AES/EBU vs XLR cables for digital connection

You have received good answers but I suggest also trying the USB connection.

I have owned Cees Ruijtenberg designed Metrum products and would not necessarily say AES/EBU sounded better than USB.  I2S sounded good out of the Metrum Amber into the Pavane and Adagio DACs and it is easy to swap out the USB board for the I2s board.  You can order the I2S board directly from Sonnet for 80 euros.

The impedance matching is more for technical aspect of designing. The common analog XLR will still work, but may not sound as good.

The importance of impedance matching is to reduce signal reflections from both ends and would generate distortions & cause power loss to the signals. The DAC itself would internally reclock the data, and might not affect the sound after all.

Go try it. No worries, your equipment is not going to explode due to impedance mismatched of the XLR cables. HAHAHAHA~

May I suggest you try the USB connection? Properly implemented asynchronous USB has the advantage of using the Dac’s clock on the streamer, I.e. the dac times the arrival of data rather than having to buffer and decode the embedded clock signal. I suggest you try USB with a good cable and Isolator.

@xboom Just for clarification, not that many DACs will reclock an AES signal. With the AES interface, the clock from the digital source is preferred and the internal DAC clock is generally not utilized. Of course, with USB, the DAC reclocks with its own internal clock. Why some people prefer one cable interface over another is not always because of how the cable sounds, but because of the clock that is employed in the chain.

@blisshifi 

I wouldn't worry much about the digital source clock too much.  Usually the embedded clock in the sourrce would get extracted and stabilised, either with a PLL or some other secret sauce methods.

I don't think the results would be bad using a common analog XLR cable for digital AES input, but OP needs to try it to see if he/she accepts the output quality.