Yes, digital cables matter too
On a suggestion from another Agoner, I recently spent a fair bit of time sorting out the coaxial cable situation connecting my Bluesound Node (gen 3) and my Chord QuteHD dac. I ended up enlisting outside help, but I learned quite a bit, and I am certain my system will be in a much better place as a result once I pull the trigger on one of the cables evaluated.
I went into a local dealer to buy a different item and mentioned in passing I was interested in trying a different digital cable, and he immediately handed me three and told to take them home and try them out. My initial impressions were so positive I went to another local dealer and they handed me another five cables to try. Combined with two coax cables I already had at home, that was a total of ten new and used cables priced from $25 to $1,500 to compare. Cables were: Pangea Premier Digital, Blue Jeans X ‘Better’, DHLabs Silver Sonic, naim DC-1, Chord Shawline, current and past Chord Signature Digital Super ARAY models, and Nordost Blue Heaven and Heimdall 2.
I have bought or assembled and evaluated a number of different PC, digital and analog cables, but until I got the Node, I had never really experimented with digital coax cables. I have developed my own method for comparing cables that includes making sure all cables have been played recently in my system for st lesst a day, and then listening to a few cuts of various genera and styles of music with each cable and taking general notes. I enlisted my son who has a very good system and good listening skills for blind testing a few of the cables.
I will touch on some if the highlights here.
First, I have never listened to either Chord or Nordost cables in a controlled context, and at least for their digital offerings, I am impressed. I had thought that my DHLabs Silver Sonic coax cable sounded pretty good, and it is often recommended as a good budget cable, but it was left a little bit behind by most of the others I tried in my system.
Second, some of these cables sounded dramatically different, and you get what you pay for. My son easily identified as his favorite cables the two most expensive cables tested in a blind listening. The amount of detail and nuance on offer made that result a near certainty.
Third, putting these high quality cables between the latest iteration of the Node and the Chord dac indicated how good the Node functions as a server for HD, 16/44 and mp3 files, and proved to me that digital cables make a big difference in this context.
The lower level Chord Shawline and Nordost Blue Heaven are both lovely cables. The Shawline is balanced with good spatial detail and broad soundstage. The Blue Heaven is super musical with great PRAT, an emphasis on leading edges and a lower center of gravity. Of the two, there’s a bit more detail on offer from the Shawline. Compared to my Silver Sonic, both had less grain, sounded more organized and less shouty. Either would have been an improvement, and I probably would have bought the Shawline if I hadn’t listened to cables further up both lines.
The naim DC-1 is a nice cable and a slight step up from the Shawline and Blue Heaven in terms of spatial resolution and detail, but interestingly, the naim wire had less PRAT and drive than either of the Nordost products.
The Nordost Heimdall 2 is a really lovely cable, similar PRAT and flow as the Blue Heaven, but more high frequency information, better tone, oodles of detail and very accurate placement of instruments and voices in the sound stage, all without sounding lit up or over the top. It took this cable a few hours of playing to get to this point. When I first dropped it in, it sounded a little thin.
The Chord Signature Super ARAY is also a great cable. My son in the blind listening described it as not quite as punchy on leading edges as the Heimdall 2, but he felt the midrange was to die for, and this cable did voices better than any other cable in my test. Very good tone, and detail and spatial resolution were also convincing with this cable.
One surprise in my listening was the Blue Jeans digital cable made specifically for Hawthorne Stereo. At just shy of a hundred bucks, this was a very good deal. It lacks the PRAT of the Blue Heaven, but it was smooth, good tone, sound stage and separation and bass definition. The treble is a bit tipped up, but no jitter glare. It doesn’t set a foot wrong, and especially for the price. I did have trouble getting the RCA connectors to grip the socket on the Node, and the cable is stiff, which didn’t help.
