Good move!
I also felt the M Scaler made the sound brighter, but didn't equate it with «worse» – it was just brighter. It took me a few seconds to reduce the treble on my equalizer by a few µdB. Synergy is a dangerous thing (given that no audio component is really neutral, let alone sound transducers). It can fool you into thinking the less honest electronics component be the better one. Whereas to my ears the M Scaler is a revolutionary step towards high fidelity. It manages to make 44.1 kHz recordings sound better (more lifelike) than hi-res recordings, and hi-res recording still better than without it.
Well for me , with usb it was a lot brighter and with a noisy background, less definition, etc out of gaming pc. Better out of macbook, but still not as black a background as optical.
On optical though it was borderline unlistenable with the amount of smoothness added, it only later hit me that even solo Dave, though not as bright is a bit smoother on optical than usb, with a less clarity.
So much so that i could never go past CF2, since the image became too blurry, even at 2 sometimes.
With the new cable it's just as laser focused on CF3 as on CF0 and i honestly barely recognize my playlist. There's much more depth, the timbre is much improved and there's a sense of higher resolution.
I'm still shocked there's such a difference between optical cables when the popular opinion is "they all sound the same ". I don't know if Kabeldirekt or other "cheap" usb cables are closer to the QED or the dumpster fire of the Sonorous i was using, but it kinda makes me also want to try a better power cable.
I'm sure this will fix the weird veil on the m-scaler, but i'm still left with the brighter sound that i'm not sure how much the ferrites and lpsu's can compensate for.
With this new cable Dave sounds even darker though so maybe a bit of brightness wouldn't be the end of the world.
I guess i'll see tomorrow.