Out of curiosity, why not invest the 7300$ in a Rossini DAC? The difference will be much more evident ….
A.
I had bought the Transparent Reference cable when I invested in the clock but had initially demoed both cable types & clock at home. When I heard the difference between the two, it could not be unheard. Large difference. I went with the lesser cable at the time as it was all I could afford to get me up and running. I was offered a very good deal to upgrade later that I couldn’t refuse. At any rate, I am all set up for when I can afford the Rossini DAC as I will have clock and cable ready to go. Just steppingstones to nirvana 
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I bought a Bartok and clock instead of a Rossini, which I demo’d and really enjoyed, for two reasons. First, I wanted a quality headphone amp and not have an extra box. Second, I purchased both items on the used market and paid less than I would have for just the Bartok. I absolutely enjoy the combination.
Rem1975, what was the other clock cable you tried before purchasing the TA Reference XL?
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Pete / Greg - I’ve read your suggestion to start with a foundation Clock BNC cable from Van Damme, BJC or Geistnote. As a result of owning a Paganini 4 box stack several years ago I own a pair of Wireworld Gold Starlight 7 BNC cables and a pair of Cardas Lightning BNC cables. I also have the opportunity to purchase Audioquest Diamond cables at a fair price. Any experience with either of the 3 mentioned?
Happy Easter everyone!
Hi Brian. I don’t have experience with any of those makes of clock cables (but I’ve had other stuff made by all three and have generally been satisfied). I’ve been satisfied with all three of the Geistnote, Van Damme, and BJC. The BJC have been in my system since their arrival over almost two years ago. And through them, I have been able to hear quite clearly the improvements in clocking I have made. Although I remain skeptical of “high end” clock cables, I do have a full loom of Black Cat mini Tron clock cables on order to try out.
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Will look forward to hearing your experience with the Black Cat cables!
Me too. They’ve been made and are en route to my dealer. Unfortunately, my Vivaldi is also about to go to my dCS dealer for its Apex upgrade, and then I am traveling for 14 of the next 18 weeks. Not sure when I will hear hifi again before mid-July, let alone have a chance to do any significant comparisons with the cables. What I like to call “zero-th world problems.”
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Well, my Black Cat mini Tron cables arrived today. I had decided to forbear sending my DAC to my dealer until a little later this month, so I could have a few days listening to clock cables burn in 
prior to some travel. Before disconnecting everything, I spent hours achieving a zen memory state through which I could preserve a perfect aural imprint of the sound of my system. . . . not. I long ago gave up any hope of scientific comparison of things like cables. Just too damn difficult. Instead, I prefer the PAR (Pete Rogers) method: listen and live with the new stuff for a few weeks, and then go back to the prior status quo. Here is what I know so far: the BC cables work. My system sounds great. Maybe even a bit better, but I am under no illusion about the source of that perception. $8+k better? 
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@PaleRider @PAR Greg/ Pete, thanks for all your posts on Clock cables. Greg, we’re interested to learn more about your impressions of the BC cables.
I agree with Pete’s suggestion to listen for a week or so before changing anything and then change only 1 item at a time and listen to a similar selection of songs for a week or more. In my early experience with Clock cables, this is sound advice as it’s unlikely you can attribute any SQ differences by trying to listen for specifics and instead the listener should try to get a sense of which change to the Clock setup (power cable or clock cable) provides the most musical enjoyment and realism as if you were in the studio during the recording. Your suggestion of the Bill Evans album was spot on for this.
Many on this thread have stated to pay more attention to the power cable used for the Clock. My dealer sent me a Shunyata Alpha NR v2 and an Omega cable that I’ll also be comparing. The Alpha cable provided a step up compared to the mid-grade power cable I used with the Rossini Clock. It’ll be interesting to see if the Omega power cable improves the realism of the music even more.
I’m also waiting for a Farad LPS to arrive to replace my EtherREGEN SMPS. Many have mentioned this is a suggested upgrade.
I took yours and Pete’s advice and my Van Damme (VD) Clock cables from DesignaCable just arrived and I’m letting them break in by playing a burn-in track 7 x 24. Any idea how many days I should let the VD cables break in?
