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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