Why do digital cables sound different?

Dekay, I believe they are one in the same, that Illuminati and Illuminations, name change for some reason and I believe less expensive.

Thanks Pops. David.

Fair enough, Frogman. Good post. I am mostly a subjectivist, have a lot of money invested in cables and hear a lot of differences between things that many argue must sound the same. I think being open minded works both ways. In this particular case, the idea of family resemblances flies so strongly in the face of common sense (to me, at any rate), that I feel we must temper our observations with an open mind to the possibility that what we observe may be influenced by what we expect to hear.

I just ordered the Mapleshade Double Helix Digital Cable. It is not a coaxial design. Since I have never used a digital cable before I thought that I would start with the unknown. I also enjoy talking with Pierre at Mapleshade who has freely shared some good basic advice on my setup. When my system settles down again I will try some other options from The Cable Company, but for right now there are too many changes going on (in my system) to perform sound auditions. When the time comes I will post to this or a new thread as there is not a lot on this subject at the site right now.

Megasam: yes, all cables have some effect (i.e., error) on the signal waveforms passed though them. However, the beauty of digital communications is that, with proper system design, these analog errors can be ignored or removed at the receiving end. That is, errors are NOT necessarily additive in a chain of digital components, as they are in analog communications (i.e., in analog, the SNR must get worse with each additional component in the signal chain). Example of how errors may be removed in the digital domain include error control coding and reclocking of buffered data. A favorite question of mine is "how can this be so?". When faced with claims of audible differences between digital cables some possible explanations that come to mind are a) placebo effect, b) a substandard cable has been replaced with one of proper bandwidth and impedance (and once it's "right" it can't get "better" in a digital system, or c) some sort of weird equalization of the digital waveform is going where the distortions of a particular cable are being used to compensate for distortions of poorly designed digital data transmitters and receivers in the transport and DAC. In a digital communications system, these kinds of effects are sometimes called ISI, or intersymbol interferance. To me, case c) is not an acceptable state of affairs and cable and audio equipment manufactures should be better serving us.