I'm just wondering what the actual cable is I'm needing...

It'll be leaving a PC sound card that's labeled "optical", however, it's not an optical jack like those square-like jacks (TOSlink I believe, forgive my newbieness) that are on DVD players, this jack looks exactly like any other 1/8" mini jack, however it's labeled "optical" out.

I need to leave that and go into a standard 1/8" mini input in a headphone amp. Can someone give me a link to any cable that'll do this trick so I'll know what I'm looking for?

Also, I'm looking for a mid-fi cable...nothing terribly expensive just yet. Thanks for any help!

That sounds like it might be a mini-toslink. I couln't tell you for sure without seeing it. What sound card is it?

It's an Audigy2 (for the time being...)

The jacks look like this:

By the way...I'm also pondering the possiblity of RCAs instead of a 1/8" mini connector, so I'm wondering if there's such a cable to connect out from the digital soundcard out into RCA?

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You might be able to use soemthing like this. It has the 4-pole (4-conductor) optical mini plug that your Audigy card needs to split off the right and left channels to the RCAs (the red and white audio connectors).

D.

the output is spdif/toslink mini on the audigy.
why are you trying to use a digital output to go into an analog headphone amp?
there has to be a digital/analog conversion before that happens.
DAC's cost a lot of money

if really want to hook up your audigy to your headphone amp, you'll need a toslink cable with a 1/8" connector on it (it's a little plastic thing) connecting the audigy to a DAC (which hopefully takes optical, not coax digital). then your DAC will have analog RCA outs on it which you can connect to your headphone amp (or connect to a RCA-mini adapter).


if you're looking for good sound quality for a relatively small amount of money, consider getting a sonica - that will provide a 1/8" unattenuated line-out that you can connect to your headphone out via a 1/8" - 1/8" analog connector (6 bucks at radioshack).


also - on demolitions suggestion... that four pole connector does not look optical to me.. there are four poles, that's for receiving analog data, not pulses of light.

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I mentioned the 4-pole mini-plug cable because the Audigy2 manual specifically mentions it. It says nothing about being an optical out. It appears to be a down-sized S/PDIF. That may explain why some people have had luck connecting their S/PDIF-equipped receivers to their Audigy cards via a 3.5mm-mono-to-RCA adaptor and a standard S/PDIF coaxial digital cable.

D.

Question: Will this adapter (shown w/ just a coax cable going into a 5.1 speaker setup) effectively transit the signals coming from that S/PIDIF output that it's in into left/right RCA for going into a headphone amp?



EDIT: Realized that'd require a DAC, DOH!