[Scrith]

In theory I suppose glass is going to be superior to plastic, but I think some caution is in order. I believed the hype about glass and ordered one of the "eBay" glass cables. At first, it seemed to offer an improvement (although I've learned since then that new devices that one is excited about acquiring always sound better than old devices, unless you blind test them...but that's another discussion).

But about one year after I started seeing the error light on my Benchmark DAC1 light up occasionally. I tried an alternative cable as an experiment (the highly praised Van den Hul Optocoupler) and it sounded better than the eBay glass cable. I remember reading somewhere afterwords that glass cables are prone to microfractures that can reduce their ability to transmit signals unless treated with great caution (which might explain why plastic cables were created in the first place). My eBay glass cable was just lying there for the one year I had it installed , although I suppose it might have been moved around a bit during various component swaps for testing over that one year period.

The bottom line is, glass is not some magic solution to improving audio quality with toslink connections, and might end up being far worse than a more flexible, less-fracture prone plastic cable.

Keep in mind, by the way, that toslink connections are sending digital data...the connection merely needs to be good enough for the receiver the differentiate between a "1" and a "0", which probably doesn't require a perfectly crystal clear (visually) connection between source and destination (i.e. just because un-fractured glass might be a bit clearer doesn't mean the destination can't correctly differentiate between the "1" and "0" signals through a plastic cable).