Digital optical cable wanted to borrow

[julesd68]

I'm experimenting with a DAC / CD transport for the first time - am connecting it with a cheap as chips co-axial cable at the moment.
There's probably nothing wrong with that, but does anyone have a decent quality optical cable I could borrow for a few days to make a comparison? :)

[Oldpinkman]

I have one - but Kent's a long way to come for it! I belong to the "cables don't matter" camp here, in spite of my techies measuring otherwise. But the same techies also said "never use optical". I have just hooked up my new toy with an old white/yellow/red £1 phono lead onto BNC phono adaptors for 50p from ebay, and it is not at all bad. "Wow's" from wife and step son. Maybe better cables would be a tiny weeny bit better, but if you're not getting a "wow" with an ordinary cable, you have other things to look at before you worry about sending the numbers down a glass rod. :-)

[Oldpinkman]

(So much so that I am using said BNC/phono arrangement, because the techie in question, John Westlake, ONLY fitted a BNC digital out on the CD6 I am using on the transport, which meant having to shell out a whole english pound for 4BNC adaptors from ebay instead of using my beautiful optical lead :-( )

[julesd68]

Maybe better cables would be a tiny weeny bit better, but if you're not getting a "wow" with an ordinary cable, you have other things to look at before you worry about sending the numbers down a glass rod. :-)

Thanks for patronising me Richard. I have never believed in spending lots of money on cables either. I never said I wasn't getting a 'wow' and never said I wanted a 'better' cable. I have simply never tried an optical cable and just wanted to see if I could perceive a difference in my system. Simple as that. The last thing I want to do is a start another subjectivist cable thread ...

Mods please feel free to delete thread.

[AlanS]

I went to Maplins and bought one.

[Oldpinkman]

Hey Julian
I'm really sorry - I didn't mean to patronise. You said you were a first timer with digital hookups. I meant (in a light hearted way) to share my experience that generally the cable was not (that) important.

It didn't come over right. Hope you get to try someones. I would be genuinely interested to know what you discover

[julesd68]

Thanks Richard, no probs ... :)

[Ninanina]

I'm experimenting with a DAC / CD transport for the first time - am connecting it with a cheap as chips co-axial cable at the moment.
There's probably nothing wrong with that, but does anyone have a decent quality optical cable I could borrow for a few days to make a comparison? :)

APPARENTLY there is not much in it with optical Toslink cables. I originally used a very thin optical cable between my cd player and Dac but someone 'in the know' suggested this multi threaded cable, for very little money: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002VBAZ60/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It made a huge difference against the thin jobby I was using. I don't think at £3.99, delivered, you can go wrong. I certainly won't be updating mine for a long time because I don't think there is much to gain

Some say that glass fibre's, rather than plastic, are better but even rather expensive digital cables such as the Chord Optichord Toslink, at about £50, still uses plastic fibre's

Hope that helps some

[mido]

I have a QED cable you can borrow if you want Julian. It's nothing fancy, cost about 25 quid 10 years or so ago I think.

[Ninanina]

I should point out that I have a friend that uses the Chord Optichord Toslink @ £50 between cd player and a Rega Dac and I am pretty sure my £3.99 cable holds it's own against it. Try it and see what you think; you can easily send it back to Amazon if you don't like it.... a bargain in my opinion.. for what it's worth... :):)

[walpurgis]

I have to say Julian, that I never got on with Toslink type optical cables with CD players. I found the sound lacking. It may just have been my setup, but this was with a variety of equipment.

But, if you want a top sounding coax, let me know and I'll make and send you one (free) and I'll bet it's as good or better than anything you've tried.

