Digital Audio Cables: Wire or Optical

The reason that wire is superior to toslink is that there is a lot more "unnecessary" work taking place with the toslink. As such, there is more room for signal loss and degradation.

The signal on a disc starts off as digital. When using a Toslink, it must be converted to an optical signal at the transport. It is then fed optically to the DAC. The Dac receives the optical signal and must convert it back to digital. Once it completes the optical to digital conversion, it is then converted from digital down to analogue. This can be summed up as DODAC, which would stand for Digital Optical Digital Analogue Conversion.

Using wire, you start off as digital. Leave the transport as digital. Arrive at the DAC as digital and is then converted to analogue. This is simply called a DAC process because it is Digital Analogue Convesion.

As you can see, involving optical in the digital chain adds two unnecessary steps. Which one do you think is closer to the "shortest path" and has the potential fo the "purest signal" ??? Sean
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I think that digital signals are PCM ( pulse code modulated ) but i'm not sure. Never really paid a lot of attention to how they did this, only the results. Either way, they are "modulating" or "super-imposing" the digital data stream onto an rf based signal. If i remember correctly, i think that this signal is somewhere around 3 to 4 MHz or so. As such, coax is still a pretty efficient conductor at that range and should work quite well.

You do bring up a good point though that i had forgotten about. There actually has to be another stage that we've overlooked. Obviously, laser is a light based energy. As such, the signal has to start off as optical and is then converted to digital. At this point, the data can be extracted / seperated between the optical laser signal and the digital data that was superimposed on that light stream. From there it can be sent from transport to dac via the rf based coaxial jack or via optical on a toslink jack. Obviously, there must be technical problems ( probably scientific limitations ) with trying to leave the signal optical from the transport and then directly it at the DAC directly. This would drastically simplify things if possible.

After thinking about all of this, it is no wonder that it has taken us 20 years to get good sound out of redbook players. While i do believe we started off with something that was not well thought out to begin with, there is obviously a LOT going on within these players. As such, i see a lot of room for error and the necessary refinement that takes place when you have such errors.

Maybe we should be grateful for what we have and be glad that technology is working to our benefit. Then again, if they would have simply started off with a higher sampling rate to begin with ..... : ) Sean
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