Transport for Bel Canto DAC2

Hi Philnyc. I believe my digital cable is 0.5m long. How would the extra lenght help?

Hi Jamesw20,

The hard drive based system sounds very intriguing, but it is out of my price range at the moment. Are they able to keep the hard drive quiet?

Hi Gmood1. I'm not familiar with those devices. What do they do, and how would they help clean up the signal from the transport?

Eeerie,

There is a pretty good (IMHO) explanation of why digital cable length makes a difference here (assuming you are using coax instead of optical):

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue14/spdif.htm

If the article is too technical to understand, the gist of it is that a 1.5m digital cable is able to hold the entire length of a square wave's "rise-edge" based on spdif specifications, and that shorter cables can cause jitter-related problems because of mismatched impedences and the resulting signal reflection inside the cable.

The other important factor is to make sure the digital cable you use is truly 75ohms.

If a hard drive solution is interesting to you, also check out the Squeezebox by Slim Devices (http://www.slimdevices.com). It's only $250-$300 and works with iTunes...

Go to www.empiriclaudio.com or www.vhaudio.com. Both sites have information on the reasoning behind using a 1.5m digital cable. Steve Nugent at Empirical Audio wrote a white paper on this and I believe it was published in PF. You should be able to locate the article on his site. He is also known here on Audiogon as Audioengr. Like you, I was using a 0.5m digital IC and upon moving to a 1.5m length noticed a difference. Then again it could just as easily been the cable upgrade.