Glass v.s. Plastic Toslink

The thread was started quite a while back, but I'll chime in...

I've been using the Sonicwave cable mentioned here. Easily better than any plastic toslink cable I've used - Kimber, Audioquest, and 2 others that escape my memory.

I've heard from a few sources that the connectors are critical in optical. Mine click in pretty snug. One or two of the others didn't do this so well. Another part of the connector is the length of the pin, so to speak, that goes into the component - some are too long, some are too short. There was a glass cable that a lot of people didn't like very much, and it happened to not fit tightly. I think it was a Parts Express cable? Or maybe they sold it. People on the Red Wine Audio circle at Audio Circle were complaining about it, as were a few others elsewhere.

At the end of the day, what sounds best is a personal thing. My Sonicwave cable sounds better than anything else I've tried. Then again, it's the only glass cable I've tried. And for once, it was easily the cheapest one I've tried.

The Litepipe from Silfatec comes in two styles, the flimsy plastic coating (white) or metal cased. I was told by the rep you could run over the metal version.
Just in case you were worried about crimping.
The connectors are quite snug.
Plastic? Meh...

I have read an interesting comment on the lifatec silflex website saying that the quality of Plastic Optical Fiber is so good that we are not giving up in performance using plastic over glass, especially over 3 feet!
In addition, the Toshiba opto electrical components were designed to be used with plastic fiber of a specific aperture.
By bundling many strands, you will not achieve the exact aperture of a single plastic optical fiber.
As one mentioned, a lot of it is how that cable is hooked up to the optical module.
I have to add that the DVD/CD transport I am using is a Yamaha S540, and I believe it was on the market probably around 2002. So it may not have the latest blu-ray ready opto electrical components that actually may be designed to work with glass fibers.

Not all optical Toslink cables are the same and neither do they have the same kind of filament. Common plastic fiber filament Toslink has a bandwidth of about 6 MHz and this is what has given Toslink such a bad reputation because it chokes out the harmonics of the 3.3 MHz fundamental which needs bandwidth out to 10X that of the fundamental on order to form a nice square wave.

Back in 2002 I bought an 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Glass Toslink cable which has the same Fused Silica Glass filament that they use in their ATT/ST Glass cables. Over the last 10 years I have compared it to many coax cables up to a price-point of $600 and I have yet to find one that has the absolute transparency that the Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink has in that it has a 30 MHz bandwidth which is sufficient to allow the full development of the Digital signal's harmonics which is essential for the best sounding digital music playback.

Most recently I used my old Musical Fidelity V-Link to compare my .99999 silver Illuminations D-60 coax to the Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink and although the Illuminations D-60 sounds absolutely great on its own when compared to the Fused Silica Glass Toslink it immediately becomes apparent that a lot of low level detail is being completely glossed over by the Illuminations D-60 and a portions of the harmonic structure of the Music is not being fully fleshed out.

Those who have never used or heard a 30 MHz bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink will continue to assume that Toslink is vastly inferior to coax and will never be bothered with what their Music might sound like using a 30 MHz bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable like the one John Atkinson used to allow the V-Link add so much additional fidelity to the Benchmark DAC in his Stereophile Magazine Review of the V-Link...

"I then changed to the V-Link, had it feed the Benchmark via a 1m length of AudioQuest Optilink-5 glass TosLink cable, and did not touch the Benchmark's volume control. The violins in the Sibelius were now slightly less steely, the soundstage a tad wider and deeper. More important, the sounds of individual instruments, such as the horns at the start of the first movement, and the timpani and plucked double basses at the start of the second, were slightly more of a piece with the surrounding acoustic."

I have known perfectly well about the additional conversion from electrical to IR Optical all along and I am in no way inferring that it does not induce some amount of degradation, but rather that there must be more areas of concern that are being overlooked because over the last 10 years as the 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink has time after time proven that it sounds much better than any other digital cable that it has been compared with whether they be digital electrical coax or lower bandwidth Toslink cables.

I have even A/B tested it with both the Dayton GOC 65 strand Filament Glass Toslink and the 12 MHz bandwidth 280 strand SonicWave Glass Toslink and in each case the low bandwidth Glass Toslink cables make a very poor showing against the 30 MHz Bandwidth Glass Toslink.

I do not want to cause any contention here its just that I've been thoroughly enjoying this 30MHz Glass Toslink cable for 10 years now and it is so radically different than the common place 6 MHz plastic fiber filament Toslinks which I heartily agree with you literally choke the life out of the music. I did not share this with you to 'one-up' digital coax, but rather to let you know that the 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink exists because there some folks with digital front ends that perform on a much higher level than mine does and I think that this Glass Toslink cable could lift the sound quality of their audio system to a spectacular new level.

It is rare that I see this high quality high bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink in use. About the only name you might recognize who knows its advanced level of capability and uses it is John Atkison at Stereophile who used his Audioquest Optilink 5 Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable to get a $169 24/96 Musical Fidelity V-Link to improve the sound quality of a Benchmark DAC and they are supposed to be pretty much immune to jitter. I consider the Computer Audiophile site very much up to those high standards of professionalism and expert knowledge of digital audio and so I wanted to let the membership know about the capabilities of this rarely seen 30 MHz Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable which is a rare gem that few in the world of digital audio have knowledge of.