I have had no problems making SPDIF cables using the Neutrik right angle RCA connectors. The cables work fine.
I figure it this way... Inside the box, the impedance isn't 75 ohms (on PC board traces) so a couple feet (with homemade cables and connectors) isn't much of a problem.
I did the research too. Basically RCA connectors are not the type of connectors you want to use for 75 ohm connections, but everybody does it... There really isn't a "perfect" solution.
Have you ever tested the impedance of your cables and what were the results?
do you have a search string or some sort of reference I can search on the impedance not being 75 ohms coming from the box( source) ? That is very interesting if no box (pc trace? I know what pc trace is but I don't know more than that)out there can output a true 75 ohm. I assumed they all met the s/pdif spec.
So if you are getting less than 75 ohms from the "source" and the cable is using a "non spec" connector
I don't understand why we would make a huge deal out of our digital cables either if we are not getting a true 75 ohm from the "source" box. I sort of understand the short run not making much of a difference at all but in theory it should make a difference. At least from what I am reading and I pasted a little quip of it below.
"Where analog audio or video signals consist of electrical waves which rise or fall continuously through a range, digital signals are very different--they switch rapidly between two states representing bits, 1 and 0. This switching creates what we call a "square wave," a waveform which, instead of being sloped like a sine wave, has sharp, sudden transitions. Although a digital signal can be said to have a "frequency" at the rate at which it switches, electrically, a square wave of a given frequency is equivalent to a sine wave at that frequency accompanied by an infinite series of harmonics--that is, multiples of the frequency. If all of these harmonics aren't faithfully carried through the cable--and, in fact, it's physically impossible to carry all of them faithfully--then the "shoulders" of the digital square wave begin to round off. The more the wave becomes rounded, the higher the possibility of bit errors becomes. The device at the load end will, of course, reconstitute the digital information from this somewhat rounded wave, but as the rounding becomes worse and worse, eventually there comes a point where the errors are too severe to be corrected, and the signal can no longer be reconstituted. The best defense against the problem is, of course, a cable of the right impedance: for digital video or SPDIF digital audio, this means a 75 ohm cable like Belden 1694A or Canare L-5CFB; for AES/EBU balanced digital audio, this means a 110 ohm cable like Belden (rest cut off)"
I'm curious now to see what kind of impedance the P2 puts out.
So you shoot a digital signal out of a A/D and automatically it is sending out a sloped wave instead of a square one and as the signal travels down the cable it becomes more round as it loses the impedance correct? By the time it reaches the recorder it isn't quite the square wave it started off as and the recorder now has to reconstruct that square? (what we would call jitter correct?)