Yes the fiber can handle huge bandwidths, but there are two major issues with common "TOSLINK".
One is the fiber itself, its a "multimode" fiber, its physically much larger than a wavelength of the light used. The result is that light entering the fiber at different angles can take different path lengths (hence time delay through the fiber), the result is that edges get stretched out in time. There are some interesting attempts at fixing this, the most common one today uses a bundle of single mode fibers, so whichever fiber the light ray hits, it takes the same amount of time through the bundle. The other is the optical <-> electrical converters. 99.9% of the industry just uses off the shelf TOSLINK transmitters and receivers. For whatever reasons these are not very good parts, particularly the receivers. They are slow and noisy. They have actually gotten worse over time. Toshiba used to make some pretty good ones but they stopped making them several years ago. (I think HDMI has pretty much killed off the optical market and Toshiba couldn't make any money off of higher end modules). It is certainly possible to do MUCH better than the TOSLINK parts, BUT none of those have the same connector. Quite a while back there was an attempt to do this with the ST optical interface, but it never really caught on. Until someone starts making a GOOD optical receiver with the same TOSLINK connector not much is going to change. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=90211 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
