AES/EBU cable shootout

I did not see your digital system posted on your profile page. I have done so many comparisons of cables and equipment my head still spins. I know it takes so much time to do these things. BUT I am going to say this again to repeat myself, while this is the sound you heard, it does not always equate to other systems. We have five different systems in our listening room and more equipment that most anyone has ever heard. Plus since we repair so much equipment, we get to hear so much and upgrade so much that we have a pretty good idea on what changes improve the sound. I did not go to the other threads you mention to see what DAC you were using but that also makes a difference in comparisons.

The differences you hear can be accomplished with capacitors and resistors in your equipment for 1/100th the price IMO.

Thanks for taking the time and posting your findings.

Happy Listening.

@bigkidz I appreciate your input. If you read the first paragraph of my post, I clarified that this pertains to my system and my ears. But I posted so everyone can get a general idea. 
 

I don’t think I can change my resistors or capacitors in my shindo preamp or amplifier to make it sound any better. I don’t have the knowledge or skill to accomplish this. Nor do I know of anyone offering this service for Shindo. So it’s a moot point.

Again appreciate your input. 

@svenjosh

No offense to any other DIY or designer….IMHO, what Shindo Labs has accomplished and continues to render that other worldly sound is simply cannot be imitated or even for that matter properly understood. Once you hear an all Shindo system, there is no turning back.

@svenjosh - all good here.  Thanks again for your post.

@lalitk Agree 100%, Ever since I bought the Shindo, I never got any urge to upgrade. The sound is something that very few systems can even think of bettering irrespective of price.

Lately I have been thinking of Aries Cerat but not to replace Shindo but as a second system.

@rudyb Anyone who thinks their cables make better zeros and ones is unfamiliar or disingenuous about the nature of digital communications. Cables live at Layer One of the model, so copper, fiber, radio are all interchangeable. Errors in digital communications happen all the the time and are accounted for by the protocol used. For example, an Ethernet frame is preceded by a preamble and start frame delimiter (SFD), which are both part of the Ethernet packet at the physical layer. Each Ethernet frame starts with an Ethernet header, which contains destination and source MAC addresses as its first two fields. The middle section of the frame is payload data including any headers for other protocols (for example, Internet Protocol) carried in the frame. The frame ends with a frame check sequence (FCS), which is a 32-bit cyclic redundancy check used to detect any in-transit corruption of data. (Wikipedia). Dropped packets are retransmitted and reassembled in their correct order by the receiving device. Remember, this is all happening at at Gigabit speeds, and audio only requires Megabits, a thousand times slower. The other issues with digital, things like quantization errors (when a sampled signal is between the voltages recognized as a zero (<300 mv) and a one (> ~3V) have nothing to do with cables  and are all about the digital filter design in the DAC.  Noise, in the analog sense, doesn't exist in digital. Spurious voltage spikes that might be sensed as a 'one' are trapped by the error correction. Voltages below 300mV are treated as zeros, and ignored. Everything a listener interpret as 'definition' or 'space' or whatever is occuring in the DAC filters or in the analog circuits, not in the digital cable. And that's by design. Do you think your ISP is using Nordost cables between your streaming service, across the internet, through lord knows how many intermediate routers, switches, and buffers? No. I can assure you it's the same Belden  Cat 6 or fiber you get off the shelf at any electronic supply house. I was trained by AT&T on both copper and fiber, and am a certified fiber splicer (which takes a very cool $20,000 tool). Digital cables either work or they don't. Binary, zero or one. If they have ANY impact on performance, they are defective.

@panzrwagn

You haven’t auditioned different high quality digital cables have you? Engineering background? It can’t possibly make a difference so it doesn’t, right? Guess what? It does, and can make a huge difference.

@panzrwagn 

I have been a CIO, Senior Director of IT, and IT Director for decades. I understand the difference between theory and practice… do you?