[Oldpinkman]

Feeling very guilty julian, I am happy to post you my toslink. If you are not on the far flung side of london I could lend you dacapo for a bit too. After all , part of experimenting with transports and dacs must include the transports and dacs. To try to share my experiences a bit less flippantly, much experimenting 20 years ago led to the conclusion that cables, in this specific context, made little difference. What sometime did matter (rarely) was the match between the units. I'm not technical, and the poor designers had to really dumb it down for me. The unit mismatch was generally down to clocks. This part of hifi - the digital input to the dac, is really computer data transfer. The link is just a wiring bridge, and generally a bit of copper wire, just sending 0 & 1's (big differences between high and low voltage) isn't too affected by rf or impedance capacitance issues which can have a big affect on analogue voltages. However, using a glass rod to send a light flashed on& off, involves putting a signalman to flash the light in the transport and a man of the watch in the dac to read the message. Sometimes those 2 bugger it up. Its rarely a problem with the glass rod, its the knob-heads flashing the lights. you dont get that problem with copper wire so generally we preffered coax. So much so that coax was the only option john Westlake chose to fit on the cd6 which is the 2nd hand ebay purchase I happen to be using as the transport for my own journey of rediscovery. Its not that simple of course, but it did for me, and i didnt encounter anything to switch me from copper to glass (20 years ago). Deep breath. So far, on a very casual unscientific basis I have been genuinely astonished to find 22bit dacapo sounds exactly as I remember, "analogue". And all other cds, whilst different from each other, sound digital. I will be neither offended nor surprised to discover a tiny bit of real testing proves that not to be true. I expected dacapo to be significantly bettered by now, not least by jw's own mdac.

[julesd68]

Feeling very guilty julian, I am happy to post you my toslink. If you are not on the far flung side of london I could lend you dacapo for a bit too.

hi Richard, please no guilt required at all!!

Thanks for your most kind offer but I'm not going to do any more experimenting till I get my single box cdp back from service, and then I'll review things.

I'm interested to know - how would you define an 'analogue' sounding cdp?

[julesd68]

And many thanks to all for advice and offers of cables - I'll hang fire for now as I say, till I've got my other cdp back as a point of comparison to the two box solution ...

[Oldpinkman]

Hi Julian

No chance of starting with an easy one to get me played in then? If there is a short answer it is "real not canned". My favourite personal definitions probably won't work for you or others, since I assume you do actually listen to cd's. But I found I didn't (other than in the car). I listened to a track, or bit of a track, compared, heard differences etc, but then put a cd on to listen to, and remembered I hadn't done the washing up yet. With LP's I could forget to eat sometimes. Certainly I could play them back to back for hours. Whole LP's.
I am a bit wierd. Sometimes I wish I'd never listened to a Pink Triangle, and had either stuck with Lowther speakers and a V15-III or a nice Sondek, Ittok, Asak, Naim Naim, Isobarik set up. You can invite your mates in for a drink with those, and they can notice just how good they are, how rich, rythmic, involving - whilst playing background music. Whilst my Ventricals aren't the beloved ESL63's I plan to get, they are a compromise for a small room, which works well enough for me. And like the ESL63's they are not really loudspeakers at all. They are giant open backed headphones. Not too bad off-axis horizontally, but really fussy vertically. So my friends get their drink taken out of their hand, and told to sit dead-centre between the speakers, with their head in a metal bracket to hold it in place. No idea why I have very few friends who come round for a drink...
Which brings us to imaging. My domestic compromise means the Ventricals are also front left and right for our 5.1 set-up, the PIP being fed by the "line out" rca's on the technics AV amp. My step son (no knowledge of or interest in HiFi - keen and talented musician) heard dacapo, listened for ages, and said "I thought the middle speaker wasn't supposed to be used for CD's". Good stereo - good imaging, is an illusion - a trick. Playing sounds from 2 points (if only) to sound like it comes from somewhere between the 2. It doesn't work for everyone. I can understand this, having lost the sight in my right eye aged 12, and then recently had it partially restored, however much the eye is working mechanically, the brain has forgotten how to synthesise 2 images. With DaCapo the instruments are precisely placed, and separate on good recordings. Indeed, to my jaw-dropping astonishment, they even have some depth - some instruments sounding like they are beyond the wall. (The wall is only about 3/4 of a metre behind the front of the speaker, so this is not a big feat - my favourite ESL63 set up in my dad's living room, had a sound which appeared to come from the back garden - about 30 feet behind the speakers)
It's a warts and all experience - and reveals a bad recording. The tape hiss on Eva Cassidy Autumn leaves live (complaint from wife - actually, that is a good recording - but with tape hiss!), the canned processed vocals of Eddie Reader on Fairground Attraction, compared with the natural sounding acoustic instruments etc.
Mostly it sounds real. Again, quoting the non-geeks in the family "that sounds like a trumpet - not a kazoo". "You can really tell that is an acoustic bass". "That's definitely a Hammond organ". With reference to Dave's comments - it certainly contains lots of treble detail, but also has gut thumping, tuneful precise bass. Precise 3d illusion of instrument placement. Precise start and stop (trannie amp, not bottles - sorry guys)
Finally analogue can be played loud without hurting, and doesn't need to be played loud to be detailed and involved and musical.

