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Toslink cables

Spirit84

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There are Toslink cables that are made of plastic that you can buy on Monoprice for $5.00
There are Toslink cables that are made with 400 strands of glass that can cost $200.00+
Will it matter from a sound quality perspective?
 

Sal1950

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BlueJean makes some nice optical cables made of Mitsubishi's ESKA Fiber.
My main complaint is with that cheesy plastic box connector system. Then the better cables use a metal end on the cable that serves no purpose but to add weight that is constantly trying to pull itself out of the plug. Genius's.
A better alternative is the Apple idea of using a hallow mini plug that locked itself in.
 

DonH56

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I think the biggest problem with TOSLINK is not the cable; it's that it has been somewhat neglected and some of the current chipsets seem to do a lousy job of recovering the signal and clock. I have a vague memory of reading a few years ago that integrating the optical receiver in some chips was done poorly but was unable to find the article with a quick search. It was in one of the engineering trade magazines like EDN, EE TIMEs, or Design News and not one of my IEEE Journals.

For TOSLINK, unless you get a really bad cable, the difference between plastic and glass let alone high-end glass for long-lines and WDM is not going to matter. For that matter, unless the cable is physically damaged, the main problem I have seen through the years is bad connectors, not cable, sometimes caused by poor cable trimming so light transfer is poor (very lossy).

IME/IMO - Don
 
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RayDunzl

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Remind me to test this one day.

I suspect the tx/rx electronics will overwhelm the cable difference for a short run.

(Don beat me to it)
 

RayDunzl

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Ever since I put my thumb on a spinning CD (nothing bad immediately happened), and just held an optical cable (and maybe a coaxial, too) near the connector (and nothing bad happened), I haven't worried too much about drives or digital cables here at home.
---

Oh, I remember, I used the RCA from my passive attenuator to play with the coax one day. Turn it waaaaaay down and it quits working, otherwise, meh.
 
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RayDunzl

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Jenving Supra Toslink guaranteed 32 bit 384 kHz capacity, in lengths up to 15 meters:

Bandwidth is not a problem in the cable, it's the electronics that limit.

"Multimode (plastic) cables are considered to be the “domestic” fiber as they are used for local-area network, as an example, they can be used in FTTH. Multimode can reach up to 100Gbps Ethernet."

There are levels of quality in plastic cables, but essentially irrelevant for audio speeds and in-home distances.
 
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svart-hvitt

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Bandwidth is not a problem in the cable, it's the electronics that limit.

"Multimode (plastic) cables are considered to be the “domestic” fiber as they are used for local-area network, as an example, they can be used in FTTH. Multimode can reach up to 100Gbps Ethernet."

There are levels of quality in plastic cables, but essentially irrelevant for audio speeds.

Yes, it’s the conversion tech, right? Which limits at 24/96 or 24/192?
 

Blumlein 88

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https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...l-converters-introduce-jitter.2279/post-62260

https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...l-converters-introduce-jitter.2279/post-62262

Some related info from another thread here at ASR.

The digital SPDIF signal in the second post was via a Musical Fidelity USB to SPDIF converter. It has toslink and coax output. Obviously nothing in those graphs suggest the Toslink had any effect of its own. Mostly the clock in the converter I would say. The optical cable isn't a bottleneck on quality.

index.php



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Fitzcaraldo215

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Never used Toslink. I did for awhile use either AT&T multi mode glass or Theta single mode glass, both now pretty dead. Toslink had a bad reputation in those days, and I agree with @DonH56 about the interface circuits probably being the culprit. It was also found to be microphonic, unlike the more sophisticated glass protocols with their far better connectors, at least back then. It has survived as a cheap interconnect method, but who was or is ever going to invest in the engineering to improve a cheap, low volume interconnect method to make it really good?

I know of no provable advantages it has over spdif/AES or USB, other than the overblown ground isolation myth, usually easily curable in systems with metallic interconnects. Me? I am a very happy USB user, with no dodads or gizmos in the signal path. I just use a properly isolated DAC.
 

sonci

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It would be interesting to measure some coaxial cable. Do you remember the myth of no cable shorter than 1.5m?
 

RayDunzl

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Blumlein 88

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Same cable is used as ADAT connection in studios. It handles 8 channels at 48/24. Even cheap fiber is no impediment to good results.
 

svart-hvitt

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Never used Toslink. I did for awhile use either AT&T multi mode glass or Theta single mode glass, both now pretty dead. Toslink had a bad reputation in those days, and I agree with @DonH56 about the interface circuits probably being the culprit. It was also found to be microphonic, unlike the more sophisticated glass protocols with their far better connectors, at least back then. It has survived as a cheap interconnect method, but who was or is ever going to invest in the engineering to improve a cheap, low volume interconnect method to make it really good?

I know of no provable advantages it has over spdif/AES or USB, other than the overblown ground isolation myth, usually easily curable in systems with metallic interconnects. Me? I am a very happy USB user, with no dodads or gizmos in the signal path. I just use a properly isolated DAC.

The beauty of Toslink is its aesthetic; it’s lightweight, flexible and nice to touch.

If Toslink can run 15 meters without causing jitter from the output of a reclocking device/DAC, this is the most beautiful cable solution in my view.

FWIW, new Samsung TV sets use optical cable to transmit all the data to the TV. Nobody AFAIK complained about the picture due to the optical cable.
 
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restorer-john

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