|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
207.200.116.196
Got a DAC over X-mas and hooked it up sort of automatically to a digital coax IC (blue jeans cable). Cheap start. Figured I'd start upgrading digital ICs later.Had to take down my rig to fit 18 people into the living room for holiday dinner. Bummer. When I put it all back together I hooked up both the coax and a starter optical IC to see what they would do side by side.
Now this is NOT a true test of anything, because I didn't have anyone handy to literally do the A/B switch for me.
Anyway, I was surprised at how clean the optical sounded. It wasn't more detailed in any way than the coax, but wasn't noticeably less at first. What was immediately and consistently apparent was that the gain lowered slightly every time I switched to optical. After a couple of tries I was quite sure that the optical portrayed the cymbals a little differently (not better) than the coax, bass was less, and the soundstage was not as big or airy. Can't pin down the differences any better than that as yet.
This make sense to anyone? Is this a common experience? Do really good opticals surpass coax at some price point???
Follow Ups:
" Do really good opticals surpass coax at some price point???Just curious, not spending any money as yet. "
That's about what you can get a "glass fiber" Toslink IC for. The glass fiber Toslink's have about six times the bandwidth of the plastic ones. These glass fiber Toslink's can pretty much out do anybody's plastic ones and at a pretty good savings too.
I got mine on Ebay.
Problem with the cheap multiple glass strands toslink is that they fracture easily. Once fractured, plastic is way better.
I think, not heard yet, that multiple platic strands are the way to go.
I bought 2 on ebay... a sonicwave and something else. The main difference between the two was the number of strands (65 vs. 260). One of them I could not dinstinguish it from a platic monocore sonically. The other one presented more "grain". When I looked at one end while passing light through, I could see strands, and light intensity was very uneven across the section and never bright. When you look at light through a mono-core plastic, it looks like a LED and it is intense. I understand that theoritically glass optical cables are much better, but I am not so sure about the cheap offerings we see on ebay or partsexpress.
Well, I can say from experience that glass is better than plastic. Also, I emailed the company I got my cables from and asked them how careful do I need to be with my cables so as not to fracture the glass. Their response: "It is very difficult to damage the glass optical fibers in our cables. You would have to bend and put a "kink" in the cable for that to happen. Normal use and even dropping the cable will not break the fibers".
Mine haven't, but what do I know, I just plug 'em in and let them sit there.
HowdyBesides the differences in the transmitters/receivers mentioned, another potential confounding difference is that coax might cause a ground loop or be more sensitive to EMI/RFI either of which which may or may not cause audible differences downstream...
As to the gain difference: the biggest surprise I ever had was that changing the power cord on my transport which was connected with glass fiber to my DAC changed the gain... What the heck?
Hate to ask this silly question ? But it seems improbably. The increase gain is possibly just an apparent increase, caused by better jitter characteristics with the new power cord.
HowdyYep, I figured it was jitter (what else could it be?)
The biggest difference was that the bass was much tighter with one cord than the other, perhaps this accounted for the perceived level difference. The level difference was hard to measure with a RS SPL meter in that finding a consistent spot to measure with real material wasn't too reproducible. I didn't bother to check test tones...
Ok, most probably, it is just improved jitter. Even with my Squeezebox, after the mods, everything sounded louder. One good thing with the computer approach is, even though there is jitter always, the nature of the sound is not 'edgy'. It must be something to do with the 'jitter spectrum' not dependent on varying things like the transport/cd surface.
The problem with optical is that there is extra circuitry that changes the signal to light in the transmitter (cd transport) and back to electrical in the receiver (dac). You are most likely hearing this circuitry and not the optical cable.
| ||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: