gobikey Wrote: 
> is there someone that knows digital audio transmission protocols that
> can comment?  does S/PDIF use error correction?  if not, i would
> completely understand the need for a high quality cable.  
> 
> i would also like to hear about anyone's experience with digital cable
> upgrades.
As someone else has already pointed out, SPDIF does not use error
correction. As a one-way protocol (ie. the receiver has no way of
talking to the sender), you can't do resends a la TCP/IP. In that sense
it's more like UDP than TCP.

You might argue that the designers of the protocol should have included
redundancy to assist in error correction. But as it happens SPDIF is an
amazingly robust protocol. I've sent it over 50 feet of random thin
COAX I had lying around (certainly not 75 ohm), terminated in cheap
phono plugs (also certainly not 75 ohm) and got bit-perfect data
transfers. Of course I'm sure that the jitter would have suffered were
it feeding a DAC, but it wasn't so that's moot.

The only reason you might want to use good quality SPDIF connectors is
to protect the signal from noise induced jitter, and that's only
necessary if the receiving DAC doesn't reclock well. If you've got
something like a Benchmark DAC1, you could probably use wet string.


-- 
cliveb
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