I talk to new customers regularly who are using say a £300 USB with a £10,000 DAC. It’s a less than ideal and ill-advised mismatch and just poor system balancing. If I partner our cheapest Vitus DAC the RD-101 in my demo room with a £400 USB cable then honestly you are not even hearing 50% of what it can do, its resolve, its expression, naturalness, soundstaging and refinement. And if you were to listen with me as we went to our £1000 usb cable then incrementally through the range, to our £2000 category and then onto the new flagship offerings, then you would probably be quite staggered as to the performance leaps that you witnessed. Yes, performance upgrades as big and meaningful as box swaps but for costs which are much lower. Many Lotus customers how only own the £3000 DAC modules that reside inside our integrated amplifiers are using USB cables to connect their servers/streamers, which cost as much or even more than the actual DAC module to begin with !

At the very upper end, using the £360,000 Level 4 Wadax Atlantis Reference digital front end, going from the best USB cable in the world to their proprietary glass optical connection is revelatory in the performance uplift that it bring. The same hold true for Tidal’s i2s TidalLink connection. These state of the art methods of transport also show just how influential and limiting the digital connection can be.

The ethernet or LAN cable, whether it is employed as a connection to a server or to the home network, is equally as influential. The last few years has shown that improvements to the home network and reducing its inherent noise pay handsome sonic dividends which normally tear apart the normal price/performance upgrade ratios we are used to. A good high end eternet cable is no exception and it should be the first network enhancement you consider whether you are playing music from streaming services or even just playing files from disk.