Yes
What about the usb cables feeding signal to the m11+ when you use it as a dac? Did that change wih cables?
Yes.
When feeding digital audio into the M11+ via a USB cable, cable quality could affect sound.
Not really discernable,
easily, with the M11+ alone, but when outputting the DAC using the 4.4mm ‘line level’ analogues, output can be inspected via high quality amplification (I used a Burson Conductor V2+).
to qualify this/‘some perspective’: Turning 20-30 sensors and ’options’ off in the phone was required to get the phone to perform
even slightly decently as a ‘high end’ audio transport.
As was installing specific software and using developer mode features.
My ears are trained to discern nuances that ARE NOT STANDARD (this has been my hobby, and sometimes profession, for many decades), and ‘too many to count‘ hours of test tones on top tier kit has trained me to hear all sorts of ‘extinction points’ and ‘things completely not relevant to the process of enjoying music’ (but rather the worshiping of the playback chain audio equipment). Once all the electrical noise in the phone was sorted and all the sensors quelled and the phone could do ONE TASK AND ONE TASK WELL (phone had never been given a SIM and was
stripped).
With the phone sorted, trying a few cables became ‘worth a grain of salt’.
The huge improvement in sound quality for inserting a 1meter long ‘blue’ cable, that is different to every other blue/black or red cable I have, was so obvious/overt that I tried to get access to a better USB cable straight away! (-how deep does the rabbit hole go?)
The 1metre blue cable also had to deal with a stupid little adaptor PLUG END that wasnt made out of unobtainium and infused with the remnants of fairy wings found on some arcane table deep underground... but it sounded phenominal none-the-less.
Crazily the adaptor I was using on the other end, could be swapped to an active part that also filtered/aided the USB signal timing.
This was an improvement of equal magnitude over stock ‘unloved‘ USB cables, and my only reason for considering the project of ‘some benchmarking’ to begin with..
When a person has a setup that works (and sounds great), taking anything away from it so that it is ‘less’, makes said system often without attraction or desire from the owner.
It is easy to know when we are hearing something ‘better’, and thus, when we step back, we have a point of reference to recall- that we remember nuances previously missed.
In future listening, it should be easy to imagine those bits we ‘once heard’ that we love/desire, but if we could recapture that magic with just a cable rotation then we obviously would.
That was my problem for the last couple of months as I didn’t want to keep moving my USB cable (and heavy adaptors etc) and so often found myself without it.
Any time I put it in place MUSICALITY was instantly observable. I don’t want to create arguments, so I will just suggest I had trained myself to like the feeling of that 1metre blue cable beside me more than any other. (True)
When I used small/short ‘joiner’ cables with the M11+; they had little life but were not abhorrent or ‘ghastly’.
Running from a phone, using a $400 price point USB cable, including a couple of adaptors to make it all fit; I could get the sort of sound that putting a half decent (albeit budget) cable between top end kit will do. (you wont notice as much as you get with the sound when you put the cable ‘in place’, but when you remove it (ideally after weeks/months/years etc) you will notice how flat and ‘tinny‘ or thin the sound becomes afterwards. Room size will be instantly diminished.
To improve above ‘basic’ isn’t hard with USB.. -it wouldn’t have to be expensive to gain much improvement over ‘junk built for printer’. (early printers had excellent cables, but probably better for UAC1 mode (/not ‘asynchronous’ which forces ‘hi speed’)).
The real gain is getting
anything better than mass market crap.
In a typical house with eight USB cables lying around dating back to the nineties, three of them are likely to be pretty good with audio. The big problem is that looking at them isn’t going to be the ultimate judge.
Modern money would buy a person better than what I have for ‘a lot less’. (I buy my cables mostly second hand when they are in the ‘ridiculous’ price point per performance metric).
Where I do not think anyone should put money into cables until their whole setup is complete (and they have lots of media!), I do make exception for budget USB cable being of a
requisite minimum quality.
I find that the price to reward ratio with digital transport cables is totally in COAXs favour, and wish more manufacturers used the method.
Using a very budget/basic COAX cable setup right now I am getting an incredible performance, it is such a jump/improvement in sound quality over the USB output that I attribute the benefits to the clock chip change.
It would be like jumping up to a ‘Nice’ Nordost cable on some $4k+ cans’, from some steel wool that had been used to wash dishes for ten days...
(its that good)
I honestly feel that it CANNOT BE THE SAME DAC.
R if you use the M11+ as a transport (highly recommended) the COAX option is likely to be the better option for some digital playback systems (DACs) and source files.
, and ‘on the fly’ reading of zeros and ones from a round disc (requiring speed adjustment to remain linear/constant) CRC can only compensate so much; beyond that is when the logic would either stop playing (good equipment typically), or ‘be heavily altered’ (bargain brands that were happy just magically getting it to all work), and would pass it along. Ever wondered why the $3k DVD player stopped on scratched discs but the supermarket DVD player could ‘play anything’?