So, in conclusion, yeah, trying different coax cables with the Node was a real ear opener. When I first thought about upgrading my coax cable, I never considered spending up to half of the combined value new of my streamer and dac, but now I plan to buy one of the more expensive cables I tried, because after listening to them in my system, there is no going back.
kn
@soix thanks for the tip, I will check out that cable. @lowrider57 thanks for the original suggestion for me to explore other cables. Good advice! I have a pretty conservative budget, so it may take a bit to get the cable I want. Used is certainly a good option. kn |
Thanks for all the feedback folks. It was a lot of time, but not all work;-) @baylinor interesting comment on the Node not clocking the USB output. I use an iFi iPurifier 2 at the coax input into my Chord dac to reclock the Node output, and it makes a big positive difference. As a control. I took the iPurifier out of the circuit for the side by side cable comparisons, but put it back in for just listening to music and it improved the performance of all the coax cables in my system. I cannot use USB out of the Node because my SSD drive is using that port so I can use the Node as a server. |
@renatus all the cables are 1M except the Pangea which is closer to 0.5M. I have read that 1.5M length is a sweet spot for digital cables between reflections and data loss. https://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue14/spdif.htm I have about 4 or 5 Toslink cables and they all sound different too. I prefer glass over optical plastic fibers. DHLabs is my favorite so far for Toslink, but I have not tried any super expensive cables. I don’t like the format on the grounds that cheap parts are converting your signal twice. |
@soix about half the cables in my test were directional, and half were not labeled. However I placed them in my system, the sound signatures were repeatable and consistent between cables, but the point of testing directionality for any given coax cable is well taken. kn |
@tweak1 Chinese cables. I could write an essay on that. Suffice to say that I have had great but not necessarily consistent luck with both counterfeits and Chinese house brands, particularly for power cables and connectors. Some of the cables I have tried in the $100-$120 price range blow away anything I’ve used premade or that I’ve built from retail U.S. or Japanese manufacturers up to at least $700 or $800 bucks. The Chinese sophistication in materials and manufacturing I have noticed just in buying finished cables and parts is scary good. Amazing what outsourcing of western technology and manufacturing over the last 40 years has done for their capabilities. Not sure the U.S. wants to tangle with them anytime soon, but that is a whole other story for another thread on another site. kn |
@nonoise I have a Unique Products Toslink cable as well, which was my favorite for quite a while and bested cables from Audioquest, Chord, and one recommended by Steve Nugent from Empirical Audio the brand of which escapes me. I like the DHLabs cable better than the Unique Products cable in my system. It is 1.5M, so perhaps that is the whole story right there. kn |
@nonoise my Unique Products cable is 1.0M. The medical grade cable recommended by Steve Nugent was 1.5M and I was unimpressed with that. As mentioned previously, my DHLabs Toslink cable is also 1.5M, so take the direct comparison in my system with Unique Products with a grain of salt, being 1:1.5 versus 1:1. The DHLabs cable was recommended by the sales team at Cables.com, fwiw. kn |
@lowrider57 I finally got around to purchasing a coax cable and selected a used Chord Signature Super ARAY at 1m length. It was a reasonable deal and sounds terrific in my system. Thanks for the conversation and input. kn |
@nonoise glad that worked out for you. It is the best Toslink cable I’ve tried so far. |
@liszt the Blue Jeans cable in my test was 1.0m. I do not see the product on their website, but you can find Hawthorne’s contact info here to inquire: https://www.hawthornestereo.com I am not sure there is a directly analogues product to the one I tested available on the Bluejeans website. As far as I can tell, Bluejeans stock cables do not use silver plated copper wire, while most of the other cables I tested do, fwiw. kn
|
@mikhailark above in this thread I noted that USB is not an option with current streamer/server as I am using the only USB connection on the Node N130 for my SSD with my ripped and downloaded files. My Chord Qutest DAC has pretty good jitter rejection, and for me in my system, a good coax cable sounds better than USB or toslink. I should also note that I have replaced the internal switching power supply on the Node with an external supply from Teddy Pardo, and that made a noticeable difference in sound quality in my system. Whether that was because of an improvement in clock performance and reduced jitter in the coax signal I can’t say. YMMV. Taking your perhaps rhetorical question more broadly - Google AI says this (with my added comments in italics): “Some audiophiles believe that coaxial digital cables can offer certain advantages in music reproduction, despite the rise of other digital interfaces like USB and optical: kn |
