I'm A Believer

I've sometimes been sceptical of the differences in sound quality that digital cables can make in a system. Well after last night I'm a believer. I had a minor disaster while trying to change out the component video cable on my Oppo DV-980h. The connection was extremely tight and there was very little space for me to get my fingers in to unscrew the housing around the component connector. While pulling hard to dislodge the video cable, my hand slipped and hit my Morrow Audio DIG2 Digital Cable, pulling the cable completely out of it's RCA connector. As I had a Straight Wire S-Link silver digital audio cable in the garage, I plugged it between the Oppo and my CAL Sigma Tube DAC as a temporary replacement. The difference was extraordinary; where my system with the Morrow cable has a tremendous soundstage, great dynamics and a black silent background, it now sounds shrill, the soundstage is compressed and there is a great deal of hiss and background noise with the Straight Wire. I simply can't stand to listen to music through my system with this cable in place, it's nothing short of awful.

As a sidebar, I would like to call out the exemplary service at Morrow Audio. I contacted Mike Morrow and told him how I had broken the cable, 100% my own fault, and he offered to repair the cable for the price of the postage to mail it back to me. Mike Morrow is a genuinely nice person and a real pleasure to deal with, and his cable are absolutely first rate (and a real bargain too boot).