From a review of Oyaide DB510 digital cable. Food for thought? Food seems like a common thread these days. 😛
“The idea of digital cables sounding different from one another will probably shock many people. According to some, “Bits are bits”and either the digital data is perfectly transmitted or there are drops and glitches but there shouldn’t be any “in-between”.
But the reality is different. There are no 1 and 0s running around in a digital cable. Actually, the signal being transmitted is analog in nature (square waves to be precise) and there are tiny timing errors that occur in the spdif interface (called jitter) that show up in the decoded data by the DAC. So the data being transmitted can be ”bit perfect” but the jitter will affect noticeably the analog output of a DAC. The jitter problem has been discussed extensively elsewhere, so I won’t go into the details.
Just know that jitter exist in cables and that itis measurable (see an old article from stereophile here: Stereophile: A Transport of Delight: CD Transport Jitter)
One interesting thing about that article is that jitter can be different according to the direction of the cable. Robert Harley (Stereophile) measured a cable that gave a figure of 4050ps on one direction vs 2700ps in another direction.”