@ghdprentice I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how the last 1 or 2 meters in the digital communications chain can make a "huge difference" and the previous one or two thousand miles doesn't make any difference. Digital is not analog. I totally get how inductance, capacitance, source, line, and destination impedance interact to cause subtle differences in SQ, I have no issue with that. But digital is fundamentally different and the things you attribute to digital cables simply have no basis in digital signal transmission. Attributing a difference in what you are experiencing to a digital bitstream that is identical at the source and the destination simply defies credulity. Whatever you are experiencing is happening in the analog realm, or it is a heuristic error or a cognitive bias. No shame there, we need those to survive. But our heuristics and cognitive biases are mental shortcuts and demonstrably imperfect. Dismissing them out of hand is never a good plan.

I was trained by AT&T

Ah. That pretty much closes the debate. Case closed. Winner

am a certified fiber splicer 

That too. One more to seal the deal 😉

@ghdprentice I was Principal Architect for a Fortune 10 company for 10 years before I retired after a career in IT. System resilience and availability were my responsibility. Whatever was built and went into production was either my architecture, or had to have my review. So yeah, I have a pretty solid grip on theory and practice, and the business implications of failure when a system responsible for $100M a DAY breaks.

And yes, I still had to know how to build cables and splice fiber.

And I am still waiting for an explanation on how a Layer One passive digital component can have any impact on analog sound quality. 

@panzrwagn since you’ve determined there is no difference, then for you there is no difference. Congrats.

But for those who have heard differences…positive differences…considerable positive differences by optimizing cables and optimizing their ethernet chain, your vast and relevant experience in IT becomes moot. They hear the differences clearly that you say don’t exist.

No one is questioning the validity of your experience. In fact, no one has asked you anything. Before commenting further, your words might carry more weight if you actually bothered to listen to two different cables and then opine. 

@ghasley You presuppose I have not, and that is an error. I will be happy to test any cabling beyond what I have done, just as soon as someone can provide a plausible explanation for how a digital cable can impact analog sound quality. The cable, not the DAC, not the power supply, not some oscillator induced phase noise, just the cable.

You say"Now, imagine streaming music. It absolutely requires proper buffering. FULL STOP. You cant have the data stream begin and then “error check” on the fly. Jittery at best, drop outs at worst. SO, how is the buffering performed, how much of the data is able to be buffered into memory, what and how is the data streamed from the buffer and what/where/method is the clocking/reclocking performed? There was alot more to the conversation and todays streamers/dacs do a wonderful job with the challenge. Some do it better than others and some do it completely differently." And I couldn't agree more.

Then you continue, " We are still in the process of understanding why certain materials, lengths of cable, shielding or lack thereof along with which method of transmission provides the best results and which do not. But it is audible. Ive tried to buy equipment from companies that seem to have a grasp of the importance of timing, lower jitter and clocking." None of this has anything to do with cables, but rather how the interfacing equipment performs. In your own words," Ive tried to buy equipment from companies that seem to have a grasp of the importance of timing, lower jitter and clocking." Those are attributes of active components, not cables. If an active component is so marginally engineered that it cannot perform properly with an in-spec cable, and has some special cable attribute as a requirement, I suggest the manufacturer needs to either document that or re-engineer the device.

@panzrwagn no one owes you anything. You hopped onto a thread where the OP tested multpile AES cables in his system. He heard differences. I’ve heard differences and don’t recall anyone soliciting your wise counsel.

Must be the rumble of those big fast tanks

@panzrwagn I started reading your post and it was fine until you said there is no noise in digital. This is absolutely not true. Take your phone out and go to a dark area and take a picture. You see noise? Why? Everything is purely in digital realm, 1s and 0s. So why is there any noise? Of course this has nothing to do with audio nor am I implying any connection. I am merely enlightening you to the concept of digital noise.

I started my listening with the cheapest of cables. But I heard a difference when comparing to other cables. I just wanted to share what I heard. I did not say this was the absolute fact for everyone. I also said that if you do not hear a difference, you saved yourself a lot of money. No one is forcing anyone to buy something. The cable companies are just offering a mere invitation to consider purchasing their products. Most offer free trials. If anyone does not believe in the differences between cables or does not hear a difference, it is fine. You do not have to buy an expensive cable. 
 

