Optical or Coaxial?

Ricardo

I've seen in some threads this question...but don't seem to find any concluding opinion.

For DVD-Receiver, has anyone chosen coaxial over optical? Why?

Thanks.

Willow

I have coax is cheaper with the same results. If thats not a good enough reason, then I don't know what is

Frank Z

For some (myself included) the difference was very noticable. Coax sounds much better in my system. Try both and see which you prefer.

Willow

that to, would be a decision maker. I hate the fact that a lot of receivers now offer more toslink than coax inputs

BrentMcGhee

ok... there is a big difference between optical and coaxial

while yes they both send all the 1's and 0's to your receiver but the way they do it is completley different.

optical:
optical cable is pretty much a hollow tube with a mirror wrapped all the way around the inside of it. It uses light pulses to send the 1's and 0's. Now the bad thing about this is that any type of kink or crack in the mirrors is going to refract the light in a funny way so when it gets to the receiuver it may not ba a clear cut 1 or 0 so it is up to the receiver to decifer it inducing possible bit errors into the signal. Optical cables are very picky about caring for them. You could easily have several cracks within your cable and not even know it. As a rule of thumb an optical cable should be bent at more than a 45degree angle, any more puts you at high risk for damaging the cable. Also any pressure on the cable could crack the internal mirrors as well.

Coaxial:
now coaxial uses pulses of current to represent the 1's and 0's. The good thing is that a coaxial cable is very strong and can be placed in a rough enviroment but because it uses current is is very prone to electrical interferance that is the reason why a coaxial cord is so much thicker becasue it needs all that extra shielding on it.

In my opinion i prefer coaxial becasue it is alot easier to maintain. i do not have to worry about a slight bend here or pressure here and there. But it is very easy to get a hum in your coaxial cable. So in a noisy enviroment optical is your best choice, for everything else coaxial.

Ricardo

Thanks for all the input; right now I have optical, but wanted to hear other opinions; from what I see looks like there is no real upgrade with optical....so I guess I'll try coaxial and see...

unc2701

Originally posted by BrentMcGhee
But it is very easy to get a hum in your coaxial cable. So in a noisy enviroment optical is your best choice, for everything else coaxial.

Hum isn't quite right- you won't get a hum w/ coaxial cable, but you will get noise in the signal from other components. However, coax is almost always better unless you're hooking up something in a _VERY_ noisy enviroment (ie output from a computer). The other nice thing about optical is that you can go very long distances with it.

BrentMcGhee

Originally posted by unc2701
Hum isn't quite right- you won't get a hum w/ coaxial cable,

yeah my bad.... i gues you are right about that... i am so used to interfearance translating into a humm, but with a digital cable interferance is a little harder to pinpoint.

steveinaz

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/toslink/toslink.html

FWIW....

aaharvel

Willow- "I have coax is cheaper with the same results. If thats not a good enough reason, then I don't know what is"

+1

Ricardo

I made a quick test using the coax cable that was connecting my cable box, and I swear I can hear LOTS more on the surrounds now.....

I made a blind test with my son, and on the same scenes of Schrek 2, he also was amazed by the difference when using the coax.

Scratched mirror or whatever it was, thsi just shows (for me) that newer/more expensive does not necessarily mean better....

I WAS MISSING SOOOO MUCH...

The good thing is that I can now watch all my movies again and it will be like a new experience.....

SuperDave

Go with the coax, more rugged and a more positive connection, the optical I used came out of the socket easily and the connectors came loose.

TheReaper

Originally posted by BrentMcGhee
yeah my bad.... i gues you are right about that... i am so used to interfearance translating into a humm, but with a digital cable interferance is a little harder to pinpoint.

Actually, you were correct that humm can travel across the coaxial. Humm can be caused by a signal traveling across a wire to a ground in another device, not necessarilly affecting the signal actually being carried on the wire.

Back to the topic, sort of. NEVER touch the ends of an optical cable with your fingers. The oils from your finger (aka your fingerprint) can interfere with the optical signal transmission. And for this reason, never buy an optical cable that has been opened (out of it's package).

Oh, forgot to mention. I have my cable box hooked up with coaxial and my dvd hooked up with optical. Why, because I have one of each type of cable.

Toxis

I feel coax is a warmer sound for music but for movies, there's no difference really IMO. I went coax seeing I use my DVD player to play my CD/HDCD's.

JDSMOKE

I use coax but have tried both. Can't say I noticed a difference. Anyway, here is some good reading

http://www.cobaltcable.com/newsletters/august_2002.htm

jsdeprey

Frank Z said
"For some (myself included) the difference was very noticeable. Coax sounds much better in my system. Try both and see which
you prefer."

