This, and a similar near-absence of marketing-driven heirarchy over at Blue Jeans Cable, is one of the best things about these companies. Just solid engineering. Granted, there’s a lot to wade through over at DAC, but the cable you want is the one Peter just linked. By all means, trust your ears. But either of these companies merits a listen. The money you can save goes to the components and the music where it likely does the most good.
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Hi,
Have you got the same mixed feeling when you added the Vivaldi clock ?
Regards,
Chris
That is not possible to say as I bought the clock at the same time as the DAC two or three years earlier. So it would have been impossible to separate changes ( burn-in) happening to the clock ( if any) from those happening to the DAC as they have never been used independently from each other.
Further the astonishing gain in sound quality compared with their predecessors ( Paganini) was sufficient to overwhelm any doubts I could have had. Of course there was an improvement to the performance of the pair after a period of use but establishing his was complicated by the DAC having had a fault and being replaced.
I understand. Thanks for taking of your time answering the question.
Hi Pete and Greg, thank you for the advice on the clock cables. I have to say that if a ₤10 cable sounds better than the stock ones provided by dCS in such an expensive piece of gear then I’m very disappointed in dCS. At this price and the intended level of user experience they should be supplying exactly the right cable for the job.
As I have pointed out before dCS make it perfectly clear in the user manuals for all of their equipment that the cables provided are NOT meant to be universally appropriate. They say ( correctly) that most audiophiles are going to choose their own favourites and therefore what they supply is just a basic “commercial” cable. Effectively they are really telling you to buy your own 
.
The alternative would be to provide no cables at all. They would then suffer complaints from users unable to use their new components until their desired cables became available.
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Hi Pete, yes I did see that in the manual and yes most users will upgrade their cables. But, my comment still stands. It would cost dCS much less than £10 to provide a quality set of clock cables. I find their approach to be rather parsimonious.
I’m actually a big fan of parsimony. And while I agree it’s very tempting to go “yeah!”, realistically, what’s the point of expecting anything other than purely “functional”? So dCS puts a Van Damme cable in, and people will still complain. I already knew I would try other cables; how does putting a “better but still cheap” cable change any of this? I’d rather have dCS pocket the few pennies and keep focusing on the box.
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Fair enough, I respect your opinion 
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Likewise, same here.
So my Vivaldi Upsampler and Master Clock arrived yesterday so it was like Christmas Day in September for daddy 
I set everything up and my initial impression was “wow more texture”. I let them play for a few hours and then sat down to listen last night. My impressions from that first listening session are “added texture, dimensionality, focus, warmth and realism”. And they are not yet broken in at all. The difference is greater than that from my old Brinkmann Nyquist DAC to the Vivaldi DAC or the difference between standard format and MQA. The comparison I was doing was between feeding the signal from my music server direct to the DAC (via USB) or through the Upsampler (via Ethernet cable). The Master Clock was engaged throughout. So, really I was just comparing the DAC to the Upsampler + DAC. Yes, there could have been some contribution from the fact that I was using USB but I’ve not found that much difference between USB and Ethernet inputs when I did the same comparison on my Nyquist DAC. Overall, I would say that the Upsampler brings a significant improvement to the table. I haven’t done any comparisons with and without the Master Clock engaged, that will come. Of note, I used Cardas Clear digital cabling throughout, both for the Upsampler to DAC and for all of the clock cables. I have a special connection for buying my cables so I just went Cardas throughout, as I have in the rest of my system.