Jitter and 75ohm cable length


I have read a number of papers on how cable length plays a role in Jitter between transport and DAC. After all of the dust settled I arrived at no sound conclusion, on paper, so I decided to use the ears of my 17 year old budding Audiophile to settle this by LISTENING! My transport is a Wadia 171i (WAV/LossLess files)and my DAC is a Cambridge AZURE 840C. I had three cables in my test, my 1M Kimber D-60 illuminations, a 3' HAVE/Canare and a 6' HAVE/Canare. All three cables sounded good, but in the end the victory landed on the 3' HAVE/Canare by a fair margin followed by the Kimber and last the 6'HAVE/Canare. In my readings I came across a number of articles saying you should use at least 1.5M of cable to reduce reflections in the cable so as to not harm the clock signal, yet an RF engineer said this was a bunch of "Bunk" and 1M would be better, in fact he said the shorter the better. So, forgive my verbosity, what are your thoughts and experience in this area? My 3' $25 HAVE/Canare beat up my $390 Kimber, I believe due to proper honest 75ohm terminations vs standard RCA connectors, and as far as length goes, at least in my system, 3' was by far the best. Thanks!
Rpg
rpg
Al, thanks, I appreciate your work in helping me understand this. I think in the end, as I may have mentioned, the 6' cable is easier on the ears. With this cable manufacturer, I can order any length, is there an "ideal" length, or are there too many system dependencies to determine this?

Again,
Thanks!
With this cable manufacturer, I can order any length, is there an "ideal" length, or are there too many system dependencies to determine this?
Summarizing all that has been said, I would put it that a length of 1.5 meters (which is virtually the same as 5 feet, to within less than an inch), stands a better chance of being ideal than any other length. But as have been cited there are many system dependencies and cable type dependencies which conceivably could result in other lengths being better in some cases.

In this case, if you decide that the 6' cable you have is preferable to the 3' cable, my suspicion is that changing the 6' cable to a 5' cable of the same type would be unlikely to make a significant difference.

Regards,
-- Al
Another twist. I noticed that my web of IC's (All unshielded Kimber silver SE and one balanced)could use some housework, so I spent quite some time rerouting and spacing the cables resulting in what I would call "neat and tidy. Then it happened, the great sound I had achieved through many learnings on this forum were gone, my transport sounded lousy and in the end I was back at the beginning! I discovered something about my DI-IC, it does not like to be close to any AC lines or any lines for that matter as well as not liking to be forced into a configuration that does not follow it's natural form as manufactured. Long story short, I ended up finding my 3' cable slightly outperforming my 6' line because I "think" I was able to doge the bullets mentioned even though the cable is double sheilded (it was very close). Now I'm wondering, after all of this effort might a Toslink cable be a better solution? I currently possess only one midgrade Toslink IC and it's in my AV set-up. I have heard that the process of converting the signal to light and then reconverting it back to an electrical signal at the DAC results in low bandwidth problems, but might it be immune to most of the potential problems one can encounter with wire? Interested in your thoughts. I'm heading off to my AV set-up to assess what kind of nightmare I'm looking at in retrieving an Acoustic Research Toslink cable. Thanks all!
In the ending, the Toslink was a poor solution to any 75ohm cable I tried. I don't want to begin suggesting I can do the math on cable length and it's contribution to Jitter, I can only finish this by saying that my 36" length of HAVE/Canare 75ohm digital cable with Canare 75ohm terminations resulted in my Wadia 171i sounding as good as my CDP with only the very slightest of differences, and that is as good in my opinion as one can get. Gone are the spinning disks and hello little music server! My thanks to all that have contributed to this forum!
Rpg