Digital XLR vs. Analog XLR - Balanced Cables

Digital and analog cables are constructed differently. In analog cable low inductance, low capacitance, low dielectric constant, purity of conductor and good shielding play important role while digital cable should have exact characteristic impedance (usually 110 Ohm for XLR), fast propagation and excellent shielding.

If you use analog XLR cable for digital link you'll get most likely a little fuzzy sound since jitter = noise in time domain (to be exact jitter creates sidebands not harmonically related to root frequency).

Don't save money on this. If you don't need this analog cable then sell it and get good digital cable.

Kijanki,

Thanks for clarifying this clearly for me. I checked other answers that you have submitted and you appear to have a very good understand of electrical signal processes. While I had planned on getting a pair of balanced digital cables, I had hoped to initially do a test with analog balanced cables initially. My intention is to use two cables to carry a 24/192 ks/S digital signal as single digital cables (outside of 1394) do not have sufficient bandwidth to accurately carry this signal. I am going from an upconverter to a DAC.

The wiring in the cable is irrelevant since it is straight through. That is, 1 to 1, 2 to 2 and 3 to 3. So, as long as the source and receiver match, any will do.

Kal

The digital and analog XLR cables that Virtual Dynamics sells is the exact same cable, just one cable versus two for the analog pair.

So all XLR cables are wired the same? How about the XLR jacks? Are hot, neutral and ground all terminated the same? I think not but I may be wrong. For AES/EBU input and output jacks are all terminated with the same pattern.