Coaxial or Optical

About 6 years ago I belonged to the "bits is bits" camp, and thought that interconnects couldn't possible matter. One weekend I brought home a Wadia dac from my dealer to try. He loaned me a $200 piece of coax to use, which I politely accepted without laughing.

When I hooked up the dac, I used Toslink from my Sony X77 CD player out of convenience. I already had a Toslink cable plugged in and the back of the player was hard to reach.

I was unimpressed with the dac. Before I brought it back, I decided to try the expensive coax just to appease my dealer.

The difference was unbelievable. The soundstage opened up, low level detail appeared, and I couldn't stop listening!

Moral of the story: I avoid Toslink whenever possible.

Firstly, it is difficult to give absolute advice here because your dvd player and receiver will affect the results. Secondly, your budget is also a factor. If you only want to spend say $40, then you cou could get a Monster Lightspeed 100 toslink or Apogee Coaxial, get decent results, but the difference between the two will probably not be very significant. However, if you're willing to spend around $100 or more, something the Harmonic Technology or Madrigal or Illuminations, etc., will probably give you better results than a toslink, depending on your transport and dac.

O.K., Now for a more technical understanding of why there is not a concensous af toslink vs. coaxial connections. Although most of the time the coax connect sounds better, sometimes the toslink will be the better connect. How can this be? Because each manufacturer is using a different input reciever chipset, which is the real determining factor to which connection will sound better. (The input reciever is the chipset that "recieves" the initial digital data, and then passes this data to the D/A and other processing chipsets ). If the input reciever has a high immunity to jitter, then it usually sounds best with an optical input. Unfortunately, these type of input recievers have only been available in the last 18 months, and are most likely on a processing unit that employs 24bit sigma delta dacs. Otherwise with the other types of input reciever chipsets, the coax sounds much better. Don't even try to ask your manufacturer about his digital designer's input chipset reciever choice. He will probably mislead you, since many are totaly oblivious of the above aformentioned information. As a former sales representative of these types of chipsets myself, many processer and reciever manufacturers "swap out" and change their receiver chipsets, during the production cycle for both cost and supply considerations. They can make this change because there are many pin for pin compatible digital chipsets offered by competing digital chipset manufacturers. As usual, the best way to determine which connection is better is to do an A/B comparison between connection types.

I just did an A/B with Monster Datalink 100 and Monster Lightspeed 100 cables (both 1M) with a Toshiba DVD to a Denon AVR-5800. Other than a slight drop in overall volume, they sounded identical. Hope this helps, Gerry

Thanks again to all.