Quote Originally Posted by lovejoy View Post
Time to open a brand new can of worms, look away now if you're of a nervous disposition:

Has anyone else noticed how sensitive the IQ DAC is to interconnect quality? Quite by accident, I managed to swap a set of interconnects with my CD player and suddenly realised the sound from the Pi/IQ had changed quite significantly - It had taken on a hard edge and the HF was sounding somewhat rough. Picking up on what must have caused this change straight away as I'd been unplugging and re-plugging everything, I tried swapping out a couple more interconnects I had lying around and the differences are much more marked between the cables than any piece of kit I've ever tried different cables on before, to the point that if I'd initially had the Pi connected using my CD player interconnects, I don't think I'd ever have been that impressed with it and wondered what all the fuss was about. At the moment, I've settled on a set of Supra interconnects at 0.75m which have very low capacitance values (these were cables I'd chosen for my turntable when I was using an MM cart but have since moved to MC).

So that's got me thinking - Are these large differences down to the fact that there's not that much in the way of a buffering stage in the analogue output of the IQ DAC? In which case, how would it fare with something like a Musical Fidelity X-10D on the end of it, or similar buffering stage - Or can it be Lampizated? Now that sounds like a project!!
Could this explain the poor results in a small number of cases?