Enjoy your music! 

@svenjosh 

Thanks for taking the time to share your cable showdown. It’s always better to hear reviews from an independent source rather than someone looking for likes on YouTube or getting paid by ? to give positive results.

I consider myself as an inbetweenist. I have a hard time ’believing’ stuff when no one can explain it.

@rudyb Love the term “inbetweenist,” and thanks for at least keeping an open mind with this I too was skeptical about how much digital cables can matter, and I happily used a $60 Apogee Wyde Eye cable (that I preferred to a highly-regarded Stereovox XV2 BTW) for many years until recently when I got “the itch” to try something else. I found a great deal on an Acoustic Zen MC2 SPDIF digital cable, and since I use and love AZ interconnects and speaker cables I thought, why not? I was shocked at how much better in every aspect the MC2 was compared to the Apogee — it wasn’t even close and I’m kicking myself for not exploring this area much earlier. Can I explain it? No. Do I care about that? Hell no, because I’m thrilled with the sound I’m now hearing. My advice is to bite ur lip, curb your skepticism, and just use your own ears as the final arbiter. Here’s the same cable I bought used just fyi…

https://tmraudio.com/accessories/digital-cables/acoustic-zen-mc2-coaxial-cable-mc-2-1m-digital-interconnect/

To anyone who likes to read some more on the subject, this articles contains views from several sources:

https://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/why-usb-cables-can-make-a-difference/

@panzrwagn… “I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how the last 1 or 2 meters in the digital communications chain can make a "huge difference" and the previous one or two thousand miles doesn’t make any difference.”

The basic founding principle of science is observation. We make observations, then create hypothesis to explain, in this case, what we hear. You are refusing to observe, until someone can explain the how.
 

For those of us that have spent decades listening have realized that a digital cable in the last couple meters does mater… as does a power cord. What takes preference is observation… it makes a difference, often large.

well said @ghdprentice  Observation is indeed one of the first steps in scientific discovery.  Antibiotics from mold?  Germ theory of disease?  These were both relatively late discoveries, yet so taken for granted today.  I hail manufacturers who push the boundaries of our understandings.

@ghdprentice When I ask this question to cable manufactures the good ones say we don't know but it does seem to sound better. The bad ones give me ridiculous notions of speed of the signal matching and power reservoir and keeping radio frequency interference out. 

I've was a professional sound mixer for 35 years and no one uses audiophile cables in a studio or while recording the very largest film productions. I wonder how the final product can be better (more fidelity) than the originally captured product? Perhaps an AI brain will fill in the gaps someday but not now.

@svenjosh I missed the part where I said there is no noise in digital, of course there is. Crank up the ASA speed on a digital camera and you'll see plenty of it. One of the biggest differences between your cellphone camera and a serious digital camera is the bit depth of the sensor and thus dynamic range. This makes cellphone cameras much more sensitive to noise, especially quantization noise, as they have many more opportunities for values between bit levels. But none of this has anything to do with cables.

Within the digital domain any change in sound from a digital source must be accompanied by a corresponding change in the digital bitstream describing that sound. However, if that were introduced by a cable, that would change the checksum and/or parity of the bitstream and would be sensed as an error, and corrected whether by CRC or parity error on the receiving end. This is true for copper, fiber, or wireless Ethernet, AES/EBU, or USB. 

Changes in sound - and their corresponding changes in bitstream are prevalent before and after transport at Layer One. Buffering, latency, jitter, all the side effects of various digital filter algorithms, introduction of noise from all kinds of sources, phase noise, quantum and thermal noise from electronics, noise carried in from imperfect grounding schemes, RF noise; in fiber there is quantum (shot or 1/f) noise, thermal noise. My personal favorite, is dark current noise (eery sounding innit?) But i digress, that's a camera sensor thing. None of these are caused by an in spec interconnect.

