Why do digital cables sound different?

In my experience, not only to different digital cables sound different, they actually have distinctive sounds. For example, I have a Goldmund cable that is consistently bright sounding, and a transparent Audio reference cable that is consistently warmer, smoother and more organic sounding.

I actually took a break from the hobby for several years and became skeptical of a lot of my audiophile beliefs, including my belief in the potential efficacy of cables and accessories. I was auditioning two components using both of the above digital cables, and the one using the Goldmund was simply bright and harsh. So, with much skepticism, I decided to switch the cables and wouldn't you know, the component that previously sounded harsh now sounded smooth and rich with the Transparent cable. It was like a different system.

although a digi cable only trasmits "0" and "1" - a beat of music may take 10k digits so the pace and accuracy will imprint themselves to the dac which will convert these to differing sounds. A simple a/b of different cables will produce much different sounding examples.

I have a (hopefully) simple question. Now that we are using 24/96 music and lets assume also 24/192, does that change the requirement on the "Freq Resp dc - 40 MHz" type of rating? What MHz is required? Interesting that Kimber D60 (quite expensive) is 40 MHz and the rest of their cables are 20.

Also, I can't find that value for the Belden 1694A, does anyone know? It seems like that is a great reference digital cable at extremely low cost - yet *many* of the issues raised here have been addressed, by degree, by that cable. At an insanely low cost ala Blue Jeans and others.

Original post on 12-01-00: Why do digital cables sound different? After much discussion, may I venture that, as of 07-02-09, the question has not been answered?
Could it be possible that no one knows? 8^)

Rja

Question has been answered many times. Digital cables introduce jitter. Jitter creates sidebands at very small level not harmonically related to root frequency. It is basically noise in time domain. Noise is reducing resolution, imaging, clarity etc.

Jitter is induced in coaxial cables by external noise or characteristic impedance mismatch (signal reflects on impedance boundaries). In Toslink jiiter is induced by system noise in presence of slow rise/fall time (slow transmitters and receivers).