[I posted this same review for the Audioquest Forest .75m digital coax cable and the Audioquest Forest 1.5m USB cable]
I use a Schiit Eitr/Modi Multibit/Magni 3 stack on my desk in my home office for headphone listening. As setups go, it has plenty of power, but its footprint is small enough that it doesn't get in the way of my work, an important consideration since I do lots of sketching at my desk. Could've gotten something from iFi or Chord that would've been really good and even more compact, but the thing about separates is that you don't necessarily buy it all at once. I accumulated the three parts of the stack over the course of about a year and a half.
Unfortunately, my Stack, while pretty good, didn't sound as good as I felt it should. It seemed a little congested, a little glaring, a little cramped. The soundstage, separation, details... felt they should've been better based on my experience with other Schiit components at audio shows, and then I had it confirmed when I had a chance to listen to the exact same setup but with different cables. You see, the triple Schiit stack is a very cable-centric system. You need a USB cable from the computer to the Eitr, then a digital coaxial cable from the Eitr to the Modi M, and then an RCA cable from the Modi to the Magni. Lots of opportunity for the signal to get picked away at by less-than-stellar connections.
You see, I've heard so many times that cables are cables are cables that, although that doesn't seem intuitively right to me, I just went with it. It seems reasonable to think that better conductors mean a better signal means better sound. The controversy is even greater with digital cables because of the binary nature of them. But even a square wave / pulse can get muddled by a bad conductor or interference, right? I'd think so at least, not that I'm an expert. I dumped most of my science credits and electives into chemistry in college. Probably should've taken more physics.
Setting that aside, I had been using cables from the bottom of the barrel. Why? Dogma. I'd been told that cables are snake oil so many times that I didn't even question that the cables might be the problem. Good ol' blind faith. But the facts were indisputable. The Stack with the decent cables sounded flat-out better than my stack, and I was hearing it with a pair of headphones that I'm very familiar with (HE-400i). I can't speak to the difference between decent cables and really expensive cables, but I can say with confidence that the step up from total garbage cables to decent cables absolutely makes a difference.
So after a little poking around, I settled on the green Audioquests (USB, digital coax, and RCA). It'd be a hair over $100, but I figured that if a $100 set of Audioquest cables can't outdo the crapola cables I had, then it might be time to just sell my stack and get something less cable-dependent. The good news is that the new cables worked like a charm. The analogue RCA cable did make the biggest difference, but I swapped my old and new cables back and forth ad nauseam, and all of them made a difference. The cumulative effect of swapping all three bad cables for the three green Audioquest cables wasn't subtle. Everything became smoother, clearer, and separation and imaging improved considerably.
So, if you're using mega low-end cables, cables that you may have gotten for free bundled up with various electronics purchases over the years, if you're using those free cables with your audio gear and you feel that your audio experience seems little flat, a little cardboard-y, a little congested or compressed, maybe a touch harsh or glaring... well, I suggest that you buy some decent entry-level audiophile cables. Again, I have no idea what the difference between a $100 set and a $1000 set of cables would be, but I do know that the difference between free cables and $100 cables is very audible.
| 产品颜色 | 黑色 |
|---|---|
| 配绳材质 | 室内 - 室外, 家里 |
| 商品类型 | 成人, 青少年, 男式, 女式 |
| 是否需要电池驱动 | 不是 |
| 本商品是否包含电池 | 不是 |
