I understand that the transmission is real time. I just do not believe a cable that is in good working order will cause a bit or two to be dropped. I agree with Blues_Man that the problem is probably in the transmitter or reciever if bits are being lost. I ran a quick test on my 3 digital cables at work today using a logic analyzer ( a scope is not the right tool for a real time test) with a pattern generator and deep memory (16 meg). I simply output a 16 bit burst every .5 seconds. The rep rate within the burst was set to 10KHz. I simply tied the pattern generator's clock to the logic analyzer's clock so that every time the pat gen's clock went high I captured the data until I filled up the memory and saved the data. I tried this with alternating 0's and 1's, all 0's , all 1's, a pattern of 0110111011001111 and it's complement. Once I had captured the data I saved them as ASCII files and I wrote a small visual basic program to look for missing bits in the patterns and found none. I also fed a repeating pattern of 0's and 1's into the cables and terminated the cable with what I approximated was the impedance of my D/A. I looked at the waveforms with a scope and looked for any droop, overshoot and undershoot. The risetime of the pulses appeared to be close on all 3 cables but I did notice some some other differences. I noticed one cable inparticular did cause more overshoot than the rest but when I varied the impedance used to terminate the cable I could minimize the overshoot (probably more capacitance in this cable causing an impedance mismatch). I marked this cable and gave all 3 cables to a another engineer who has a a separate DAC and transport to take home to see if the cables sound any different from one another. I am sorry but I did not hear very much of a difference between the cables to begin, with but I thought this would be a more subjective test. As for real time and loosing bits, the logic analyzer does not lie. I will let you know what he thinks. I can not think of a better way to test the real time data transmission characteristics of a cable. I burned up today's lunch time trying this, tommorrow I think I will have something to eat :-)Thanks for the post