Let’s start with the back-story, back in 1998; I bought a DAC (and its pronounced DAC, not spelt out, one for all your audiophiles out there), but it is initialised really, as it stands for Digital to Analogue Converter, same as you get in your normal CD player (it’s the thing that converts the 0s and 1s into analogue sound that you hear from your speakers) just a lot higher quality, because it’s a separate unit, it eliminates crosstalk and creates a more pure sound. OK, I’ll shut up now, I do tend to ramble on technical stuff. At the time I never had a digital cable to connect it to my CD player, guess I shouldn’t have assumed it would have come with one. The unit has been collecting dust for more than five years, until today when I wondered if I could use a normal coaxial (composite) cable to connect the CD to the DAC, connected the two units together, and at first it didn’t work, so I thought it must need a specific cable after all, but then I remembered the phase switch at the back of the DAC, switched phase and suddenly the speakers sprang into life, hooray I thought. The sound is so much better now, much better soundstaging and everything just sounds clearer, hearing little instrumental bits in songs that I had never heard before, brilliant stuff!
If you really want to know how digital coaxial audio works, take a look at this article.