kelly
Herr Babelfish der Übersetzer, he wore a whipped-cream-covered tutu for this title.
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2002
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I don't usually invite this kind of argument and I really don't appreciate it when people complain that subjective reviews are not scientific. (In my opinion, you either accept that when you read the review or you don't read the review and go read some technical magazine instead.)
In the case of digital cables, however, we do have measurements and we do have people on both sides of the debate making arguments based purely on measurements - and that's what I'd like to see discussed further.
Jitter
"Jitter is a measure of errors in timing. When reading the transition from a pit to a land, there is a timing window that is ideal. The deviation between the window and the transition is important to the reading process. Jitter, as specified by the Orange Book, should be less that 35 nanoseconds. Since jitter can be caused by the player as well as the disc (i.e., the player may incorrectly perceive the transition), it must be measured in relation to a known reference disc." - explanation from by Dana J. Parker and Robert Starrett, http://www.cdpage.com/dstuff/BobDana296.html#3
Jitter is measurable. Large differences in jitter are believed to be audible to anyone. There is much debate whether small differences in jitter can be heard and this, I believe, is a fundamental part of the debates concerning whether all transports sound the same and whether all digital cables sound the same.
the claims of modern DAC makers
Many DAC makers are beginning to claim that the reason digital cables have matter in the past is that the clocking mechanism within the DAC was not doing its job efficiently. To paraphrase, if the DAC was doing its job correctly, any copper coax cable should sound just as good as any other. Once the bits arrived, they get reclocked and the DAC does the rest of its job.
Argument against this is evident in that many of the people who own these expensive DACs that make such claims still end up with $200 or more digital cables. According to them, there is still a difference. Does this mean something else besides the jitter problem is going on in the cheaper cables? Or, does this mean that by and large new DAC makers are simply exagerating the quality of their digital clocks?
personal experience
I own a Monster digital cable that I picked up at Best Buy. When I was auditioning the Perpetual Technologies DAC, both Dan Wright and an engineer from Perpetual Technologies insisted that I would hear an immediate improvement if I bought a better digital cable. Frankly, I wasn't sure what to make of this. I went down the "placebo effect" path that most of you would and are probably going down right now. Dan stocked a Jena Labs cable called the Digi Trio and offered the same return policy on it as his DAC (I ended up returning both and going for ModWright's flagship mods instead). So what the hell, I gave it a shot.
The difference was immediate and noticable in my system. The sound was both cleaner and more extended and the the bottom octave was especially improved. To me this points to something more than jitter. I see jitter blamed for timbre inaccuracy and phase distortion, but that's not all of what I was hearing. What I heard made me wonder if somehow the Monster cable had actually been losing part of the data itself. This doesn't seem possible to me and I'm open to explanations here.
I took the cable with me to the home of fellow Head-Fi'er, dparrish, where we compared the two cables. I remember dparrish shaking his head in disbelief. The differences were simply far to audible to be dismissed despite this seeming completely irrational.
I took the Jena Labs Digi Trio with me to Nick Dangerous' home also where we compared it with his Bolder digital cable and did some AB comparisons with the modded ART DI/O DAC. Here the differences were less pronounced, but that Nick, jerikyl and I all heard the differences and described them similarly lead me to believe something was still going on.
I assume from this that the Jena Labs was the best of the three cables but by only a narrow margin over the Bolder but by a huge margin over the Monster.
Unfortunately, today, I still have the old Monster cable that I use with my modded ART DI/O at work. I can't disprove any psychological accusations of placebo effect here but at least I cannot be accused of ownership bias. I do wish I had a better cable but frankly my current bottleneck in my work system is a noisy soundcard so I'll not look into a cable swap until I've at least remedied that.
I can't help but wonder how these problems infect the recoring as its being produced at the studio. Surely if something so simple as a cable connecting a transport and a DAC can produce such large differences, the original soundclips themselves are being corrupted within and between the components used in the studio.
