Digital Cable Question

I'm using a Clarity Cable XLR as a digital cable and it smokes my JPS Superconductor Q and Morrow DIG4 AES/EBU. Soundstage is more defined and precise.

At least one site offers two lengths: 12 inches, or 5 meters!! Which apparently are the best lengths for less reflections being a problem.

The usual recommendation, if the cable is not very short (less than 12 inches) is 1.5 meters, or about 5 feet. See this paper.

Length beyond 1.5 meters would not provide additional benefit in terms of reflection timing (unless perhaps the output signal of the source component has unusually slow risetimes and falltimes). The additional length could, however, conceivably result in increased noise pickup from ground-loop or rfi/emi effects, thereby worsening jitter. Also, if hi rez formats are involved a 5 meter length could actually cause reflection timing to become more of a problem rather than less.

These length recommendations, btw, are generally intended to further improve the situation where a reasonably good impedance match exists to begin with. A severe mismatch will not necessarily be helped by using a 12 inch or less cable length.

The 1.5 meter length probably would help a severe mismatch in the case of redbook data rates, but not necessarily for hi rez rates. In the case of hi rez data rates, if the impedance mismatch is severe enough, reflections corresponding to a given signal edge (i.e., a given 0 to 1 or 1 to 0 transition) may keep propagating back and forth across the length of the cable enough times to cause distortion on the following signal edge.

Regards,
-- Al

Thanks for all of your kind replies gents, they were very informative.