Review of the Oyaide DB-510 – An "analog sounding" digital cable - Page 6

Thanks for the details on the the Apogee Wide Eye. Indeed, it seems to have addressed many issues. But the Oyaide has been constructed like a cost no object product, so hopefully since you are using a high quality transport and DAC, you should notice a positive improvement.

To be honest, that length issue still remains a little bit blurry for me. I didn't fully understand everything that Dan Lavry said, but I chose to believe him since he doesn't seem to have any agenda in telling people that shorter is better.
By the way, the Oyaide I am using is 1.3m and is better than shorter and longer cables from other brands... But still, it would be very intersting for me to test some day the same digital cable at different lengths... But that is for another time

We will be waiting for your impressions on the cable

Hi Rokoko,

Thanks for the comments on the review.

Some technical aspects on jitter:

Here are some basics on jitter:

Just to be a little bit picky, there is no such thing as a jitter free transport or DAC. They all have some amount of jitter.

For the Hiface, it is a low jitter device/transport, but it is definitely not jitter free. Empirical Audio is going to release soon a usb to spdif converter based on the hiface. It will use some ultra-low jitter clocks, low noise power supply ... to reduce jitter but there will be no way to supress it entirely.

As for the DACs, if you look at most datasheets they all claim to have high jitter rejection or being jitter insensitive, ...
However, to the best of my knowledge, all DAC chips are affected by jitter.
According to some papers I read, 1 bit sigma-delta dac chips are the most affected by jitter, they are followed by multi-bit sigma delta chips, and the most jitter resistant are the R2R dac chips. It seems that the PCM1793 falls into the second category so it is probably affected by jitter as well(you just have to look to jitter measurements made by stereophile, I am sure you will find a DAC based on the same pc1793 that your dac uses).

Line transmission jitter

Regardless of the jitter of the transport, the digital cables will also generate jitter. Whether that is audible or not will depend on the ability of the DAC (digital receiver+PLLs+DAC chip) to reject jitter. It will also depend on how resolving the system is.
To give you an example, with the same front end (hiface+Oyaide+dac19mk3), I hear the difference between digital cables with the C2C headphone amp, but I hear almost nothing when I use the Little Dot mk3 and standards interconnects and heaphone cable.
So the audibility of the digital cable will depend not only on how good your digital section is at rejecting jitter but also on how transparent your analog section (amp/headphones) is.


All I can say is that in my system, the difference between the Belden and the Oyaide was pretty big. If you are pretty much satisfied with your system and want to hear a little bit more, you can definitely try the Oyaide. I hope that was helpful.

I don't know for Pacha, but personally, I needed a cable that was slightly longer than 1m.

As for jitter, a high performance (and properly constructed) 3m coaxial cable will have far less jitter than a poor .5m coxial cable.

Absolutely, the Stereovox XV2 is also a very good cable (for the price). It completely walks over budget cables such Belden, Canare or Belkin.

However, I have tried in my system 3 coaxial cables that sounded more natural on the top end: Oyaide, Hifi Cables & Cie Sobek and Actinote Aria.

I have also had the opportunity to try the Stereovox XV2 against other cables in a friends house in the context of a highly resolving (and expensive) speaker system, and we reached the same conclusion about the naturalness of the Stereovox XV2.

On highly resolving systems, the Stereovox XV2 can sound a little bit on the lean side and can lack the refinement and natural timber of more expensive cables. However, I might have probably never noticed that if I didn't have better cables to compare to.

Since the Oyaide has a similar price to the XV2 and that the XV2 is highly regarded ... All that I can say is that the Oyaide represents a great value