Thanks,
Brian …
I don’t have any specific suggestion as to time of break-in. My habit is to play my system for about seven days straight with new cables before doing any serious listening. But I often break thet rule.
While I agree that there are many different factors that affect SQ, I confess to some skepticism about the role that the power cords for an external clock could play. Why should this have an affect on SQ? Perhaps someone with more engineering chops than me could offer an hypothesis. As a digital cable skeptic, I can actually see the case for cable quality much more easily than I can for power cord into the reference clock.
Agreed. As a (bad) engineer, power cables for an external reference clock should not impact system SQ. Clock cables, potentially.
From reading prior posts, I believe @miguelito is well qualified to answer this question/provide his view.
(Everyone knows physicists are a lot brighter than engineers…) ; )
Last week I noticed that the blue led of my LP12 Radikal power alim wasn’t working…I knew the cause…someone cleaned up under my stereo furniture and pushed some cables to the wall, causing the power cable of the Linn Radikal to disconnect…
Well, I reconnected it…The power cable of the LP12, not the power cable of any dCS box…and I heard some bad noise out of my loudspeakers (I didn’t switched off the Radikal before reconnected it), and it had obvious electrical interferences with the rest of my system, while the pre amplifier was selected to play the dCS stack, not the LP12, and even though the electrical interference was heard through the speakers…
Then I do think that any power cable can interact with the stereo system, may be not always to improve the sound, but bad connection of any component can impact negatively the sound…
Maybe @ermos will provide his opinion on power cables for dCS Clocks. In a different thread I believe he said that the power cable is more important than the Clcok cables.
What I meant to say is that the clock profits more from a good power cable than the DAC.
Initially I had two different power cables, a medium and a high end one. Intuitively, I started with the best connected to the Rossini DAC, and the other to the Rossini Clock. After some weeks, just for fun, I switched the power cables, and to my surprise this sounded easily better in my system.
I did not compare the importance of power cables and clock cables.
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I note that the LP12 is an analog device, correct? Perhaps not quite apples-to-apples. Still, this makes some sense to me along the lines of the aphorism of a chain’s weakest link. When someone tells me that a digital cable swap has improved their SQ, my first (but not the only) reaction is to wonder what problem may have been created by its predecessor. Similarly with power cables on digital devices. I absolutely agree that a bad or just shoddy cable could inject problems downstream, and in that sense, the device to which it is connected could “perform better” when a proper power cable is inserted. But other than a sort of “pass-fail” standard, and given what we know about the dCS clicking architecture, what effect could mains power cabling have on the internal power supply of a master or reference clock that could cause it to have an SQ impact?
P.S. Would love to hear dCS thoughts on this.
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I really do not have the answer. It was/ is counter-intuitive to me. But you can easily repeat this test at home, to see if it brings you something.
Thanks for that clarification. Why would that be? Is it perhaps that the power cord had an effect on the DAC, which after all does have an analog section and quite literally makes the sound? Is it possible that the comparative descriptor “better” doesn’t necessarily hold when applied to the Rossini DAC’s sensitivity to power cords? We’ve been tossing around terms like “better” or “best” as though they are objective. They aren’t, as many a listening test with power cables and equipments have demonstrated. We know that power cables can make a difference, though we often don’t know why a particular cable does.
Sure, anyone can swap a cable, but it’s not a repeatable or verifiable test without some controls against the inevitable expectation and confirmation biases. I do wonder what you would hear if you kept the cable at one device constant while only changing the cable at at the other device. By swapping cables, you’ve changed both devices and made it impossible to know which or whether both produced the SQ change.
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What I did do after the first swap is to connect both the Clock and DAC with the same better power cable. It did not bring a SQ improvement.
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Power cables tend to act as filters based on their geometry (ie how the cable is made, whether it is wound, etc). You can readily see this if you use one of those noise meters such as the Entec, etc.
What this means is that all cables plugged into a power strip would actually have some impact on the other cables as well. Power delivery and signal delivery are electromagnetic processes, not “electrons going down a pipe”.
So my answer is: all cables matter to some degree. I would expect a clock signal cable to be more determinant of the result than power cables to the clock, but everything matters.
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