Will a RCA Y-adapter work with a digital coaxial plug?

amenu

Junior Member
Nov 23, 2015
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Will a RCA Y-adapter work with a digital coaxial plug? I have just bought a Sony blu ray player that has one digital coaxial female plug. I need to connect that to two amplifiers. Can I just use a normal RCA Y-adapter with one male and two female plugs to split the signal and connect to the amps with two digital coaxial cables, or do I need a special coaxial adapter? If I need a special adapter, please suggest a brand that I can order from Amazon.ca (I live in Canada).

One of my amps is a tube amp that only takes RCA L&R input. The blu ray player does not have RCA L&R output plugs but does have a digital coaxial output plug. I have a digital audio to RCA converter into which I will plug one of the digital coaxial cables from the blu ray player and connect to the amp that way.

Thanks for any advice!
 

JeffMD

Platinum Member
Feb 15, 2002
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#1 you can attempt to use a normal rca cable. Normal rca cables lack the shielding and the tolerance levels to carry higher frequencies needed for the digital signal. And because there is no error correction your audio can sound bad.

#2 you cannot split the SPDIF connection, there is a handshake that occurs which requires a 2 way connection between both pieces of equipment. The protocol is not designed to handle a third party.
 

amenu

Junior Member
Nov 23, 2015
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Hi JeffMD,

I have seen that there are devices available that take a HDMI input and split it into 2 or more RCA L&R outputs. Would that work for me (my blu ray player has a HDMI output plug) without degradation of sound?
 

JeffMD

Platinum Member
Feb 15, 2002
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You cannot, in any way, split an hdmi cable, nore is it wire compatible with anything that would use rca plugs. You can get a powered converter that would break hdmi down to video and audio rca plugs.
 

Mike64

Platinum Member
Apr 22, 2011
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I have just bought a Sony blu ray player that has one digital coaxial female plug. I need to connect that to two amplifiers. [...] One of my amps is a tube amp that only takes RCA L&R input. The blu ray player does not have RCA L&R output plugs but does have a digital coaxial output plug. I have a digital audio to RCA converter into which I will plug one of the digital coaxial cables from the blu ray player and connect to the amp that way.
I'm very confused. Does either of your amps have a digital audio input you'd like to be able to connect directly to the output of the BD player, or are you simply wanting to connect the player to both amps using their analog stereo inputs? If the non-tube amp does have a digital audio input, are you using that amp to drive multi-channel speakers, or just stereo or 2.1 ones? And does that amp also have analog inputs? (I assume it would, but who knows?)
 
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JeffMD

Platinum Member
Feb 15, 2002
2,026
19
81
One of my amps is a tube amp that only takes RCA L&R input. The blu ray player does not have RCA L&R output plugs but does have a digital coaxial output plug. I have a digital audio to RCA converter into which I will plug one of the digital coaxial cables from the blu ray player and connect to the amp that way.

Thanks for any advice!

I missed the last part, your rca converter converts the digital audio to analog. You can proceed to split the analog audio to whatever audio amps you want (although output power will suffer. You may need to increase the volume even more and suffer background noise). You may still need a proper digital coaxial rca cable for the digital connection to work, but nothing hurts by trying a normal rca cable.