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I'm not sure exactly what I expected from swapping the digital cable at this point, but what I got was not it.
Before I bought the Belkin Synopsis cable I just swapped out, I had sought out and purchased an Acoustic Revive cable, on the strength of a recommendation from a friend who then owned a small recording studio, which is the first place I heard the original IDAT. This cable is/was supposed to be what all the hot-rod Japanese pros used to make all those recordings the audiophiles (and other recordists...) flip over; so I thought, why not? I put the cable in but never really used it much before I reconfigured my system when I wound up needing to move my CD transport, when I went from wall power to battery, and the AR cable was too short to span it. A Synopsis cable happened to be available, cheap, so I bought it, plugged it in, and never looked back.
As we have discussed, the Synopsis cable is a low-pass filter that is mostly good because it is not bad, and it ameliorates a number of the digital problems that other cables either allow or they highlight them. The Acoustic Revive, on the other hand, is more along the lines of the "direct microphone feed" thing that I seem to be getting a lot of these days.
One of the original mods to my iDAT was to convert it to full Class A operation. And I suspect that one of the mods John did this time involved messing with the operating points. The sound is as I reported above. It is not really "hard", but it is right on the edge of hard, and I was a little concerned that the AR cable might push it over the edge. But I went with my greedy "intuition", and this did not happen, at all.
Like I said, this is the sort of sound one gets sitting in the studio and listening right off the mics. This means it is VERY dependent on everything being in order to get the most from it. Given the dearth of great CDs, I am very pleased that the sound rarely sinks into stridency, as one might reasonably expect it to, even with less-than-good recordings.
The oddest thing here, according to my initial expectations, is that the HF was not made worse or too much of in any way, nor is noise more obvious than it was with the Belkin Synopsis. The AR cable used to pass more noise than the Belkin, so I suspect the lowered HF noise now owes to John Wright's most recent mods.
Did I mention that bass is also better, on a cross-comparison basis?
Paul S
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