Here's my thing (and full discloser, networking was my day job for many years).

People think loading a website and playing digital music are the same thing: that bits is bits. But clearly the are not. When you are doing something like loading a website both the input and the output are bits, and it this case bits really are bits. And if some of the bits get delayed or corrupted the computer is perfectly happy to wait until they are correct, because (mostly) a computer doesn't care about time.

But when you are playing digital music bits are really an analog representation of a square wave that is propagated through an imperfect medium. The "digital" part of digital music is there is a specific voltage that marks the transition between 0 and 1, but what that voltage looks like after it has been through your cables and across your connectors and interacted with all the electro-magnetic noise in your vicinity can be very different from the cartoons we've seen of bits when they tell us bits is bits. And when exactly that transition from 0 to 1 occurs determines what the output musical wave form looks like. Or put another way time matters critically to digital audio.

So if you stop thinking about digital music as bits and start thinking about it as an analog signal, just like the rest of your system, things start to make a lot more sense. At least to me, YMMV of course.
 

What CAJames has explained is the conclusion that I have come to after working "digital" for some time.  So much so that, for me, "digital" is no longer stigmatized with the negative stereotype of early digital.  I find as much satisfaction from it as I did with my previous analogue set up which was no slouch even by today's standards.

The shocking part for me was the difference that a charging/data transfer cable made even with an iPhone in the car system!  Totally unexpected.  The reason for the purchase was not to improve SQ just to shorten the cable length.  

This further goes to validate that cables, analogue, digital or ethernet make a difference.

Quote:


Since you asked... if you are talking about connecting a source to a DAC it isn't the cable. Optical cables have staggeringly high bandwidth. What matters is the laser source, and to some extent the receiver in your DAC. Back in the early days of digital most lasers used for digital music were not great and most people agreed that coax S/PDIF was better than optical TOSLINK. Since the 80s though lasers have gotten a lot better. So what I can say with my current transport and DAC is there is very little difference between coax and optical, but AES/EBU is better than either. YMMV as always.

FWIW the same is true with data networks. Today we use the same fiber cables at 1000x higher speed than we did 30 years ago when they were installed. This is because of new/better lasers.

So I recently purchased a Spotify account (mainly for my wife and daughter) and added Sonos setup to my non audiophile system that plays music through my architectural speakers in my living room, dining room, and kitchen.  So now that I have Spotify, and Roon doesn’t intergrate with Spotify, I decided to buy a used 2nd Gen Sonos Connect streamer to tie into my Bifrost DAC.  The 2nd Gen Sonos can handle Hi-Res, but I’ll be limited to CD Quality when I stream Spotify through the Connect.  Qobuz accessibility in Sonos will be Hi-Res.  

With that being said, I will now be able to do a comparison between the SPDIF/TOSLINK and Digital Coax out from the Sonos connect going into my DAC.  While the SPDIF can handle high bandwidth and is free from electrical interference, it’s downside is jitter.  A lot has to depend on how well your DAC can handle the jitter.  On m Bifrost….I’ve never used the Digital Coax in
Input, only the Optical and USB.  So far between tone two, the USB input is hands down a lot better.  

I should be receiving my Sonos Connect late this week.  I have a good optical cable on hand, but my Digital Coax cable is a non audiophile 20 year old cable from old system.  So now I have to shop around for a decent Digital Coax cable.  Joman…which QED coaxial cable do you own?  The regular for like $100 bucks, or the Reference for $150?  I was looking at the Audioquest Cinnamon as an other option, but the QED seems like it’s a better cable on paper.   I’ll report back once I get things up and running.

Dom

Quote:


USB is just a fundamentally superior format for music than TOSLINK-optical or S/PDIFF-coax because the is clock is broken out on a separate line rather than being derived from the timing of the data. Cables still matter, as do the quality of the send and receive circuits but everything else being equal (and everything else is never  equal) USB ought to win.