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I think its interesting how different mediums have a different flavor or signature if you will.
To start I picked up a Spider brand coax cable from Newegg for $23.
I'm curious to see how a silver cable will compare to my cable which is 100% copper.
Personally I don't know how s/pdif differs from textbook digital (ones and zeros). But I do find it interesting how someone on youtube just used a wire hanger as a coax cable and it seemingly worked fine.
I've always been a firm believer that analog audio cables make a difference, but where is the limit? anyone who spends multi thousand dollars for a Nordost cable for an almost inaudible difference is insane in my book.
Cabling has such huge debates going for it. To me its sensible that a different conductor material (silver) with a different conductivity measurement at different frequencies could easily affect sound, but the differences between the same conductor materials seem wildly inflated. My feeling is, the cable crowd isn't making it up entirely, by definition I'd think different gauges in different configurations with different base metals, with different terminations (attatched questionably in some cases) may very slightly affect the flow of current, allow RFI in more at some frequencies than others, allow leakage of certain frequencies more readily than others. I also think some of what the cable crowd claims as "warmer this" or "detailed that" are actually flaws in the cable where certain frequencies are leaking, more RFI leaking in, or poorly made terminations changing the impedance. Though a good portion of "designer" cables are, inside, actually the same Belden cable across brands with pretty sleeves and terminators on them.... They cables are good, no doubt....but they're worth $40
Flaws or not, I think there can be "differences" (defects...differences...whatever) in cables, but in most cases (silver aside maybe) the difference is so miniscule that one wouldn't notice it unless they were sitting around ABXing, and one isn't definitively better. And for the money spent on such a cable, FAR wider differences/improvements could almost always be achieved via changing other equipment. If cables were $20, sure, why not. But for $200+ cable for two channels, and a $200 power cable, and a $300 headphone cable, you could just buy a DAC1 and be done with it using your old decent cables
The coat hanger test has been done many times and always works well in ABX. Why shouldn't it? It's basically an insanely high gauge solid core aluminum conductor..... I imagine it could be "bright" though since its running unshielded. But with a conductor like that, I doubt you need much shielding unless you're sticking a wifi antenna next to it.
Then there's the old Stereophile article about the trade show where a famous engineer was demoing some very pricey speakers across from a $1000 cable booth. He had orange Black & Decker extension cord connecting the speakers. He said it looked good and sounded fine to them.
But for those with top-tier systems, and you have nothing left to buy in the hardware realm, and still want to try changing the sound....I imagine cable changes could actually work. But it's worse diminishing returns than LCD-3's. Or Theils for that matter.
My digital cable is my first order from BJC after considering them numerous times, but I've become a big fan...it's that center line between value and performance. You don't get designer stuff claiming to improve your clarity and tighten your bass, you just get cable with a printed spec, outdoor, underground, and overhead strung rated, designed for studios and cable companies, that's been tested to successfully carry all required frequencies. It's rugged, heavily shielded, and is probably inside more than a few $100+ cables (No joke, BJC made some toslink cables for Audioquest, I remember they were selling them off dirt cheap a few years ago at BJC because of overstock, or rejection, or something. They don't use glass though, only some high-end Toshiba polymer) I figure if the stuff is good enough to have been used in the recording of probably half the albums in my collection, it's good enough to use for playback too
What it isn't is pretty. At all. It's industrial cable with industrial terminators, and it looks the part. Thankfully that look goes very well with the Schiit minimalism! I'm still considering replacing my Audioquest Y-splitters (fairly priced, believe it or not, I bought them because they were 6" and I was planning on running an IEM amp out of the Bifrost originally) with some custom BJC too, just to clean up my nest of cables and get a uniform industrial look.
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I have had a bit of a play over the past 6 months since getting the Bifrost and initially I liked the USB as my Mac could upsample via Puremusic to 24/192. But over time with more thought and listening put in and some changes to a quality 75ohm coax cable and a Glass fibre optic cable I now tend to use the optical out of my Mac, non-upsampled, to the Bifrost.
I dont have coax out of my Mac and can only feed the Bifrost Coax from an Onkyo ND-S1 dock. This then limits the max sample rate to 16/48 due to the ipod but I am very surprised that when comparing optical out of the dock to Coax out that the Coax sounds fuller in the bottom end and a little smoother in the highs. The Optical is noticeably brighter sounding.
As other people have said before, non of the implementations on the Bifrost are bad but when we are a group focussed on sound quality then Coax should have the greatest potential.
The type of distortion caused by the actual cabling, unlike analog, wouldn't affect just the lows or highs (that happens in analog becuase those are the frequencies that push at the tolerances of the cable on either side.) The coax cables are still frequency dependent, but a lost bit doesn't affect the audible high or low specifically, the dropped bits are random so any part of the frequency spectrum could be equally affected (meaning high frequency is used to determine if any bit is on or off....mid, high, or low...unlike analog where high frequency is a 1:1 for the treble frequency it should reproduce. Same with optical, though for different reasons than frequency leakage (namely, refraction/reflection in the cable) That's the curse of digital. it cures the problem of analog that the extreme highs and extreme lows have a habit of getting lost or distorted. But it creates the new problem that the entire frequency spectrum now becomes subject to loss and distortion equally
I would suspect if optical is brighter and coax is darker, then either your ear preceives the higher distortion as affecting the lows (human brain trying to piece together something that's "not quite right") or something else is happening to the data on the source before it's S/PDIF encoded that's different depending on output.