The point is any change be being attributed to the cable is being done so contrary to the basic operations of frame or packet based digital signal transmission. Those audible changes may be occurring, just not during transmission of the in-band bitstream.

I've was a professional sound mixer for 35 years and no one uses audiophile cables in a studio or while recording the very largest film productions. I wonder how the final product can be better (more fidelity) than the originally captured product? Perhaps an AI brain will fill in the gaps someday but not now.

There are quite a few music recording studios that use high end audio cable.

@invalid alot of the better studios do indeed use better cables, especially if they are audiophile oriented. Steve Hoffman, Gray, et al.

@panzrwagn you still seem to be in the wrong thread. This isn’t the thread asking retired IT guys if digital cable quality matters in hifi, this is the thread where the original poster communicated what he heard between multiple digital cables. For those of us who hear clearly the differences, your opinion doesn’t seem to overlay well with our experience.

Also, you may want to recheck your “facts”…spdif/aes data doesn’t get resent.

@panzrwagn I don’t think you understand or you are trying not to. I am not interested in changing your beliefs. So you can enjoy with whatever works for you.

@donavabdear No one here claimed the final product can be better than the original performance. Some sound engineers understand the principles of audio recording and reproduction, their recordings sound great while others who do not understand produce poor sounding recordings.

There is a continual degradation in audio quality from the time of recording to the ultimate listening at your home. We are just trying to minimize the audio quality loss that occurs in our homes. That is the best we can do since we do not have any control over prior processes. So to answer to your question, there no way to get better sound than original but we strive to preserve what we can in the final part of audio reproduction. 

Panzerkampfwagen: please refrain from posting in threads & topics that are no interest to you (i.e. cable threads). This is public forum to exchange user experiences, and not to change beliefs. You can start your own thread with whatever rant you feel makes you feel better.

@svenjosh :

There is a continual degradation in audio quality from the time of recording to the ultimate listening at your home. We are just trying to minimize the audio quality loss that occurs in our homes. That is the best we can do since we do not have any control over prior processes. So to answer to your question, there no way to get better sound than original but we strive to preserve what we can in the final part of audio reproduction. 

Well said and spot on! Exactly

I ignore anything written by PWagn, as I do from JBourne, cakhole and a range of others. Seems they say the same thing, with no experience of any of the items.

@jerrybj Physics is physics, acoustics is a branch of applied physics as is digital communications, an area I've dedicated several decades of my life studying and implementing. So I am comfortable saying I have a lot more experience in that area than most. I have been involved with audio, both personally and professionally, even longer.

You are trying to attribute a perceived change in subjective sound quality to a part of the digital signal chain that is demonstrably unchanged. That leaves only three options: (A) the actual cause is not what you think it is. (B) you are falling prey to any number of forms of observer bias. (C) you want to propose that the digital bitstream, from which all content is derived, is mysteriously influenced by some unidentified external force capable of manipulating bits beyond the ability of error correction protocols, and that can only be mitigated by the most exotic cables, alloyed, extruded, woven, braided and terminated according to the incantations of the elders.

So I go with Option A. 

A difference in frequency response with an AES/EBU digital connection?

Technically impossible!

Is there any references that details that there is effectively error correction in the AES/EBU and USB for low latency application such as audio? From my search it appears that a defective packet sent can be identified but it is just dropped and not re-transmitted because of the low latency. Any technical paper on the subject?

@panzrwagn @david1964 you are both well-intentioned, intelligent gentlemen, of that I’m sure. You are both technically correct in an ASR kind of way and yet, here we are….other well-intentioned, reasonably intelligent souls have experienced audible results that are inconsistent with you two fine gentlemen as well as many others. Many of us also may have once been in your camp but managed to keep an open mind and try things from time to time.

I have found alot of the high end fussiness to varying degrees of “less effective” than others have communicated be they footers, some cables, power conditioners, etc, etc. You don’t have to believe that there are considerable gains (or less degradation) to be had by utilizing different digital cables, thats cool. I too was skeptical before trying them. I don’t understand why one well made cable sounds better or worse than another but I have experienced it and made choices based on what I hear.

