Forest OptiLink 15m492 feet Optical Audio Cable Green Model OPTFOR015

The audio frontier is all abuzz these days with the pleasure possible though HDMI USB FireWire and Ethernet connections. However these current generation digital technologies are only part of the story just as the challenge of designing manufacturing and choosing the best analog interconnects and speaker cables is as important as ever. S/P-DIF is transmitted through Digital Coax and Toslink fiber optics (EIA-J) making them still some of the most important cables in electronic entertainment. While thanks to HDMI Toslink is not so often used to connect a DVD player to an A/V receiver Toslink connectors are common on cable-boxes TV sets subwoofers all sorts of products.

For these many reasons has refined and renewed our line of serious high performance OptiLink cables. When the question is how can a fiber-optic cable change the sound? the answer is easier to explain than for almost any other type of cable. If the light source were a coherent laser firing into a vacuum all the light would stay straight arriving at its destination at the same time. Even if the LED light source in a Toslink system were coherent the light entering a fiber-optic cable is scattered and dispersed by imperfections and impurities in the fiber.

This can be measured as a loss of amplitude but amplitude is not the problem a 50% true loss would have no effect on sound quality. The problem is that the dispersed light does get through the cable but only after it has taken a longer path like a pool ball bouncing off the side-rails causing it to arrive later. This delayed part of the signal prevents the computer charged with decoding this information from being able to decode properly or even at all. The inability to decode shows first at higher frequencies (not audio frequencies this is a mono stream of digital audio information) so reduced bandwidth is a measurable signature of light being dispersed by a fiber.

The punch line: The less dispersion in the fiber the less