Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Plastic vs glass fiber TOSLINK?
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extide:
Ok, fair enough, but with a typical 3m toslink cable you shouldn't need to worry about any of that unless the cable is already damaged somehow.
Bassman59:

--- Quote from: drummerdimitri on March 28, 2019, 07:30:39 pm ---So I have a DAC connected to my computer via an optical plastic fiber TOSLINK cable that is 3m long.

After some research, I found that there are also glass optical fiber cables that attenuate the signal 10 times less than the plastic ones (1 dB/m) meaning that I would of lost 50% of the light energy by the time it reaches my DAC which seems like it would degrade the sound quality by a lot.

Would it make sense to switch over to a glass fiber version with the same length? I'm not too sure about the correlation of beam attenuation vs data loss at the other end.

--- End quote ---

Given that my current design uses a gigabit-rate fiber link that the customer uses with a plastic fiber that's about 200 meters long, and it works perfectly, I think that a plastic TOSLINK fiber that's 3 meters long will work without problem.
tooki:
I’ve used regular plastic 3m TOSLINK before, it works fine. (In fact, my understanding is that TOSLINK actually has a minimum length requirement!) I don’t doubt that glass fiber could go longer distances than plastic, but I suspect we’re talking about lengths that are orders of magnitude longer.

Oh yeah, you can also confidently ignore the cables with gold-plated TOSLINK plugs!  :-DD
LapTop006:

--- Quote from: Bassman59 on March 29, 2019, 07:12:28 pm ---Given that my current design uses a gigabit-rate fiber link that the customer uses with a plastic fiber that's about 200 meters long, and it works perfectly, I think that a plastic TOSLINK fiber that's 3 meters long will work without problem.

--- End quote ---

I'm impressed by that, wouldn't have expected it to work. Standard gig-E on multimode (glass) fiber doesn't have a distance rating much more than that.
Daixiwen:
I have a 10 meter plastic toslink cable with absolutely no problem. And the good thing with plastic fiber is that when I wanted to shorten the cable a bit I could just use regular tools to cut the cable and put on a new plug. No need to be extremely careful about not braking the glass. The most "exotic" tool that I used was a razor blade to do a clean perpendicular cut on the fiber.
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