Why do digital cables sound different?

Ehider, I am still the skeptic, but I appreciate your viewpoint and candor. BTW, Is your employer Burr Brown? Thanks for the reply.

I am not sure we are disagreeing - over and undershoot being a capacitance issue, is the same thing as saying it is a bandwidth issue (but not necessarily the reverse). So far as I know there is no capacitance issue wrt glass cables, but they sound different from one another.

I will be honest and say that I do not use fiber optic cables so I can not say definitively there is a sonic difference between digital cables. You have heard differences, so I will take your word for it. As for the reason.... I am an EE not a physisist. If I were to take a stab at it, with my limited knowledge of optics and lightwave, I would guess the differences would be due to propagation delay, loss or refraction differences in the cables. Maybe someone else with a better understanding of optics in this forum could enlighten us both.

Don't worry about starting a religious war. The reason for these forums is to get the big picture. There are a million opinions out there and you should consider the ones that make sense to you. Part of the fun of these forums is to learn a little and give a little in return. I read a reply to one of my posts the other day that mentioned that audio was a "passionate undertaking". I subscribe to this wholeheartedly because if the music we listen to and the equipment that provides that music does not empower emotion and passion, why listen at all? If some of the responses seed a bit emotional, just understand that it is only because of the passion that we have for the music.

Frogman, rather than challenge the fact that you hear the difference I will simply state what I know to be facts. While I most certainly do not have the trained ears of a musician, I think, (maybe wrongfully so) that God has blessed me with a decent set of ears. While I have not listened to a set of fiber optic cables, I can not discearn any real sonic differences between good quality copper (or silver etc.) cables. I also submit that the physics involved may not support sonic differences that are discearnable to my ears. I believe you when you say you can hear the differences, but maybe the differences are so subtle that one would need musican's ears to hear them. To quote Dennis Miller: "that's my opinion, I could be wrong".