I spoke with Michael Ritter, the owner Berkeley Audio Design yesterday regarding cable lengths with the Berkeley Audio Design SPDIF to USB converter and the Berkeley Audio Design Alpha 2 DAC.
He said they recommend 1.5m USB and AES 110Ω XLR cables. The reasoning on the AES cable is that there is a signal "reflection" with any impedance mismatch that reflects and perturbs the signal in the cable causing jitter. Sounds good enough for me...
But, I was wondering if one were to just go super-short with a 0.5m cable would this be short enough to prevent much time delay in any replaced signal? I'd much rather use a short cable between 2 stacked chassis, and obviously the cost would be much lower.
On a related topic, would my 0.5m Kimber Silver USB cable test with higher jitter than a 1.5m cable run in the same way as described above?
Has anyone tried testing varied cable lengths and heard an audible difference?
I'd think that it is a trade-off between picking up interference and signal losses at longer lengths, vs. possible impedance-based reflections and induced jitter at <1.5m lengths?
Any thoughts?
