| Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff |
| Plastic vs glass fiber TOSLINK? |
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| drummerdimitri:
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. |
| awallin:
one way of attenuating an optical signal in a fiber is to wrap the fiber around a pen or similar to get a tight bend-radius (which looses some of the light out of the fiber) (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_attenuator) so the steps for an experiment would be: - wrap fibre around a pen until you loose signal at the amp/speaker end - back off just a bit so there is signal again - listen if you can hear any difference |
| extide:
As long as it's getting enough signal to decode the data the sound quality should be identical (literally bit-perfect). The only real thing you need to worry about in scenarios like this is jitter, which should not be affected by the cable at all. |
| Benta:
--- Quote from: extide on March 28, 2019, 07:39:41 pm ---As long as it's getting enough signal to decode the data the sound quality should be identical (literally bit-perfect). The only real thing you need to worry about in scenarios like this is jitter, which should not be affected by the cable at all. --- End quote --- This. The TOSLINK interface is digital, so either you have connection or you don't. |
| drummerdimitri:
--- Quote from: Benta on March 28, 2019, 07:51:55 pm --- --- Quote from: extide on March 28, 2019, 07:39:41 pm ---As long as it's getting enough signal to decode the data the sound quality should be identical (literally bit-perfect). The only real thing you need to worry about in scenarios like this is jitter, which should not be affected by the cable at all. --- End quote --- This. The TOSLINK interface is digital, so either you have connection or you don't. --- End quote --- I was looking to get this cable: https://www.qed.co.uk/cables/hdmi-digital/qed-reference-optical-quartz-digital-audio-cable.html#tab1 They don't seem to be selling BS and their claims of glass fibers reducing jitter is actually believable. Not sure if such a difference would translate to any audible benefits though. |
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