable as I really never heard it with my new speakers. My conclusions were based on hearing them with my older set up using JBL 4319 monitors with their Al/Mag tweeters and mid range drivers. The 2 meter version of the Toslink cable ameliorated the harsh highs and leading edge those metallic drivers produced. The drivers on the Atalante 3 monitors exhibit none of those qualities and the detail, air and ambience are there in spades along with a tighter bass with no loss of richness or body. Looks like I may now try out that DH Labs Glass Master Toslink after all and save some money not going for the longer length. All the best, |
@lowrider57 I finally got around to purchasing a coax cable and selected a used Chord Signature Super ARAY at 1m length. It was a reasonable deal and sounds terrific in my system. Thanks for the conversation and input. kn |
Snippet from my post this morning Eventually I came across the Chinese Cable knockoff thread and first tried the fau-Nordost Odin 1.5m coax which was/is amazing: as they were so cheap compared to the $169 1.5m Pangea Premier XL, I also bought a 1.0M Odin, but didn’t try it until after I replaced both the WW cables with Odin 2 XLRs and cables. Then I replaced the 1.5m with the 1.0 and was kinda blown away that 0.5m of the same coax could be THAT much better. |
@knownothing ,Just wanted to give you a big thank you for your recommendation on the DH Labs Glass Master Toslink. I just put it in and man, oh man, what an improvement. More air, depth, ambience, tone and texture to revel in. Even facing away from my system as I type this I can hear and appreciate the improvements. I have to keep this short as Lady Blackbird is calling to me and I can't resist. All the best, |
@nonoise glad that worked out for you. It is the best Toslink cable I’ve tried so far. |
On thing to add is that this is the only digital cable I've tried that passes everything without any drop outs. The three coax and three Toslink cables I've tried before all failed to play two of my CDs without peppering them with audio drop outs. They all had indicated perfect locks on the signal at 176.4 MHz yet couldn't play those two CDs successfully. Goes to show there's more than 1's and 0's going on with digital. I still can't believe the quality of playback I'm getting with this cable. All the best, |
I spent a nice chunk of $$$ on an Analysis Plus SPDIF cable only to get a different streamer that forced me to use USB. But then I learned what you said above…so now I may go sell my SPDIF cable. Some discussion here: https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/60663-confused-usb-a-solved-problem-or-back-to-spdif/ |
@baylinor Did you get the filtering box too? The USB Cable IV is the cable? |
It is the Eno III. Cable only. Using the LHY SW-10 ethernet switch instead. Wonderful unit which allows me to use the Gustard C18 master clock and not only that, it also ties in to my Small green computer optical isolation bundle, more expensive but this newest unit gives the competition like etherregen a lot to think about. |