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Glad to received my Bifrost yesterday. My current setup is laptop (usb) -> Bifrost -> Lyr -> HD650. Initial impression, lack of mid and lack of bass. My Lyr already has more than 100+ hours of burn in. My older setup, laptop (usb) -> Fiio E17(DAC)+L7 -> Lyr -> HD650 sounds better. Will let Bifrost burn for another 50 or more hours and will hear how it sounds.
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Give it some time (brain burn in, not dac burn in). It will sneak up on you. Listen to the frost setup for a few days then go back to your Fiio setup and decide if you still prefer the Fiio. My guess is you will find the mids/bass less controlled and less detailed.
+1. The Bifrost is a very detailed, transparent, clean DAC. It's not the most resolving in the world, but it's light years ahead of E17 in terms of resolution and transparency. I often feel bad that I pay attention to all my gear, but endlessly forget about poor Bifrost being there at all. It does its job and gets out of the way so well, it's very easy to forget it exists at all. Which is the point of a DAC. The E17 isn't as highly resolving, isn't as good at separation, and is probably adding a warm color to the sound. With the Bifrost you're hearing your cans and your amp/tubes cleanly for the first time. There's a good chance once you listen more you'll hear more detail you were missing before and realize you were mistaking clarity for thinness. If you still like a more colored sound, it's time for tube rolling that Lyr!
The Bifrost will really let you hear the difference of each tube.
I'll say, though that, to me, stock tubes in Lyr, + Bifrost + HD650 is a great combination and is definitely not lacking in bass. At all. (Some would argue it has too much bass and mid-bass.) The bass in that combo is the same as my carefully tuned 12" Velodyne sub as calibrated in my speaker setup....any more would be true bloat and lose its musicality.) Remember: In sub setup, you shouldn't actually know the sub is there...it should blend with the speakers completely. Same applies to bass integration in well calibrated headphone gear.
Give it time, but if you still like a certain coloration, you can always change tubes or add EQ. Either way the Bifrost should be outresolving and out-timing that E17 by far. The Fiio gear is a great value in its price range (I use an E11 with my IEMs), but the Bifrost is still in a very different class.
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Compared to analog, the digital domain is a Cambodian minefield in the deep jungle laced with punji sticks and tree swinging aboriginals puffing curare laced blow darts at you. Anyone thinking it's just a '1' and a '0' probably stays up at night just to make sure the sun rises in the morning. Digital can cross that gauntlet but it's extremely complicated and it's hard to say if everyone will make it through okay.
LOL That has got to be the best description of digital I've ever heard
When it comes to digital, when you finally understand what digital is about, it makes one wonder why we ever left analog....it's so much simper and, strangely, more reliable. Of course, with analog there's no chance of ever reproducing the original, and there's virtually no possibility of getting the high and low freq back as it was. With digital at least there's a chance to get close to it. And digital still has the far better noise floor...
Everyone confuses digital with data, 1 & 0....which perhaps calling it "digital" was the error. If digital were 1's and 0's that would be fine. The true trouble and confusion with "digital audio" is that it's not actually digital.....it's plain old analog audio in transmission being used to represent digital data, but on the receiving end it doesn't just amplify the signal, but first has to reconstruct the signal as data, then convert it to plain old analog, then amplify it.
The best real-world analogy I can think of would be transmitting MP3's via morse code over signal radio. Yes the actual DATA is digital. But you're transmitting it in an analog way. IF one person is standing in a monsoon tapping the byte values of the MP3 into a radio, and the other person is listening on another radio and entering the byte sequence into a computer, when you play the MP3 file back, will it be a 100% digital recreation even though it was built from digital data? No. Some of the bytes would get lost by the guy tapping into the radio in a monsoon (interferance at the point of transmission), some would get re-ordered (transposition/ out of order packets), some would get lost over the radio waves (interferance, in-cable damage/loss, garbling on the radio, etc.), and some would be operator error buy the guy entering the values into the computer (interferance at the point of receipt/lens issues on the optical receiver, etc.)
In a well set up digital setup, most of the values will be exactly as they left the transmitter...but almost never will all of them be.
Fun fact: This very message as it's being sent to the H-F server is experiencing the same problem. All digital transmission over wire is analog. All will get lost and degraded packets. The difference is for data protocols the recipient side keeps checking the data to make sure they're in the right order, and that it's not missing any as it reconstructs each bit of the message, and re-requests anything that didn't make it through. Audio is on-the-fly, so no re-requesting, waiting, and queuing can take place unless the idea of a DAC were to be redesigned with on-board buffering, etc. Which means it would play back with a delay as well (and we'd need a new protocol.) And adding buffering, volatile storage, packet resequencing etc adds new problems, new chances for errors, and new sources of noise/RFI.
