Looking for a Giant Killer Digital cable



Hello all,

I’m looking for a Budget ‘Giant Killer’ RCA coaxial cable to connect my Oppo 203 to a DAC for music playback.

Can someone suggest something currently available in the $50 to $150 price range?

If however your experience says some new Optical cable in that range is as good or better, please, by all means do mention it as I could go either way of course!

A 1M to 1.5M will be sufficient.

Huge thanks!
blindjim
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.
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.

I have compared good glass Toslink cables to a high-quality plastic one and this plastic one beat the glass:

https://btpa.com/TOSLINK-XXX.html

Steve N.

Empirical Audio

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.

An unfortunate state of affairs IMO. If the DAC S/PDIF input would only go to a good S/PDIF receiver like the AK4114, many DAC’s would at least have the capacity to sound a lot better with a low-jitter input source and a good S/PDIF cable. Instead, you mostly hear the Master Clock of the reclocker inside the DAC, which is usually of dubious quality.

A reclocker or a good S/PDIF cable before the DAC can still be beneficial because the PLL of the reclocker in the DAC is usually still sensitive to incoming jitter (the filter of the PLL).

BTW, many modern DAC’s do not have reclockers on the S/PDIF inputs, but some do use older receiver technology, so their ability to reduce or maintain low jitter is compromised.

Steve N.

Empirical Audio


audio sensibility a very good digital cable. Get his best dont look back. AND its pretty reasonable (well who knows whats reasonable in this hobby anymore)

Best
Char2