Hi John,
I can now share more on Argentus hdmi but with several slight twists when using my Avatar to the TP .... my friend in a small group of 5 audiophiles loaned me both his 0.5m and 1.0m ones as seen in below photo.
First of all, my Pangea Audio Premier HD24PC SE 6% silver with Cardas copper sounded veiled, lacking in details and "soft" sounding aka low density in comparison to the Argentus but it is usd60 compared to usd475 which is still not too crazily priced:
https://www.audioadvisor.com/mobile/prodinfo.asp?number=PGHDPSE
It was not easily to plug/unplug to do AB comparison but the difference was quite obvious and I had my china made TZ cable RJ45 i2s cable connected to i2s B RJ45 and switch to i2s A hdmi with the Argentus and Pangea separately as a reference which helped me tremendously:
SG$ 38.43 30%OFF | Cat8 Ethernet Cable RJ 45 Lan Cable Cat 8 Networking Cable 0.5M 1M 1.5M 2M 3M 4M 5M 7M 8M 10M 12M 15M 20M 25M 30M 40M 50M 60M
https://a.aliexpress.com/_dZxZpqH
Here comes the twist ... i2s B RJ45 with this 0.5m TZ cable (metal shield version) sounded just as good as the 0.5m Argentus in i2s A hdmi !
My dotter who plays drum, guitars, piano etc. and wife who is grade 8 piano trained prefers the TZ RJ45 and Argentus hdmi respectively ... AB testing via the main system was 5/5 and 4/5 for my dotter and wife.
I then did the final testing via both the main system with the Revel Salon 2 and my grado fg-1 headphones with silmic 2 modded gilmore lite mk2 which I dare say are both quite resolving and found the following:
Argentus hdmi:
- detailed
- smooth and musical
- slightly "soft" sounding
TZ RJ45:
- equally detailed if not more so
- more textured
- "pops".. more dense and engaging
In summary, they are very similar in sound quality and I removed the Argentus to return to my friend and will not miss it with the TZ RJ45 connecting the Avatar to the TP.
More importantly, I am happy camper as I was just advised
/realised that only the i2s hdmi of the gaia is the preferred lvds as compared to its RJ45 lvcmos. This is because it means that if daisy chain of gaia and Avatar to the TP works, I have preferred i2s hdmi (perhaps the Argentus) to the gaia and i2s RJ45 to the Avatar
.
I just placed order of the TZ RJ45 cables to replace current ugreen Cat 8 cables in my network .. 3m from NAS to switch, 1.5m from router to switch, 1.0m for planned Antipodes cx or current ex to switch, 0.5m for connecting planned cx to the ex for the "ultimate" of them running as server and renderer separately and even try upsampling.
Cheers.
Richard
NB: no clue if connection type of RJ45 and hmdi has an impact but I do lean towards RJ45 ethernet