Which budget digital cable ?

The Stereovox cables are one of the best values around.I have the hdxv and with performance as good as it provides I have not been tempted to upgrade to their new digital cable.They are also quite flexible!That said if I were buying used on Audiogon I would certainly go for their newer version the XV2.

Haven't heard Joemazzaglia's digital cables but his analog ones certainly are, as Listener57 says, budget in price and elevated in performance.

I'm very happy with my expensive Atlas Opus and I would think the cheaper Atlas Compass worth a try. I have owned a VH Audio cryo Pulsar and thought that one very good indeed, with an amazing long breakin period.

Unless you are absolutely sure that your DAC maintains internal impedance at 75 ohms, get a cable that is 1.5m long. Often the difference in price over 1m is minimal. The extra length makes a huge difference in cleanness and coherence in most setups. This is because the extra half meter delays internal reflections just enough that they don't arrive at the DAC in time to cause jitter.

monoprice

Unless you are absolutely sure that your DAC maintains internal impedance at 75 ohms, get a cable that is 1.5m long. Often the difference in price over 1m is minimal. The extra length makes a huge difference in cleanness and coherence in most setups. This is because the extra half meter delays internal reflections just enough that they don't arrive at the DAC in time to cause jitter.

Gee, that's a very interesting point that I haven't seen stated before, and which does seem very conceivable technically.

If the input impedance of the dac and the impedance of the cable don't match precisely, a portion of the incident signal would be reflected back to the transport. A portion of that reflection would then re-reflect from the transport to the dac. The two-way reflection path, assuming propagation time of roughly 2 nanoseconds per foot, would be 12ns for the 1m cable, and 18ns for the 1.5m cable.

I don't know what the typical risetimes/edge rates are for transport outputs, but it does seem very conceivable that the extra 6ns could move the arrival time of the re-reflection sufficiently away from the middle area of the edge of the original incident waveform so that it would not be responded to by the digital receiver at the dac input.

Thanks for pointing that out!

Regards,
-- Al

Thanks for the suggestions, I will look into the options. The dac for my headphone set up is the Valab NOS dac, a budget priced but musical piece. There is a review here in audiogon. Looking for a digital cable commensurate in price point and performance. The above suggestions are really helpful.