Feb
27
While HDMI is rapidly becoming the de-facto cable of choice in many applications, component cables (for video) paired with digital audio cables are still widely used and will be for some time, you’ll notice I said digital audio cables and not cable singular. For years now we’ve had two different connection methods for passing the same digital audio stream, namely optical and coaxial. While both are perfectly capable of transmitting digital audio from one device to another I do have a preference between the two.
A typical coaxial digital-audio cable won’t look all the different from a standard “RCA” cable and as a matter of fact given the cables resistance of 75ohms, a composite video cable will work just fine in this application. Keep in mind that one-half of a stereo cable and or single channel RCA audio cable shouldn’t be substituted for a 75ohm digital cable; as these cables are intended for 50ohm applications i.e. analog audio. While it’s easy to mistake a coaxial digital cable for something else, Toslink digital-audio cables shouldn’t prove hard to identify, the end of the connector will have a square, plastic housing and clear center conductor or tip.
Which do I prefer? coaxial, its essentially maintenance free, more robust and for all practical purposes identical in sound quality to Toslink cables. As a matter of fact since we’re talking about digital signals the only thing would give one of these transmission methods an advantage over the other; would be the quality of the transmitter/receivers in the individual pieces of gear. Toslink is fine and will give excellent results in most cases but in my experience coaxial cables tend to cause less transmission errors and last longer to boot.
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