Hi Steven , the less is more or KISS principle is certainly something I have persued over the last 30 yrs in this hobby and it seems to work well with analogue electronics. I do however wonder if that approach can be directly translated to the digital world?
Any thoughts ?
Oz,
From my extensive experimentation with I2s cables I can vouch that for me the same principal seems th translate to digital.
I contemplated for some time over what nature of standard connector to adopt for I2S out of the killer dacs. As several guys were wanting to use the empirical audio offramp as a source I ended up going with an RJ45 socket as the standardized I2S input on the dacs. I use the same pin config as the empirical.
I tried cat5, cat 6, cat 7 in shielded, unshielded, I tried cat 5/6 as 'naked' twisted pairs with the sheath removed and then ala Mario and Steve I tried cat wire as 4 individual strands just gently splayed apart in space and found this last approach to be the best that I had tried.
I showed Mike Lenehan the difference between the 4 individual wire strands and a cat5 patch cable and he was astounded at how much more open the 4 individual strands sounded.
In the beginning I tried 75 ohm coax on bncs and found it OK but rather cumbersome and prone to easy hookup error......and it sounded no better than cat5, and not as good as my last and adopted approach.
C
The best signal integrity should occur with a proper 75 or 50 ohm termination and any RF connectors.
Then there's the question of is that 75 (or 50) ohm termination a/ driven correctly b/ terminated correctly.
I2S was never meant to be for transmission between devices so it's a pretty safe assumption that the usual chips in transport cant drive a 75 ohm termination.
The reality seems to be the transports transmitter chip cant drive anything more than loose cat5.
So - it's easy to say less is more - but if you think it through, there's more going on.
There is also the question of:
Is 'More Open' a subjective product of noise / jitter / gnd bounce.
This is where you need to start **really** using your ears to hear what is going on. Is 'more open' additive or subtractive, IOW is it adding something to the mix or
is it reducing something, ie making it cleaner. Often cleaning things up sounds worse than adding something (noise jitter).
Food for thought.
Z