last mile ethernet

[GuillaumeB]

I must admit to being totally baffled by the above posts. There are many good technical reasons why an 800 should sound better than a 250. Devialet themselves state that the 400 sounds better than a 250, a case of the dual mono configuration halving distortion. The 800 is another step up. I have also noticed fairly consistant options from a few people that the 800 offers less "grain", a higher resolution sound. (On top of the raw power and headroom, which is good news for speaker control) What the above suggests is that the crystal digital cable is so bad it negates all of this. The self same cable that Devialet give you in the box with a new 250 slave.

Now I am running a D800 with the crystal, am I insane?? Has anyone tried switching the crystal on an 800 with a genuinely audible improvement? I must admit that I don't think I could tell the difference between the Crystal and another digital cable, having said that, I must admit I've never tried a back to back test. I do have other digital SPDIF's I could try, but these are cables that are about a tenth of the retail price versus the Crystal, but I guess I should give even these "cheap" cables a go when I get some time?

Hey Confused I didn't get a Crystal cable with my 500, at the time they were shipping with unbadged Transparent Premium ones. As an experiment I borrowed a Transparent XL S/PDIF from my dealer... just to see. It was just supposed to be an experiment, I can assure you. The results utterly amazed me and made very little sense (how does this sync business work anyway?!). I also discussed this with Absolute Sounds and they agreed with me.

Now based on what I'm reading elsewhere it would appear that others are getting really good results by changing S/PDIF cables. Some are getting similar results with 300 euro cables (which I posted about in another thread).
I haven't heard the Crystal one so can't comment but I've heard of others saying that they aren't that impressed. There are also concerns being expressed about the technology used to link the two units. Could that make it more susceptible to jitter? Who knows. They did recently introduce a jitter "fix" though. Did it sound good before that fix? Well, yes!

As with all these things it depends on how far you want to take things. Some are quite happy with what they have and others feel the need to keep experimenting and pushing the envelope (you know all the bonkers stuff! ). Just because something sounds way better after a tweak doesn't mean the original setup was "broken".

Yes the Dual mono was a big step up from the single unit. But so was the TA XL cable I installed... as were some of the other tweaks. I wouldn't bother unless I got decent results each time.

Guillaume