Customizing sound through digital interconnect

Look at the Cardas Lightning 15 Cable, it is about 200 street price.. Used even cheaper, this is a firehose sized digital interconnect that has a very full bloomful organic sound, super deep bass, and very airy soundstage.... I put this cable in the past against quite a few hi end pieces, including wireworlds top of the line digital which cost a small fortune, yes this will change the sound using certain digital cables no doubt. Why I can not explain.

It is still a mystery to me that a digital interconnect cable can alter the "frequency response" and frequency/amplitude behaviour of music signal while it is only transporting 1's and 0's. Can anyone explain this? Any expert in the field of digital transmission maybe? Thank you.

Chris

Dazzdax, digital cable is even more sensitive to imperfections than analogue cable. For one, the 1's and 0's are square waves, and square waves consist of the fundamental + an infinite number of harmonics (as per Fourier). So the frequencies transmitted by digital cable are in the order of several MHz. Contrast this to analogue cable, which "only" has to deal with 22kHz.

At these frequencies, skin effect becomes more of an issue. Higher frequencies may experience delay in transmission, which would be worse the longer the cable and the smaller the diameter of the cable. This will affect the shape of the square wave.

Also, the cable needs to be impedance matched. If it isn't, reflections can occur in the cable. It is possible to hook up an oscilloscope and see a ghost image of the transmission, which surely can not be a good thing.

Having said this I do not buy into the overpriced cable market. I would only buy a cable which is "good enough". I have learnt my lesson.

My reading suggests to me that the worst source of jitter is in the interface between the transport and the DAC, particularly if you are using transports and DAC's from different brands. For this reason it is sometimes worthwhile to have a one box CD player.

How would you know if a cable is good enough?

Hi Amfi, so you are saying that by altering the shape of the square wave you can change the sonic characteristics of the digital interconnect? Please elaborate. According to the theory digital data stream is either corrupt or not. Digital is discrete, analog is continuous. By changing digital data stream one is not able to predict how the analog music signal will sound.

Chris