@panzrwagn  You made a claim earlier in the thread that you had tested some cables and found no differences but you didn’t say what cables you tried and with what gear. I cringe though that you might think I’m asking you to share it with us with a blow by blow recap, which I am absolutely NOT doing. Your test was sufficient for you with your gear in your home. Our tests are sufficient for us so again I wonder what your motivation is participating in a thread where some fellow audiogon members are exchanging ideas and commentary about WHAT THEY HAVE HEARD, IN THEIR OWN SYSTEMS. What is your motivation and what can you possibly add to the dialogue?

From a professional perspective latency in digital circuits is by far more important than nano second timing differences created by cables. In modern systems used in professional recording you set latency based on buffer size. Last week we did sound and video in an arena with an all fiber network but because there were ancillary audio and video circuits in the sound mixer and the video switcher the signal to the video monitors in the sound room was about 2 frames out of sync, probably about 3 feet as far as the speed of sound. If you are speaking in a microphone and hearing that signal on headphones you will hear 3 milliseconds and up, it's difficult to speak or sing without being distracted by the timing error with only 3 mil. delay which is very low.

The circuit latency in digital systems is practically never talked about in audiophile stats, it is in the realm of 1/1000ths of seconds not 1/100,000 of seconds, milliseconds are very audible microseconds are not. Cables are the connectors between the digital circuits they are not the problem. "Don't kill the messenger" that's all cables are.

Analog systems have much more to do with cable gage and length.

@panzrwagn @donavabdear You are amazing guys who showed your profound intelligence in electronics and digital. Now that you have wowed us with your knowledge, maybe it’s time to contribute this same amazingness in other threads too so everyone can be enlightened!

@donavabdear : it sounds like you evaluate your digital cables solely based on the timing differences, i.e. speed of transmission. Sorry if I misunderstood you. Is this all there is on digital cables? All the other stuff about capacitance, impedance, shielding, radio frequency signal mitigation and more is just .... what? bollocks?

OP: as for Panzerkampfwagen, if you read something like this (copy / paste of his first illuminary contribution on this thread below), run! No need to read anything else from someone with that logic

Digital cables either work or they don't. Binary, zero or one. If they have ANY impact on performance, they are defective.

@donavabdear so a cable is not going to fix an error at the output of the circuit. 

@thyname To answer your question yes, bollocks everyone knows you can't have better sound quality than the original (I did recording for 35 years) audiophile cables especially are perhaps hundreds of times more expensive than professionals use in the studio at concerts and location recording. So yes there are elephants running around in the room and audiophiles are worried about mice. I assume that no one is making an elementary mistake like impedance mismatch in digital cables and not using to small of gage, dirty connectors or anything like that. 

There is no denying cables make a difference the difference's start from zero in a digital connection and only go down from there the cables can't make anything sound better. 

Speed of transmission is meaningless with the same type of cable (copper, silver etc.) if you are using some crazy conductor the speed of the signal can change drastically by changing the impedance but that is another subject. generally copper/ silver is a little slower than the speed of light producing nanoseconds of differences where latency in digital circuits are milliseconds 1 millisecond is about a foot at the speed of sound in air.

Also just for fun every recording has phase problems the 3 to 1 rule is the oldest in the book -triple the distance from the first mic to the next mic- even a single stereo mic over the conductors head has different kinds of phase problems like the diaphragm's being perhaps an inch apart or acoustic phase problems like reflections from the floor, walls or the music stand in front of the musician. These are real timing errors that actually make a measurable and audible difference, nanosecond timing errors because of the length of the silver cell in the cable are mice among elephants. Hope that's clear.

@jeffstrick Cables can’t fix anything, although years ago when a singer was to bright we used an old brown Electro Voice cable that didn’t pass high end very well and it fixed the problem, a little EQ with mic cables. Again cables only degrade they start at zero if they are perfect, cables can only make things sound worse. I listened to cables worth 180k at AXPONA a few weeks ago and the speakers were disappointing even in a $1.3M setup.

