gsawdy;342938 Wrote: > From what has been said it would apprear that an optical cable can be > (or should be?) as short as possible. Yes/no? > Is there a minimum radius for a bend in the cable? Would that affect > the choice between glass and plastic?
You seem to be looking for a yes/no only answer .... in which case I would answer: no, don't worry about the length. A little longer answer: When you try to connect two pieces of equipment that are not stacked or next to each other, like in different rooms of the house, the spec's of the transmitter and detector inside your equipment must be checked for maximum cable-length. minimum radius: oh yes, sure. You would have to look it up in the spec's of the cable but from memory I say it's around 40x it's diameter. When the cable is 1-2 feet longer than the line-of-sight distance between the two connectors you are good. When the cable is 6' longer than needed you are not going to have a problem because of that. As I wrote in my previous post in this thread... the choice between glass or plastic isn't as important as having the right connectors on both ends. I have experienced problems with same-type-but-different-brand connectors but I never had a problem with radius or cable-length. This was not with audio but high speed data. I always used glass because plastic was not rated for the speeds and lengths we used. The longest length of "dark-fiber" (slang for passive fiber without repeaters) I made was 6 kilometers with 622 Mbps SDH equipment on both ends. The only time I recorded a bit-error during a couple of years of continues-duty use was when I inserted the patch-cords connecting it to the equipment. Also: every fiber-optic patch cable we used was spliced/build on the spot. Sometimes we used pig-tails which are assemblies consisting of a length of fiber with a connector on one end. You cut it to length and splice the 2nd connector on, saving some time. Every cable is tested before put to use. With this test you look at the echo's caused by the splices which must be below a pre-defined level. You -always- see the echo's and I once saw an additional echo caused by a flaw in the cable. This test-equipment tells you the position of where the echo originates from (measures travel-time) and the cable was undamaged at that point so you can have a bad length of cable. cheers, Nick. -- DeVerm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DeVerm's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18104 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=52817 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
