Help me pick a digital cable

Apogee Wyde Eye is the best low-price cable I know. I had one for a long time. I've just moved up to the Ven Haus cryo'd Pulsar and it is terrrrrrific. Smoooth, with detail detail detail, no edge. It takes a long time to break in but the upside, as you leave it burning in 24 hours in 24, is that you come home to a noticeably better cable every single day for about 3 weeks. No kidding. And it doesn't even sound bad out of the box!

Just make sure, whatever digital cable you buy, that it is at least 1.5 meters long.

Jeff_jones, I have performed the test you ask about. I used Apogee Wyde Eye in 1-meter and 1.5-meter lengths. I made the cables up using Canare RCA connectors and 2% silver solder. A pal and I did listening tests using his Theta transport and Kora DAC, and my TEAC transport and Apogee DAC.

The difference was notable in terms of sound source positioning and delineation, depth and width of soundstage, orchestral focus and cohesion. In general terms, the music was less confused, more coherent, with the longer cable. We had no doubt that longer was better.

Higher quality cable does make a difference. In some ways I preferred a 0.5-meter Zu Ash to a 1-meter Wyde Eye. However the 1.5-meter Wyde Eye would have been my choice even over the more expensive Zu, if the Zu cable were just a half meter long.

Chadnliz, the Steve you refer to is of course Steve Nugent of Empirical Audio. His moniker here is audioengr.

Goodness, Jeff_jones, I'm shocked. Are you saying my test wasn't honest? ;o) Why, I'm the soul of accuracy in all things.

Actually, kidding aside, I would welcome the description of anyone else's minutely rigorous blind A-B test. The results in the test I describe above were so obvious and clear to me and my pal that we felt we needed to go no further into testing. The difference in sound quality was large, the buying decision was plain as day. One pleasant surprise was how good an economy cable like the Wyde Eye could sound, as long as it was the right length.

Jeff_jones, would it be a bother for you to post a detailed procedure for conducting the kind of repeatable blind test of digital cable lengths you might find legitimate? I might learn something from this...

In the case of my cable test, the difference was so obvious that there was no hesitation whatsoever in saying which one was better and why. There were absolutely no disadvantages in using a 1.5 meter cable, only advantages.

I went to some expense and trouble to do the test so that I could be sure there was no self-deception, spending extra money to make up a second cable I was not sure I would be using. This was worth doing, to me, because the result claimed was counterintuitive. In all my previous experience, shorter has been better. However that was the case with analog connections, not digital. My previous tries with digital cables had involved improved cable quality, not different lengths.

Still, I am glad to know how a blind test should be set up. When the pal who helped me with the last test gets back to town, we ought to set one up with the same cables again, and see if we learn anything new.

Chadnliz, that's funny! Your wife sounds great--it takes a big person to admit that audiophile fussbudgetry brings results. I got lucky myself--I knew it the evening my s.o. told dinner guests that every time I changed something the music sounded better.

Gee, come to think of it, I never thanked her. I better get her a disc...