Triode User
Member of the Trade: WAVE High Fidelity
A friend and I have got a Blue 2. We listened to it in our environment. Both of us bought it when we had listened to music for just a few minutes.
It was his turn, because I prefer silver, and the test unit is black. Now I must wait. Nevertheless, we have a problem, regarding to the BNC cables.
When I first connected the Blue to the DAVE, I took our high-quality silver cables from Audiosensibility, mine is 1.5m and his is 1m, even if I had read, that the cables
should be of equal length. The short ones supplied look quite cheap, so I thought quality is more important than length, and I was completely wrong.
The sound was harsh, more like a CD player from the past. I switched cables and the journey to HIFI heaven started.
The problem is now, that these short cables are about 50cm.
There is common sense that the rule the shorter the better does not apply to digital cables, they should be longer, at least 1m, because of reflection.
So, I have questions:
- Is the length of the cables unimportant in this special dual application?
- Is the quality of the cables unimportant in this application, or would it still be an advantage to buy "better" cables.
I remember well, that I used a silver one when I had the DAVE on trial, but the cable from the Company above was much better, and silver as well.
My friend is going to drill a hole into one board of his rack to save length, but my rack is made from Plexi, and I have to use longer cables.
Both of us would appreciate the help of Mr. Watts. Thank you.
Mr W may well chime in but he has already posted in post 527 of this thread regarding the dual cables. I have copied his post in a post below but the spirit of his post was that he found that longer cables sounded better than shorter cables and this is surmised to be because of the better RF rejection of the longer cables. Your guess that quality is more more important than length is, I think, the exact opposite of what is found. In reality length (longer is better) is more important than quality (or should I say that length is more important than price on the basis that price does not always equate to quality). So far the message is that as long as the quality is reasonable there is no real reason to pay exotic prices and 1m (or maybe better 1.5m or even 2m) should sound fine.
Rob was going to try some more testing involving qualities of cable etc and ferrites but I guess he has more important items on his agenda.
Bear in mind with silver that it only has 5% better conductance than copper so be cautious about thinking it is likely to benefit a digital signal. A well terminated plug is more likely to be important.
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