Will that do for starters?

[Oldpinkman]

And I'm so excited, I had to post somewhere - and I'm afraid you copped it
The hospital have just emailed to say they have completed the diagnosis for my Quad - a cure is possible (the doctors Quad had the same fault developing 10x worse on the left channel compared with the right channel on both amps).
Indeed he is confident it will return better than ever before. Sue will be so pleased to have the "Proper box on the floor" back :)

[julesd68]

And I'm so excited, I had to post somewhere - and I'm afraid you copped it
The hospital have just emailed to say they have completed the diagnosis for my Quad - a cure is possible (the doctors Quad had the same fault developing 10x worse on the left channel compared with the right channel on both amps).
Indeed he is confident it will return better than ever before. Sue will be so pleased to have the "Proper box on the floor" back :)

Awesome! Who is working on it for you?

My 405-2 was an amazing machine. If I only listened to my classical music, I think I could have quite happily kept it for the rest of my life ...

I had a modest service / upgrade performed on it by Red Hill Audio and it really was in tip-top condition. I know you can do a whole lot more mods to it, but my concern was that it might lose the Quad 'quality' that I enjoyed about it in the first place.

[Oldpinkman]

Awesome! Who is working on it for you?



Another mate from PT days - Owen, the Pip designer. He knows his onions!

[julesd68]

Will that do for starters?

No, sorry Richard, I think you need to go away, think about it and get back to me with some more detail! ;)

Just to be clear folks, that is IRONY and hence the use of the smiley!! The last time I employed irony on the forum it didn't work at all. :lol:

Richard, your description of 'real not canned' resonates with me perfectly. When I talk to a lot of non hi-fi punters, they are nearly always surprised I never listen to mp3 and prefer vinyl to cd. This is what I tell them - when I listen to vinyl, I feel I am listening to the live experience of the music being played. When I listen to cd, I'm always aware I'm listening to a recording of it. And this is why, like you, I can really lose myself listening to vinyl - the sound is sometimes so real, you could reach out and touch it. For me, there is nothing like listening to an orchestra going at full-tilt in a good concert hall. My vinyl can get me really close to that emotional experience in a way that cd never could.

Once I accepted that cd couldn't give me the unique vinyl experience, I actually started to enjoy it a whole lot more. My Consonance cdp (sent off to Deco Audio for service this morning) is to my ears a fab cdp. I have read several reviews that comment on its 'analogue' approach. Maybe it is the lack of oversampling and digital filter - who knows - it just sounds right to me. The treble isn't rolled-off to make it sound more analogue, it is still detailed, but it has a sweetness and delicacy that means you can quite happily listen to a whole cd and more. Still, I will never listen to cd for hours on end as it doesn't emotionally involve me in quite the same way as vinyl. But, I only buy classical music on vintage vinyl nowadays, so I'm sure that has something to do with it!!

[Oldpinkman]

Julian

We are clearly on the same wave-length. Mind, I find vinyl tends to skip and jump a bit when I am out jogging...:doh: