Quote Originally Posted by harley .guy07
Wow the WASAPI add on really helped the output to my dac. I did not know it existed but also the fubar program I had loaded up was an older version so i upgraded it so I could use the add on. Now I am waiting on my higher end usb cable that is longer and much better made than the Belkin I have been using temporarily and I hope it will hop up the low end of the sound while smoothing out the highs since while it does sound good it just does not have the balance of my Oppo running through my dac with coax digital cable playing disks. I can hope that a better usb cable will help and then I can possibly in the future look to getting a small desktop pc to run as a media player in my system with a sound card with digital outputs plus it will be a more integrated part of my system than I can make my laptop since I use my laptop all the time for College and other projects. But if this upper level usb cable helps it will satisfy my need to make things easier when wanting to listen to a mixture of music without messing with changing disks all the time.
Let us know how you like the upgraded USB cable.

Pardon the pun, but there isn't much analogy between digital and analog cables. Technically, the improvement you'd hope from a better digital cable, USB or coax, is reduced jitter, and it isn't clear to me what range of frequencies reducing jitter will help the most. So your report will be interesting.

According to specifications, USB cables must be under 15' (or 5 m). According to all reports, the shorter the USB cable, the better. Shorter the better is general rule with all cables, except with coax (S/PDIF) cables which I'm told ought to be very short, e.g. <1 foot, or quite long, i.e. >30 feet. Too much transmission line engineering for me, but apparently source-target impedance mismatches can cause signal reflections which in turn cause jitter depending on the distance covered.