A bit more and you could have a real giant killer, the Standard BNC with RCA adapters. $275. Here are jitter measurements:
https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=154425.0
Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Looking for a Giant Killer Digital cable
Hello all,
I’m looking for a Budget ‘Giant Killer’ RCA coaxial cable to connect my Oppo 203 to a DAC for music playback.
Can someone suggest something currently available in the $50 to $150 price range?
If however your experience says some new Optical cable in that range is as good or better, please, by all means do mention it as I could go either way of course!
A 1M to 1.5M will be sufficient.
Huge thanks!
Showing 9 responses by audioengr
30-day money-back, less $8 shipping on the Standard BNC cable. You are welcome to shoot it out against other cables for 30 days. Sometimes I allow a bit more if needed. My very best is my Reference BNC for $499, but the Standard is very close. More silver in the Reference. Both are aerospace cable with expanded Teflon dielectric and double-shielded terminated to 18GHz B/W BNC connectors. Very good 75 ohm match, better than Belden cables. Connectors are a perfect match, except of course when using the RCA adapters, which will never be 75 ohms. These don’t seem to affect the SQ though. The important thing is the termination to the coax. I have been doing cables since 1996 and I have a EE degree. Computer simulated many of my designs. Terminating a coax to BNC is much better than trying to solder to a RCA connector any type coax cable. The impedance is a perfect match with BNCs. BNCs are specifically made for each cable type, either 50 or 75 ohms char. impedance. There are hundreds of BNC connector types as a result. Steve N. Empirical Audio |
This is your experience with your particular equipment, not something that you can make broad conclusions from. There is nothing fundamentally flawed with S/PDIF as a transmission medium. There is no reason why it cannot be as good or better than any others, except perhaps lack of error correction. It is double-terminated, so if the interfaces are properly designed, it will have superb signal integrity and very low jitter. I routinely get ~15psec at the end of the cable across 75 ohm terminator. This is the rub. Very few designers get the driver right. Wrong impedance and wrong voltage. I used to mod a lot of CD players/transports and computer audio equipment. Not one of them was designed right, even from Sony. Steve N. Empirical Audio |
if we assume you cannot get a true 75ohm out of an RCA ... I wonder why more manufacturers don't get it right, maybe as those that care that much are including S/PDIF on RCA as a convenience and prefer you use AES3 or some other method? Simple. They don't have the expertise/experience to execute these designs correctly. After seeing many of these designs in my modding days, I came to the conclusion that they just copy each other, not really understanding how the interface really behaves. The bad designs just get replicated over and over. Steve N. Empirical Audio |
Regular S/PDIF COAX digital cable is actually not a bad system, though using BNC connectors is best. Only a true i2s digital connection is better because the DAC/source does not have to encode the stereo digital signals into a single wire signal. That is the S/PDIF method. I2S is not necessarily a panacea either, although its a good start. Most of my products have I2S interfaces, both SE and differential (HDMI connector), so I know how they behave. Galvanic isolation of I2S is a non-starter because it adds too much jitter. Because S/PDIF is a zero-crossing signal, at least it’s easy to add a high-quality pulse transformer and get isolation. I have compare with my own DAC the difference between S/PDIF input (on BNC) to I2S input (on RJ-45). The difference is actually really small, almost audibly undetectable. This is partly because I use a AK4114 receiver, which reduces S/PDIF jitter significantly. As for differential I2S, the problem there IMO is the LVDS driver and receiver that add jitter. I think the SE I2S on RJ-45 is better. The other advantage of S/PDIF over I2S is that a world-class cable for SPDIF is a lot less expensive than a world-class cable for I2S. Steve N. Empirical Audio |
The glass optical cable has the standard ends of a inexpensive toslink, but are highly polished on the Wireworld. Standard cheap toslink ($15 to $30 variety) usually comes with one thick plastic line to transmit the signal. OTOH, a high quality glass optical is made up of hundreds of small glass threads to carry signal. I have compared good glass Toslink cables to a high-quality plastic one and this plastic one beat the glass: https://btpa.com/TOSLINK-XXX.html Steve N. Empirical Audio |
Then one is left with figuring out if the reclocking on board the given device ...is substandard or not. And whether that given reclocking is messing up cable qualities analysis, or not. Or by what degree, is the usual reality. An unfortunate state of affairs IMO. If the DAC S/PDIF input would only go to a good S/PDIF receiver like the AK4114, many DAC’s would at least have the capacity to sound a lot better with a low-jitter input source and a good S/PDIF cable. Instead, you mostly hear the Master Clock of the reclocker inside the DAC, which is usually of dubious quality. A reclocker or a good S/PDIF cable before the DAC can still be beneficial because the PLL of the reclocker in the DAC is usually still sensitive to incoming jitter (the filter of the PLL). BTW, many modern DAC’s do not have reclockers on the S/PDIF inputs, but some do use older receiver technology, so their ability to reduce or maintain low jitter is compromised. Steve N. Empirical Audio |