What do you guys think? Are expensive digital cables soon going to be made extinct by higher quality digital clocks in DACs? Is there something more to this than jitter?
In the case of digital cables, however, we do have measurements and we do have people on both sides of the debate making arguments based purely on measurements - and that's what I'd like to see discussed further.
Jitter
"Jitter is a measure of errors in timing. When reading the transition from a pit to a land, there is a timing window that is ideal. The deviation between the window and the transition is important to the reading process. Jitter, as specified by the Orange Book, should be less that 35 nanoseconds. Since jitter can be caused by the player as well as the disc (i.e., the player may incorrectly perceive the transition), it must be measured in relation to a known reference disc." - explanation from by Dana J. Parker and Robert Starrett, http://www.cdpage.com/dstuff/BobDana296.html#3
Jitter is measurable. Large differences in jitter are believed to be audible to anyone. There is much debate whether small differences in jitter can be heard and this, I believe, is a fundamental part of the debates concerning whether all transports sound the same and whether all digital cables sound the same.
the claims of modern DAC makers
Many DAC makers are beginning to claim that the reason digital cables have matter in the past is that the clocking mechanism within the DAC was not doing its job efficiently. To paraphrase, if the DAC was doing its job correctly, any copper coax cable should sound just as good as any other. Once the bits arrived, they get reclocked and the DAC does the rest of its job.
Argument against this is evident in that many of the people who own these expensive DACs that make such claims still end up with $200 or more digital cables. According to them, there is still a difference. Does this mean something else besides the jitter problem is going on in the cheaper cables? Or, does this mean that by and large new DAC makers are simply exagerating the quality of their digital clocks?
personal experience
I own a Monster digital cable that I picked up at Best Buy. When I was auditioning the Perpetual Technologies DAC, both Dan Wright and an engineer from Perpetual Technologies insisted that I would hear an immediate improvement if I bought a better digital cable. Frankly, I wasn't sure what to make of this. I went down the "placebo effect" path that most of you would and are probably going down right now. Dan stocked a Jena Labs cable called the Digi Trio and offered the same return policy on it as his DAC (I ended up returning both and going for ModWright's flagship mods instead). So what the hell, I gave it a shot.
The difference was immediate and noticable in my system. The sound was both cleaner and more extended and the the bottom octave was especially improved. To me this points to something more than jitter. I see jitter blamed for timbre inaccuracy and phase distortion, but that's not all of what I was hearing. What I heard made me wonder if somehow the Monster cable had actually been losing part of the data itself. This doesn't seem possible to me and I'm open to explanations here.
I took the cable with me to the home of fellow Head-Fi'er, dparrish, where we compared the two cables. I remember dparrish shaking his head in disbelief. The differences were simply far to audible to be dismissed despite this seeming completely irrational.
I took the Jena Labs Digi Trio with me to Nick Dangerous' home also where we compared it with his Bolder digital cable and did some AB comparisons with the modded ART DI/O DAC. Here the differences were less pronounced, but that Nick, jerikyl and I all heard the differences and described them similarly lead me to believe something was still going on.
I assume from this that the Jena Labs was the best of the three cables but by only a narrow margin over the Bolder but by a huge margin over the Monster.
Unfortunately, today, I still have the old Monster cable that I use with my modded ART DI/O at work. I can't disprove any psychological accusations of placebo effect here but at least I cannot be accused of ownership bias. I do wish I had a better cable but frankly my current bottleneck in my work system is a noisy soundcard so I'll not look into a cable swap until I've at least remedied that.
I can't help but wonder how these problems infect the recoring as its being produced at the studio. Surely if something so simple as a cable connecting a transport and a DAC can produce such large differences, the original soundclips themselves are being corrupted within and between the components used in the studio.
What do you guys think? Are expensive digital cables soon going to be made extinct by higher quality digital clocks in DACs? Is there something more to this than jitter?
