[Arny Krueger]

"nebulax" wrote in message

Yeah, the connectors can really suck on cheap cables.
It's bad enough that the norm for hi-fi connections are
RCA jacks, much less poorly made ones.

On balance, most cheap connectors are OK if you don't make a lot of changes.

I've read info
from Mogami and Canare that state that the quality of the
connector can affect the ohm rating of the whole
assembly, with a bad jack design making a cable
unsuitable for transferring digital S-PDIF information.

Very unlikely, because the frequencies involved with SPDIF are still
relatively low.

A mismatch of ohms in a electrical circuit can be quite
audible, and well as visual (in the case of video
signal).

Video signals are at least one order of magnitude higher in frequency than
SPDIF. That makes a difference.

I think that coax would give more predictable results
than something like say, Hosa cable,

For audio purposes, just about any cable is predictably good.

and the shielding would be better, too.

Believe it or not, shielding is not that much of an issue for audio
interconnects. The source impedance is so low that pick up of ES fields is
not much of an issue.

If nothing else, better shielding = less noise+interference = better
sound.

Shielding is not that much of an issue for audio interconnects, so the
equation nets out to a zero.