adamdea;656162 Wrote: > Fibre optic cables are able to transmit data at huge bandwidths without > (as far as I am aware) huge issues, > Yet there appears to be an audiophile consensus that coax sounds better > than toslink. > Can anyone explain why this might be. > Therre is a tremendous amount of interest on this forum for software > and firmware mods which are intended to improve the sound from a dac > connected to a Touch. It is difficult to see what effect these mods can > have other than through the transmission of electrical noise which would > presumably not be passed via toslink. > So why is it that toslink is supposed to sound worse than coax. The > only possible explanations i can find are > 1) the signal sent by toslink leads to data errors in the receiver (ie > the receiver cannot accurately read the bits) or contains a large > amount of interface jitter which the dac is unable to remove. Is this > something inherent in the toslink medium or is it the fault of bad > transmitters? > 2) the operation of the optical/electrical conversion in the dac > adversely affects the dac or analogue stages somehow
The anecdotal speil around this has always been that the not so expensive opto transmitter and recievers used in toslink are not so fast , hence lower bandwith than the electrical interface and , so transition 1 > 0 migth not be as fast as an electrical interface. But that was 20 years ago, but these "facts" seems to stick in audiophile comunity . I have no example at hand, but did not the hifi rags measure jitter at the opto interface and found it worse on toslink in some cases ? And then it became the official truth for all toslink interfaces. On the other hand . This migth not be true anymore with modern toslink components, after all the bandwith for spdif is not really high and demanding. If it's still the case modern DAC's seems to twart this very effectively. So that the electrical isolation gives you more benefits than problems . I would not automatically dissmis the toslink as inferior anymore, i would try . the practical implementation might vary by each use case. It could be that toslink is the best for you and electrical is best for me ? given our different equipment. Or most likely none of could hear any difference at all in practical reality even if there is a measurable difference. -- Mnyb -------------------------------------------------------------------- Main hifi: Touch + CIA PS +MeridianG68J MeridianHD621 MeridianG98DH 2 x MeridianDSP5200 MeridianDSP5200HC 2 xMeridianDSP3100 +Rel Stadium 3 sub. Bedroom/Office: Boom Kitchen: SB3 + powered Fostex PM0.4 Misc use: Radio (with battery) iPad 64gB wifi +3g with iPengHD & SqueezePad ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mnyb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4143 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=90211 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
