Fiber optic vs coaxial?

[saftey]

I have a surrond sound system at home and i was thinking is it worth switching over to optical from coaxial?whats th ebig differnce?

 

[flood]

no difference at all. its a digital signal.
fancy cables dont help either.

 

[rbhawcroft]

The only big issues are cost and distance. TOSLINK can only go about 8-10m without a booster, whereas coax should go to teens. In terms of jitter if there is any it will be from the Coax, but the braid shield should remove 99% of it, the main source of jitter is in the DAC chip's power suppy, so if you are interested get a better power supply but you will need a $600 plus system to really notice a diff.
TOSLINK is marginally more expensive, I do some from my website, www.avnetworks.btinternet.co.uk, in the US a good supplier is sys-concept.com. I prefer TOSLINK.

 

[rimshaker]

Optical and coax both have MORE than enough bandwidth to pass audio signals, even the most advanced HT sound you can get. It's just a hi-tech fad... any optical connections in home theatre these days is popular (and expensive), but 99.99999% unnecessary.

 

[spidey07]

There CAN be a difference between the two (this has been hottly debated for about a year). As said, both mediums are far overkill for todays very low bandwidth sound applications.

Try both and pick the one you like. Of those that prefer one over the other, coax always wins. No optical conversion/transceiver involved.

 

[rbhawcroft]

Optical cables should have less jitter and better sound charecteristics, but there is little difference. In terms of the above comment Coax doesnt require a TX and RX unit, the Toshiba TOTX173 and RX are the most common, they operate at 5V TTL, where as most receiver/ DSP chips are either 5V compatible. The Coax standard is 0.5V so a pulse transformer is used to change the voltage up. Bothe the TOTX173 and the transformer are less than $3. The 4 big things in sound quality are the source - some MP3 encoders destroy the sound whereas other preserve most of it, the speakers, the speaker cable - upgrade this first, and the power dac/ analog power amplifer.

 

[rbhawcroft]

Spidey how did you know that Coax wins over Optical in listening tests? I thought Coax was more popular in US and EU and Optical more popular in Japan. When I tested mine listening the Optical difinitely had less jitter and a cleaner sound but the difference isnt as big as the analog to digital difference.

 

[Rainsford]

I wouldn't bother switching if you already have coax. The main difference is that optical cables obviously won't have problems with electical interference, but even the cheapest coax should be shielded well enough to prevent interference as well. That being said, if you run your cable a long distance, optical cables will have less problems with the signal deteriorating. But I don't think it makes a big difference for sound applications, the differences are fairly small.

 

[spidey07]

rbhawcroft.

I'm a EE (1993) as well, and have a hard time even considering coax can have an edge over fiber. *cough* real fiber optics I mean.

But have you looked at the TOSlink connectors and the plastic inside???!!! I really had a hard time believe any difference as my occupation calls upon me to deliver digital data.

Doesn't make much sense to me, only what I have exhaustively read over the last year. I can't really provide links. I am an obnoxious audiophile (read - pain in the arse when it comes to stereo) and have a very hard time telling the difference.

But then again, my high end gear is all coax (krell/thiel). My mid-fi gear (denon/adcom) is optical. Hard to have a true comparison. plastic-optics via toslink cannot be compared to 50 or 62.5 m fiber.

So my suggestion remains the same - try it and decide for yourself.

 

[rbhawcroft]

hi
Im not and EE but in tech business. MM fibre is virtually no jitter. I had a look at Toshibas TOTX173's datasheet and it didnt mention the jitter level, so maybe they are a bit high. Do you think that wire transmission is much worse than telco fibre, say optical Gigabit Ethernet rather than cable Ethernet?

 

[rbhawcroft]

hi
Im not an EE but in tech business. MM fibre is virtually no jitter. I had a look at Toshibas TOTX173's datasheet and it didnt mention the jitter level, so maybe they are a bit high. Do you think that wire transmission is much worse than telco fibre, say optical Gigabit Ethernet rather than cable Ethernet?

 

[rbhawcroft]

Did you ever check out the prices of high end audio cables. I can really see that if you have an analog signal trough cd-preamp-poweramp-speakers then the cables will have a huge auiophile affect on the sound you get. With the digital cables I retail who sends me info sells one $60 TOSLINK cable with medial POF fibre, and about 30 Coax cables going from $60- many hundreds. I could never understand how a digital 1m cable could make that much diff, since there must be a basic auidible jitter threashold, and I couldnt see why there should be such a big diff. Also if you want to make a very good digital audio cable then go to enjoythemusic.com and find the max rocklin memorial cable. ; ), or buy one of mine ; )

 

[spidey07]

I use AR optical cables.

Make my own 75 ohm cables for video/audio. much cheaper. Sounds great.

It can get crazy sometimes...let the ears decide.