I've heard this question asked many times before. However, the typical answer is less a reassuring statement, than it is a counter question "can you hear jitter in your cable?" My question is how exactly would I know if I need better optical cable? Can anyone share their epiphany with digital cables? To my understand, analog cables are the most diverse and I can hear their differences. Should I start believing in digital? (I am currently using cheap-o Monoprice ones which doesn't fit my setup.)

Update: Look at page 3.

Here we go again...
Imo they do matter. The quality of the cable, connectors, .. have an impact on the resulting sound.

Others have a totally different meaning, of course.

Even optical cables matter.

TOSLINK Interconnect History & Basics — Reviews and News from Audioholics

I'll verify it soon, BTW.

IMO if you compare a radio shack cable vs a $100 one, they do matter, but personally I won't pay for a optical cable more than $100.

Yeah, there might be a difference between a generic $5 TOSLink cable off Ebay and a $20 BJC Super-duper Ultra-conductive etc. cable. However, I don't think it goes much beyond that. Any money you might spend on upgrading cables would be better sunk into upgrading your source/output.

Go for glass toslinks, it matters because plastic based cables are way more lossy than Glass based, more bandwidth available etc. you can find more info on this on the web just search for "TOSLink glass vs plastic" .

Look for glass TOSLink @ ebay, you can find them for 25 USD up, or cheaper here: http://www.uniqueproductsonline.com/gltodiopca.html (from 15 USD up)

IME there is a difference between plastic and glass, and connectors seem to make a difference as well. But compared to coax digital the differences seem to be slight.

You can not convince me that a better optical cable is going to give me a better sound. It's a digital stream.

rasterscan,
If a digital cable is working perfectly then yes a 1 from any cable will sound the same and so will a 0 from any cable, but we do not live in a perfect world. Bits can be flipped ie a 1 can be read as a 0 or vice versa, or there can be gaps in the bitstream, or other various interference/imperfections.

In my experience there have been differences between optical cables though as I said above if a cable is working perfectly then they will all be the same.

Dave

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So, digital steams do not have data loss (packet loss), error correction, timing issues, and bandwidth issues? They do.

Most DACs do not even have error correction implemented, so, if the data is missing or corrupted = imperfect stream, in sound terms, you can have all kinds of interference and missing details. Even with error correction, some erros are irrecoverable, and affect timing.

Like myinitialsaredac, said, could you guarantee a perfect environment, where the streams would be equal until conversion, yes, 0s and 1s, no difference, but this is not the case.

Just imagine a simple download (example not to be taken literally), a everyday thing, the source file is OK, but the internet is imperfect, many times the file ends up corrupted on download, why? May be a faulty router on the way, your hard drive, file system, etc. Sound streams are "no different", just data, 0's and 1's affected the very same ways digital streams can, with the added problem of final analog conversion/amplification.

I will answer my own question once I get my Blue Jeans Toslink here by this weekend. I am only a half-believer in cables, so it could go either way.

Bear in mind that Blue Jeans Toslink are still POF (Plastic Optical Fiber) and not glass, Blue Jeans prefers it because it is more rugged, and knows it is lossy by comparison with glass fiber. I would expect (I did have noticeable) differences in glass vs plastic, but plastic vs plastic not sure, they do use quality POF, so, maybe, especially if the cable tested against had fabrication / quality problems.

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x2! Well put, DaMnEd. And myintialsaredac. I have tried to make this point over-and-over in dozens of threads ... a digital audio stream has hard real-time transmission requirements. It the cable is too slow (due to interference) an edge transition will be missed by the reciever and a bit can be flipped. It is nothing like file transfer. Bits are bits, but bits that must be transmitted in time are something else again. There is no re-try, to (mis)quote Yoda.

Most modern DACs supply their own clocking, and have input buffers, but that does not eliminate the possibility of a flipped (not a missed) bit.

The errors may be inaudible, however. It is worth spending a few bucks, not a lot, on better-than-junk cables, as sochee says.

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my opinion lies somewhere between the extremes of "they all sound the same--if you hear a difference, you're imagining it" and 'if you can't tell them apart, your ears and/or your system sucks"

they make a difference, and the glass is better than the plastic, and more fibers are probably better than fewer.

how much any given sonic improvement is worth is much more subjective.

just my 2 cents!

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So move on then...