Guys come on, The difference between Coax and Optical should not really exist if you are getting a good signal from either one.
Understand it is a digital signal and as long as the 1's and 0's get sent and received ok there is no possible loss of quality at all.
If you are hearing something better with your Coax cable than from your Optical connection you have something wrong with either your cable or your pre-amp/receiver or transmitting device.
Optical is going to give you the benefit of not having to worry about any interference at all since it is transferred by light going through glass so it does not pick up radio interference or ground loops or anything like that, because there is no electricity sending the signal like with Coax and no metal to pickup R/F noise, but you absolutely DO give up the ruggedness of coax cable.

I work doing Internet routing for a living and run quite a bit of fiber optic cable between Sonet interfaces and GIG-E interfaces,
there is also gigabit copper cable out there and we will tend to use that for things that either don't matter as much or as going to run in areas that might hurt fiber. We have fiber that runs over 60 miles also and that is much harder to do with copper. When you talk about running Gigabit connections to people desks for instance you wouldn't even think about using fiber since someone is going to kink it and mess it up, it is light going through a tube and you can imagine you are not supposed to bend is much and if the ends get dirty its all over.
That being said, I have seen it run in some environments that it shouldn't and work fine and people tend to not be as careful as they should allot of times.

In my opinion fiber is probably better just for the fact you dont have to worry about any line noise, but if it a short run and you have a good piece of digital quality coax, you shouldn't hear a difference anymay. Some gear might have the ability to make up for / or guess some drop outs that might be caused by a bad digital connection so you might not hear much of a drop out of noise, but with digital you should either get a signal or you don't, and noise might be line noise on a cable but if you got got the series of 0's and 1's correctly then there was no real loss in the signal, the signal was transferred from one component to the other with the same 0's and 1's that was on the previous unit, if that digital signal is then being converted to analog, like going to your amps and out to your speakers than you might hear the hum or some kind of R/F interference from the line on Coax but should never have that problem with Optical cable.

Digital has that awesome benefit of being lossless, and you can even do things like check sums to make sure everything ended up exactly like it was on the other side of a cable. This is done in the Data world on almost everything at almost every level.
In the analog world you might be able to argue the difference between cables, but in the digital world if the 1's and o's are the same on both sides then, there is no room for argument They are the same thing! If that wasn't true you wouldn't be using you computer right now and doing much of the things you are doing, some applications are much less forgiving than even audio and if you miss even one 1 or 0 then the file or stream is corrupt and you might as well start over that's why you have protocols that can ask for just the missing piece of information and things like that.

Also consider this, I dont really know much about tos/link, it is a different style connector and not sure of the light frequency it uses to send the signal at all, in the Data world you have lots of different connector types, (SC, ST for example) and usually a pair of single fibers since its a one way connection on a single strand, but the frequencies of light can very, this is important cause what you have to understand is that the bandwidth in a single hair sized piece of fiber is almost limitless because you can send multiple signals over the same piece of fiber using difference frequencies (called Lamdas, might be spelled diff).
So you will probably have other reasons you will run in to more optical cable in the future.

Anyway I am sure this is more info that what was needed, but thought I would share.

dorokusai

Fiber is all about capacity, and the benefits over copper is over distance not home audio lengths.

I prefer copper over optical in an audio format, but then again, my 2CH rig is only inches from my actual "DMARC". Why go optical, when you simply don't have to? Coaxial is King.

jsdeprey

dorokusai, I agree really, like I said there is really no reason to argue if one is better than the other, since as long as the signal of 1's and 0's are getting from A to B unaltered then it wont make any difference, and a good piece of coax running 2 - 5 feet should not pick up much interference, and what R/F it might pick up might be shielded off anyway. It should be easy to send a digital signal since there are only 2 states to record, a high and a low, or + or -, or a 1 or a 0, how ever you look at it, its either on or off at any given time, and as long as nothing interferes bad enough with that simple signal you are ok, a loss of data should sound like a drop out or weird digital sound if it is bad, if not then its a perfect copy, and people shouldn't hear a difference unless something is just plain wrong with some of the gear, either way it shouldn't be the cables fault.

phuz

I'm with jsdeprey. It's all 1's and 0's.

If some bits or bytes don't make it to the other end, then you'll hear a skip, chirp, or very apperant jitter. Otherwise, the two should sound identical with the exception of the possible hum from coax.

Willow

well I beleive that most toslink cables are not made of actual glass but of high polished plastic.

HBombToo

Originally posted by Willow
well I beleive that most toslink cables are not made of actual glass but of high polished plastic.

correct but you can buy high end gear with the AT&T glass.

