I don’t want to open a can of worms so just wanted to check what is the best cable I can get for £100 please? 3.5-4 m long. To connect Chord Qutest to preamp. Bluejeans? or Qed? or something else?
Supra?
A coax SPDIF is for digital. You said preamp. Your profile says you use a 282. Which would be a regular analogue interconnect from a DAC.
There’s some information missing in the question I think. If you are really talking about bargain basement under 100 pounds digital cable, then I might go optical rather than coax.
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I have a Qutest in my study system being fed from cd transport and a Wiim streamer.
I did a bit of comparison with a few options and ended up with the vdh optocoupler toslink from the transport and an Atlas coaxial from the Wiim.
I use the toslink because light is light and there is no need for hi-res capability from transport but somehow the vdh sounded more solid than others. I’m not sure how, I’ve read others say the plugs are a class apart.
I didn’t want to spend oodles on a coaxial but I like Atlas cables already and this was clearly ‘better’ to my ears than say a Mogami cable, which I guess is equivalent to BJ.
It looks like I have confused myself there by the looks of it. You are right, it is analogue connection to my 282 and digital cable from transport to dac. So is optical better than coax for this?
Coaxial is better for sound quality and will stay as a firm connection into the sockets.
I use a mark Grant HDX1 coax cable to connect a digital transport (Naim streamer) to a Chord DAC. It cost about £30, and sounded identical to a Naim DC1 which was also very stiff and too long and looked absurd, so I sold it.
I’ve also had good results with a Gotham coax cable at a similar price.
Naim tend to optimise their SPDIF digital connections around coax rather than optical. With other equipment you may prefer optical.
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All thing being equal, coax is generally better. But a cheap coax, and a very long one at that, is likely to be worse. You mentioned 3.5m.
Your hands may be tied though. Optical, if adhering to the Toslink audio standard, will be limited to 96Khz maximum sampling rate. If you have content higher than that to stream, coax is the only option. Fine for CD and some hires audio up to that limit. To summarise:
- For a shorter distance and a slightly larger budget, I’d go with coax.
- For a longer distance on a budget, I’d go with optical.
- If using hi res content like 24 bit 192Khz downloads, optical isn’t an option.
Bluejeans 4974R, or maybe its anagram. It comes BNC only because it’s a video cable but sounds very nice as an SPDif.
Oh sorry. The coax will be 1m and not 3.5m as I previously posted mistakenly
By the way, I have a set of 3 75ohm IXOS coax cables. Ixos XHV804 component video interconnect 75 ohm co-axial geonetry PC-OFC conductors. Would one of them do the job?
When I used S/PDIF from Gustard U12 USB isolator converter to Chord Hugo DAC, it used a Van den Hul cable with RCA plugs (claimed to be 75ohm)l It seemed perfectly fine, and was not expensive - I have in mind about £50, but that was about 10 years ago. Maybe 0.5m long.