Why does my DAC sound so much better after upgrading digital SPDIF cable?

@audioengr thank you. what would you recommend for a toslink-to-mini-toslink convertor? For compatibility with an airport express or chromecast audio.

Thanks! 

You know I have no idea how I could possibly get to the end of this thread because of the utter rubbish that is being spouted. To the people who say that cables don't make a difference why don't you take all your cables that you have at the moment and replace them with cheap stuff that you Americans would say comes from a nickel and dime store and listen to your units for a whole week of at least two hours a day. Now after that is done get a mate to loan you some upmarket cables and do the same and listen to it for another week. If you don't notice a difference straight away and I'll give some of you two days time and it is not patently obvious to you that there is a massive difference then please take a tip from me and sell your stuff because you plainly cannot hear properly. I bet in all this time you have not even considered the people who are responsible for the content of your disc or file "the musicians" . I happen to be a musician myself and although I was never blessed with perfect pitch I know when something goes awry. say you are sitting in a recital hall and one of the players violins goes flat on a string then everyone instantly hears it even people who say they are tone deaf , but absoloutely no one is tone deaf. The same applies to high end music systems and that is why a lot of musicians don't listen to audio because they know it rarely sounds like real music, it is only a representation of real music. Why don't you do yourselves a favour and stop the carping because clearly no one will win.

@audioengr

Drivel as in measurements showing the differences are insignficant? Also yes, you heard plastic optical cables as better sounding than glass because plastic ones do measure better. And also, yes, USB cables of shorter length measure better than ones or longer length, but also bargain bin USB and “audiophile-grade” USB measure near identically.

And again, any decent DAC will reduce jitter to at least below say -110dBFS, so all these differences before the DAC can indeed be ignored, unless you are cranking your amplifier above full scale.

And yes, I’ve used wire bough at Walmart and wire that was much more expensive, no difference. Getting a sufficient gauge and maybe twisted for decent runs are pretty much all that matters. And no, you don’t have to listen for days to begin to appreciate the difference, our recall ability is about 15sec to my knowledge, so if you can’t immediately hear a difference, than any difference you hear latter on is not real.

Just to point out for those that don’t know, there is $10,000 amplifier challenge for anyone who can differentiate between two amps that are level matched, operating at volumes with THD below 2%, amplifying linearly (no tubes or bass boost), etc. This has been going on for almost 30 years, and not a single person could do better than 65% accuracy (24 guesses). So if anyone believes they can hear a difference, here’s your chance to win $10K. Over a thousand people (of course the majority are fellow audiophiles) have taken it and all failed.