Plastic vs glass fiber TOSLINK?

[drummerdimitri]

Yep. Heck, TOSLINK syncs even once the cable is halfway into the connector, it doesn’t even have to be seated properly. It’s very forgiving.

I’m actually kinda surprised we don’t use more low-cost optical fiber links using the same technology. Surely plastic optical fiber is cheaper than copper? And in some applications, it’d help eliminate ground loops that mess up audio recording. (I could imagine USB being done optically, for example.)

The only real downside is that it doesn’t carry power, but one could bond it to copper cable for that, perhaps even integrated into a single connector. That and minimum bend radiuses, though again it tends to be rather forgiving, and one could probably make it much thinner, to make the bend radius smaller.

That's exactly why I am using fiber instead of USB to isolate ground loop issues.

[Janne]

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! 

You mean I was scammed when i bought this one?