Tuning Tip #5
My recent activities writing about computerized audio, which entailed far more than listening to a multitude of rips of the same track – and that in itself is a major league task – revealed one thing that I had sort of guessed but now I know I know. Digital data transmission is a flawed process, whether it involves squirting information down a length of CAT5 or the ‘simple’ act of reading a CD. Things FUBAR regularly and often for the apparently least significant of reasons.
Digital is not the perfect medium the Sony/Philips reckoned it was when they launched Compact Disc in 1983. I believe that they have known all along that it is significantly more fragile than we were led to believe by the marketers who seemed so eager to foist it upon us. Some folks, for instance, seem to think that so-called bit perfect copies of digital music must sound identical. All I can say is if you believe that to be true, you are in desperate need of a more musically revealing hi-fi system.
While Steve Harris and I were messing about comparing DACs we needed a second BNC-BNC cable to connect a second source to a DAC. Thankfully, Steve had one – a quite expensive Chord Company Indigo Digital model – in his briefcase so that was ushered into service in place of a length of BNC-terminated microphone cable that up until now had sounded rather respectable. The differences we heard were immediate and squarely in the OMG, jaw-dropping league: the changes in the music and its presentation were akin to switching from a £200 CD player to a £2,000+ model. Only those differences were not attributable to some major component change but simply to swapping a three-foot length of wire.
So, before you connect a digital component with any old length of cable that comes to hand or, worse, any old optical cable, get down to a dealer and audition some decent digital leads. The difference between the performance of the top-runners and the joggers can be truly amazing.
