My position on using special (read expensive) USB cables for audio has always been somewhere in between agnostic and skeptical. I always thought if the cable looked thick enough and had USB 2.0 or Hi-Speed marking on the sheathing it was good enough, it is all 0s and 1s after all. As someone with EE background who spent enough time looking at waveforms back in the days I perfectly understand what signal degradation is and why it occurs, but because of the relatively short USB cable length I thought it was a non-issue.
Because of it an audiophile USB cable was at the bottom of my wish list but the time came and I got a short 50cm Pangea USB-Ag cable with 24AWG silver conductors. I thought $30 was a reasonable price for a peace of mind even if it turned out to be snake oil and I always wanted a shorter cable anyways. After I received it got the thing connected and didn't even bother testing it against a generic 6ft cable that I had in service for a long time. Then after a day I thought that the sound I was getting with the Pangea cable was a bit darker than I was used to, and after a quick A/B comparison with the old cable it indeed sounded brighter with more digital glare. I'm not talking about night and day difference and I don't know if I could pick one over the other in a blind test but it was clearly there, detectable on the several tracks I tried, the sound with the Pangea was darker but a notch cleaner. Surprised I grabbed a Mediabridge 6ft cable I was using on my desktop system that I never bothered to compare and it sounded different than the other 2 cables still, it had more pronounced mid-range and weaker low-end, again very subtle but noticeable.
I don't know what to make out of this but I'm pretty convinced what I heard wasn't a fart of my imagination. I suppose this makes me a believer now that USB cables can sound different, which is probably bad news my wallet. I'm using a NOS DAC with a modern XMOS-based usb interface, there is no digital filtering or other digital trickery on the DAC that may smooth the effects of the cables, perhaps this has something to do with it. I thought I'd share, feel free to laugh and humiliate me.
Because of it an audiophile USB cable was at the bottom of my wish list but the time came and I got a short 50cm Pangea USB-Ag cable with 24AWG silver conductors. I thought $30 was a reasonable price for a peace of mind even if it turned out to be snake oil and I always wanted a shorter cable anyways. After I received it got the thing connected and didn't even bother testing it against a generic 6ft cable that I had in service for a long time. Then after a day I thought that the sound I was getting with the Pangea cable was a bit darker than I was used to, and after a quick A/B comparison with the old cable it indeed sounded brighter with more digital glare. I'm not talking about night and day difference and I don't know if I could pick one over the other in a blind test but it was clearly there, detectable on the several tracks I tried, the sound with the Pangea was darker but a notch cleaner. Surprised I grabbed a Mediabridge 6ft cable I was using on my desktop system that I never bothered to compare and it sounded different than the other 2 cables still, it had more pronounced mid-range and weaker low-end, again very subtle but noticeable.
I don't know what to make out of this but I'm pretty convinced what I heard wasn't a fart of my imagination. I suppose this makes me a believer now that USB cables can sound different, which is probably bad news my wallet. I'm using a NOS DAC with a modern XMOS-based usb interface, there is no digital filtering or other digital trickery on the DAC that may smooth the effects of the cables, perhaps this has something to do with it. I thought I'd share, feel free to laugh and humiliate me.