coax vs toslink

[ralphpnj]

But with a bit of googling consumers are realising that they can get a 24bit
96khz high res rip from vinyl that hasn't been butchered by the loudness
wars. Thus the monopoly falls (at least for older music).

Martin

Luckily I still have most of my old (and some new) vinyl and a very good vinyl front end. Nowhere near as handy as good hi-rez digital versions (whatever their source - vinyl rip or studio master) but vinyl can often sound very good indeed.

[saeyedoc]

Luckily I still have most of my old (and some new) vinyl and a very good vinyl front end. Nowhere near as handy as good hi-rez digital versions (whatever their source - vinyl rip or studio master) but vinyl can often sound very good indeed.

My buddy who turned me onto Squeezebox and has downloaded a lot of music generally thinks the Vinyl rips to high res from someone with a very high end system sound the best. I guess the dynamic range issues can explain much of that preference.

[trott3r]

Lo,

At 00:35 31/07/2012, you wrote:

>trott3r wrote:
> > But with a bit of googling consumers are realising that they can get a
> > 24bit
> > 96khz high res rip from vinyl that hasn't been butchered by the
> > loudness
> > wars. Thus the monopoly falls (at least for older music).
> >
> > Martin
>
>Luckily I still have most of my old (and some new) vinyl and a very good
>vinyl front end. Nowhere near as handy as good hi-rez digital versions
>(whatever their source - vinyl rip or studio master) but vinyl can often
>sound very good indeed.


I have a fair amount of well looked after vinyl as well.
Also my turntable the pretty decent project perspective but only a 16bit
44khz PCM HiMD recorder so limited to CD quality for my vinyl rips.

But at least i avoid the loudness wars mix of a modern "remastered" CD.

Martin

Running MorphOS v3.1 (July 2012) on a PowerPC Powerbook, Moderator of
MiniDisc,amithlonopen,bwfc Yahoogroups

[Waldo Pepper]

Technobable? Maybe to you.. To me, transmission lines studied to MEng level. And I ask you.. If it is just 0s and 1s, how do you think are they represented down the length of a piece of cable?
!

Then you learned alot but understood nothing. They are represented down a piece of wire as zero volts and probably 5v. It would have to be a pretty long and noisy wire for there to be any discrepency. At bit rates encountered in baseband digital audio, characteristic impedance. group delay, reflections and phase issues don't even come into it over practical lengths encountered in home audio systems.

[Waldo Pepper]

it is an analogue carrier modulating small changes in voltages representing binary information),

No it's not. There is not an analogue carrier. There would be no advantage whatsoever of imposing a digital signal on a carrier on 2 foot of wire. It's simply ones and noughts represented by a voltage.

Too much reading Hi-Fi magazine articles written by art students.

[Waldo Pepper]

Wow! I am so sorry to disagree, but what I have just read sounds like a bunch of techno-babble published by the manufacturers of high end cables to attempt to justify their exorbitant prices.

Digital is binary. Binary is a sequence of 0's and 1's. If 100 different cables transmit the exact same sequence of 0's and 1's to your DAC, I guarantee that each will sound 100% the same. There is no such thing as a flat 0, a sharp 1, a warm 0 or a harsh 1. They are nothing more than numbers that are decoded by your DAC!

If a cable is so poorly made that it is incapable of transmitting the proper sequence, the result will be different. But that is the only variable.

This takes me back to the question of the OP. If a toslink or spdif cable transmits the same sequence of 0's and 1's to the DAC, there will be no difference in the output.

Spot on! I have read there are cold and hot zeros though

[cwon]

I won't touch the audibility of differences between optical and coax cables.

The advantage of using a toslink is that there's no electrical connection between the source and the DAC, so there won't be any grounding issues (if the components were designed without galvanic isolation).

Where this has come into play for me is I can connect my universal player via toslink to my DAC to watch videos without worrying about the hum from my cable feed.

So, I just connect all my digital sources (including my TOUCH) with toslink to my DAC.

But I also happen to prefer what I hear from the toslink I use over the coaxes I've tried.