Amphenol glass toslinks - First impressions

Mike - I know what you mean. I am running my first one between my transport and my dac. It is beating any digital cable I have.
I have a second glass optical that I am going to run between my Mac Mini and my dac. I have been enjoying the first glass since this morning, then the Fedex guy pulled up with a pair of Gabriel Gold Revelation MK2 interconnects, so it's hard to be analytical right now... I am just enjoying the music and the whole experience... I know you know what I'm talking about.

I was very surprised at the improvement over standard fiber that everyone is selling. I was also surprised to see how solid they are built. I got the Amphenol polished glass toslinks. They are really beautiful.

It really is amazing to get to a point in quality that you can really hear your sound changing with each new upgrade. I wish I had a million bucks just for HiFi. I love it. To me, it's like a savings account that you can enjoy building in value. You not accumulate equity, but you also get the most important reward from the beautiful sounds that you get to hear.... really priceless.

Enjoy your glass, Mike !

If glass toslink sounds better than standard toslink, and they are both digital, could a better quality usb cable sound better than a standard usb cable?

I have been a digital guy most of my life, 1's and 0's, so I cannot figure out how the same 1's and 0's sound so different coming through different cables, but they do.

Mattzack2 - it sounds different because affect light transmission and therefore jitter. Jitter is a noise in time domain and affect clarity of the sound. Digital cables are in general better with jitter than toslinks but there are also jitter rejecting DACs (like Benchmark DAC1) where quality (or type) of cables or transport doesn't make any difference.

When you say ' digital cables are in general better with jitter than toslinks ', are you referring to 75 ohm coax cables and usb cables? I was thinking that toslinks were considered digital also.

I have a Valab DAC (2009) which is based on the old Philips tda1543 and dir9001 chips. I am just beginning to study it but I really like it so far.

Another thing you say is interesting. The right (jitter rejecting) dac will make the quality of its incoming cables or source a non issue. That seems to be a bold statement.

Thanks for the reply, but if you are correct, I have a few thousand dollars worth of equipment and cables I need to sell.

Mattzack2 - You're right. I was referring to coax (either 75 or 110 ohm). I don't consider fiber optics a cable (in electrical sense). I don't know much about USB. The reason for Toslink being inferior is slow voltage-light conversion and therefore longer edge that is more exposed to ambient noise on the receiver side.

Jitter rejecting DAC (like Benchmark) makes not only cables non-issue but also transport. I use the cheapest decent DVD player I could find ($60 Sony) with great results (and have DVD and MP3 playback + great tracking). Benchmark DAC1 has jitter bandwidth of just few Hz and at frequencies of interest (kHz) has way over 100dB rejection. Benchmark tested it with 1000' of cable - no audible difference.

Not every DAC labeled as "upsampling" is really that. Often companies use it instead of "oversampling". Bel Canto DAC3, if I remember correctly, have same jitter rejecting properties. As for the transport - as long as it is "bit-transparent" (no DSP processing or digital volume control) there will be no difference. It is big selling point of upsampling DACs but some people prefer to use NOS DACs - it's subjective. I found that stand alone, jitter rejecting DAC allows me to connect TV as well as computer (Benchmark has 3 digital inputs) and serves as preamp since it has volume control and input selector (I don't do analog).