I have read the argument hear time and time again that if you don't need to convert the audio chain from electrical to light and and back again then you are really you are better off. I can't agree with this more.

HBomb

jsdeprey

HBombToo said...
"I have read the argument hear time and time again that if you don't need to convert the audio chain from electrical to light and and back again then you are really you are better off. I can't agree with this more. "

Well there might be more of a chance that something will go wrong the more electronics that you run through....
But again, this is not like going from analog to digital and back again, this is a digital stream and its ALL 1's AND 0's so it really
don't matter as long as you get the signal, unless a piece of gear is turning your 1's to 0's and 0's to 1's or dropping out, then it don't make any difference.

You don't hear people comparing the quality of the IDE cable on your hard drive, as far as the how good the music sounds playing
off of your PC do you? you can always compare the quality when it goes from digital to analog, but while its digital forget it.
You dont hear people say that my hard drive sounds a little warmer that that hard drive, or that the sound quality is better on one hard drive do you?
Jesus get over it , times change, things are not like they used to be.

Dennis Gardner

Originally posted by phuz
I'm with jsdeprey. It's all 1's and 0's.

If some bits or bytes don't make it to the other end, then you'll hear a skip, chirp, or very apperant jitter. Otherwise, the two should sound identical with the exception of the possible hum from coax.

If bits and bytes don't make it, then your oversampling rate isn't high enough. Alot of what you may hear in a poor digital playback has to do with the processor working overtime on a poor source. It doesn't always reveal itself in the form of a skip, it may just sound fuzzy or distorted and your mind can't make sense of the difference, but it is noticable. Think of oversampling as a way of reorganizing the data very quickly to get it out the door before time is up. If there isn't enough time, you get some garble or missing data and it sounds different.

Skips happen when movement of the laser or diffraction of the light is above the level of oversampling. The rate just can't keep up with the defect. It is like when credits role too fast for me to read at the end of the movie. I can't sample fast enough.:)

That aside, your system has to have enough resolution ( ability to reproduce small differences) for you to hear the difference in cables of equal quality. Then again how do you know the quality is the same between glass and wire?

Frank Z

We've gone over this subject time and time again. It's no different than any other cable debate. If you hear a difference between coax and toslink, then that's all that matters. No one else's spec's, reference material, or ears matter at all. I don't claim to have golden ears, hell I can't tell Home Depot wire from Big Daddy Mojo wire, or whatever the flavor of the month is around here. What I do know is that each and every one of us has our very own set of top notch audio testing equipment, and they happen to be glued to the sides of our heads. So if you want to waste a bunch of bandwidth re-hashing yesterdays news.... fine, knock yourselves out. If you want to lay down the law about there is no difference between coax and toslink...fine, but apply the same argument to all things audio. There's no difference between amps, receivers, CDP's, etc, it's all in our heads.:rolleyes:

Dennis Gardner

Yeah, but Frank, I thought you were the "MasterDebater".:D

jsdeprey

I agree with you that it comes down to what you hear allot of times. But I still say things are different in the digital world, how many times do you think things are copied around now a days in the studio in to software like protools , then sent off for mastering and things like that while all digital.
Bad equipment might have problems but you shouldnt hear I big difference between 2 digital signals coming in though a different kind of cable as long as the 0's and 1's are the same at the other end.
In other words the cable doesnt add or take away from the sound. Either they make it to the other side or they dont.
It is very, very different than in the analog world, were everything has the possibility to change the sound of a signal going over a medium.

HBombToo

Originally posted by jsdeprey

Jesus get over it , times change, things are not like they used to be.

Yes they do and to hear an argument comparing my computers HD with that of the audio chain is the most ridiculous thing I have heard.

In all digital systems there is jitter. The bottom line is that your jitter is effected by every circuit in the path. The less circuits and operations on the digital stream the less jitter and the better the audio.

HBomb

PolkThug

Wires and cable are so dated. Wi-Fi is the way!

Ricardo

Ok guys...I will go back to optical and say there is no difference if that stops this thread!!!!!

Sorry I started this....

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

HBombToo

Originally posted by PolkThug
Wires and cable are so dated. Wi-Fi is the way!

wi-max brother... Now that is some good stuff!

PolkThug

Nice! I need to get caught back up on my puter nawledge.

"WiMAX, an acronym that stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a certification mark for products that pass conformity and interoperability tests for the IEEE 802.16 standards. IEEE 802.16 is working group number 16 of IEEE 802, specialising in point-to-multipoint broadband wireless access. WiMAX is both faster and has a longer range than Wi-Fi."