@donavabdear : That’s not what I asked, but OK, I understand, good platform for your rants blowing steam towards the "stupid" audiophile species who are always confused according to your multiple threads you had started. Carry on.

@thyname I really don't mean to pick on audiophiles and someone pointed out to me lately that I should be kinder, I agreed and I'll try. It's just that this group is full of intelligent people who have the same hobby as I do so I want to add the the knowledge when I have expertise in some cases. I was the first person to record a fully digital signal path for movies and I spend a lot of time fixing the workflow of many studios while at the same time nearly getting fired numerous times because of all the confusion concerning digital signal path. I've been there and have the scares and the Oscar and Emmy winning shows to prove it.

@thyname

It’s just incomprehensible to some technical know-it-alls that amateur hobbyists might know more than they do.   When first joining a new-to-them discussion forum, these know-it-alls assume that their new membership is an invitation to inform the unwashed masses of their vast knowledge.  Sadly, they have no understanding that the forum they just joined has an accumulated wealth of audio knowledge - acquired over decades & decades of practical experience. 

What these cable-deniers just don’t get is that many of these audiophile cable manufacturers were started by professional EE’s and physicists.   This forum presents an opportunity to learn something new.   Apparently, some posters don’t want to - or can’t.

@steakster You say "cable-deniers" does that mean people who don't think cables will make a system sound better? I asked many cable manufactures at AXPONA what cables do for a sound system only 1 manufacture, Beldon, had an answer. Most of them said "I don't know but people like it". Question for you concerning digital signal processing, can you make the signal better than the original? Think about it for a second if you say no then you also can't make the signal better than the signal you get from the any source at any position on the signal path all the way to your speakers. As far as I know there is no AI algorithm that adds information to an audio signal. What do you say? 

@thyname Well argue your point then don't simply put me down, I don't care if it's technical or practical. The question is do cables make a sound system better. No one including the OP is saying that cables don't make a difference they must be up to zero to be perfect. No doubt cables make a difference but no one has ever shown they make a positive difference only a negative one, even getting rid of RF or other forms of over the air distortion still the cable does not add to fidelity ether analog or digital. I don't even think audiophile know what a "cable-denier" is. Perhaps it's more accurate to say "Im a cable cultist, come frolic with me".

they must be up to zero to be perfect.

Exactly! And as I posted on this forum right above:

thyname 2,706 posts 04-26-2023 at 09:21am      @svenjosh : There is a continual degradation in audio quality from the time of recording to the ultimate listening at your home. We are just trying to minimize the audio quality loss that occurs in our homes. That is the best we can do since we do not have any control over prior processes. So to answer to your question, there no way to get better sound than original but we strive to preserve what we can in the final part of audio reproduction.  Well said and spot on! Exactly

Also:

come frolic with me

Sorry, Not interested.

@thyname Sorry you are making the wrong argument, you aren't keeping the signal the same as it is originally you are only at best keeping the signal the same at the level it enters your speakers there is a world of difference between original and the end of the line. You still never answered the question "do cables add any positive traces to the signal". Also you misunderstood my analogy between "Vaccine deniers" and "Cable deniers" an obviously derogatory term. Calling names is really the lowest form of debate, try harder.

Haven't you ever thought of the hundreds of feet of cable around the voice coils haven't you ever thought of the tracers on the PC board haven't you ever thought of the fuse haven't you ever thought of the crossover PC tracers (at speaker level), come on argue with me give me your technical reasons why an expensive piece of cable at the end of 1000 feet of electrical line is going to help with anything but 3 feet of RF filtering, you can do it.

Have you been drinking? Sorry dude. Find another person to fight with. Or pet a cat (or dog)

come on argue with me

Some other day. I don’t have time right now. I will get back to you another day. Sorry, I sincerely hope you don’t mind 😁