Why do digital cables sound different?

Mapman, to cut to the chase, at least in my system when I had a digital cable, copper outshone silver, whereas for the interconnects it was vice versa. Both the interconnects and digital cable were Audioquest Lapis Truth, same construction, dielectric, etc. Just the conductor was different. YRMV.

It is a system thing. Cable that works perfect in one system might be bad in another. It comes to characteristic impedance matching and quality of the shielding. Characteristic impedance is affected not only by geometry of the cable but also materials. Anything that changes inductance or capacitance of the cable might change characteristic impedance resulting in reflections on impedance boundaries producing jitter - adding noise to music.

Mapman, are you saying digital signals in a coax cable for example are harder to mess with than pure analog signals, and so theoretically the cable construction should have less impact on the resulting sound? I.E. It is harder to mess up coded and sent 1s and 0s than the analog wave forms of a bass drum or a cymbal in transit through a wire. I have found differences in the sound performance between different USB and HDMI cables, but those are different animals than coax.

kn

Kijanki,

You use the BEnchmark DAC which pretty much deals with any jitter issues that might exist otherwise, correct?

I do not have a DAC like that to-date and am probably more affected by the variables you describe, but still whatever differences might exist in my case still is way down in the pecking order of things that make a clear marked difference. It's been a case of theory not coming into play yet clearly for me. Someday I might a DAC like BEnchmark that addresses jitter comprehensively and see what happens there, but have not crossed that bridge to-date.

"Mapman, are you saying digital signals in a coax cable for example are harder to mess with than pure analog signals, and so theoretically the cable construction should have less impact on the resulting sound?"

Not harder to mess with per se but I have not found any clear negative effects to date whereas I have with analog ICs and power cords. ALso I find less differences with speaker wires though I know all these things CAN make a difference. Just to different degrees for me in practice to-date.

I do find USB implemetnations more problematic for CD res digital than SPDIF/TOSLINK. Have just started to dabble with USB. USB has different modes of operation that clearly can make a difference. Asynch mode is preferred for best sound quality. I use HDMI in my AV system but have not experimented there at all to-date.