[leeperry]

FWIW, my other friend is also stunned by the glass cable...he's got a dac19mk3 and a mac laptop.

 

[music_man]

i need a glass cable that is 20' can bend sharp and is less than 1/4' at the connectors. otherwise i am stuck with the hosa. i will take your guys word and i would like to try it. if a cable this size exists. per this threads title, i do not care what the price is. well, within some reason.

music_man

 

[rosgr63]

Quote:

Originally Posted by music_man /img/forum/go_quote.gif i need a glass cable that is 20' can bend sharp and is less than 1/4' at the connectors. otherwise i am stuck with the hosa. i will take your guys word and i would like to try it. if a cable this size exists. per this threads title, i do not care what the price is. well, within some reason. music_man

Does it have to be glass?

 

[music_man]

well everyone is saying it is the -glass- cable that makes a big difference in sound quality. i don't want to doubt them. besides, it certainly is not going to hurt anything. if there is one small enough i'll get it. from what i read here any plastic one simply will not do the job as well as glass. i compared my seemingly decent plastic one to a very expensive glass one and did not hear a difference. i would also not be surprised if there are better glass ones. better glass,that small and bendable? hopefully!

music_man

 

[rosgr63]

My 2c, long lengths can be better achieved by plastic fibers.
Sysconcept make reasonably priced fiber optic cables and this is what they say:
Quote
====
Yes, some manufacture charge extra especially for glass optical cable
but glass optical cable has very high attenuation as it is composed of
small glass strands; therefor nobody will make you length longer then
8meters (I think)
We can make you Toslink Cable over 25-meters and it will still work, so
make your own judgment.
In addition, what counts is not low fiber attenuation (ours is
Attenuation less 0.15dB per meter @650nm) and very important part is the
finish type. We polish our cable on 0.3um film and most other
manufacture including more expensive one terminate their cable by hot
glass or knife.
Yes, those cable will work or short distance and you can hardly tell the
difference but they will fail on longer distance transmission in length
over 20meters, or if you try to connect the two cables together via
female to female adapter especially the fiber with hot glass
termination. The tip of these cables are round, so when you try to
connect two cables together only the tips are touching an the rest of
the surface is air to air transmission which gives you very high
attenuation loss.
UNQUOTE
=======

 

[leeperry]

Quote:

nobody will make you length longer then 8 meters

that plastic cable seller thinks a lot:

Glass 30FT DIGITAL AUDIO OPTICAL TOSLINK CABLE - eBay

25 ft GLASS TOSLINK DIGITAL OPTICAL CABLE - eBay

and yes, sure, attenuation is terrible w/ silica optical fiber...they're used wordlwide and can drive 100gb/s over 7000km, that's not impressive at all.

anyway, what matter is the SQ...this sellers also says that glass is bad: Digital Audio Cables at Blue Jeans Cable
Quote:

POF is in general rather lossy stuff compared to glass optical fiber, we prefer it for optical digital audio use because it's much more physically durable and because its aperture matches the spec for optical digital audio use, unlike glass fiber which is too small and must be used in bundles.

it's a very nice story! but in that test they found their Mitsubishi POF cable worthless: LITE AUDIO DAC AM REVIEW
Quote:

The Mitsubishi POF cable sounded dull and lifeless

Quote:

the Dayton glass optical cable was a little smoother and warmer than the coax but with better sounding highs and imaging

specs, commercial bs....it's very nice and all, but a wild guess would lead me to believe that it's far easier to cut POF with a hot knife, use shiny plugs, call it "audiophile grade" and sell it for a good price...than assembling silica cables professionally, that would take a lot more equipment and money to set up. As usual in this hobby, there's only one way to find out

majkel mentioned a Belkin cable earlier, maybe I'll try it someday...but I can't find a good reason right now

 

[rosgr63]

What cables have you actually tested leeperry?

 

[music_man]

the people that said glass is for short runs are completely wrong. glass is designed specifically for long runs. it has to be very pure glass though. data travels thousands of miles on glass. in fact we are all probably using it to chat here right now!

glass is not the specification for toslink though. i am open to the fact that it may sound better however. if i can find one that suits my needs above i'd be happy to have it. if it makes a difference or not. i am streaming 128kbps radio so i might not even notice a quality difference. the quality of this sound is rather poor as you might imagine.

the better audio cables have less strands of glass. audioquest makes a 9 meter 5 series. it is like $4,500 or something. that is a top quality cable with 65 strands and heavily armored. therefore i doubt i will find what i want. glass cables must have thick armor. they also generally canot be bent tightly which i also require.

as far as the run from my transport to dac i still prefer a high end silver/gold aes/ebu to my short aq series 5. i think coax is better and aes/ebu is the best. as always i could be wrong.

i'd prefer to use glass just because so many people think it is better. i don't mind. the problem is the ones that are really good, 65 strands are a lot of money for long runs. plus the issue with size and bending. i do not think the 280 strand cables on ebay can compete with the 65 strand aq or similar. if you really want to feel you have the best sounding cable.

music_man

 

[Crazy*Carl]

$300 optical cable.....
 
Tell me, 'friend', when did Saruman the wise abandon reason for madness?!
 

 

[haloxt]

That looks like some serious vibration dampening device.

 

[leeperry]

I still can't really explain why, and it might very well be 100% placebo...but I still feel that the $45 Dayton glass toslink cable has made lossy audio totally acceptable?! it's like before there used to be distortion due to the lossy encoding and *on top* of it, there also was the jitter/harmonic distortion/"whatever you call it" of the cable that just made the music "lo-fi" sounding...and now I fully agree that ABX'ing 320kbits MP3/FLAC would be really really hard. MP3 used to sound edgy and amusical before...ah well, this set up is still going strong! if I'm not bored 3 weeks later, it's usually a good sign

 
I thought the more transparent your set up, the more MP3 would sound like ****...but I believe that it actually allows lower quality files to sound their best.

 

[Kawai_man]

 
Quote:

I still can't really explain why, and it might very well be 100% placebo...but I still feel that the $45 Dayton glass toslink cable has made lossy audio totally acceptable?! it's like before there used to be distortion due to the lossy encoding and *on top* of it, there also was the jitter/harmonic distortion/"whatever you call it" of the cable that just made the music "lo-fi" sounding...and now I fully agree that ABX'ing 320kbits MP3/FLAC would be really really hard. MP3 used to sound edgy and amusical before...ah well, this set up is still going strong! if I'm not bored 3 weeks later, it's usually a good sign

 
I thought the more transparent your set up, the more MP3 would sound like ****...but I believe that it actually allows lower quality files to sound their best.

 
I think I have an explanation to why it's better. On my review of the cables I mentioned that the light output was a little brighter with the dayton cable than with the ebay glass cable, I forgot to mention that the surface area of the optical input of the dayton cable was considerably larger than of the ebay glass cable,  and before that comparison I had compared the ebay glass cable to the to the ibasso toslink cable, the ibasso cable (which is plastic btw) also sounded better than the ebay glass cable and the ibasso cable also had a brighter light output and If I remember correctly it also had a bigger optical surface area. The ibasso cable and the dayton  both have longer tips so they were also much closer to the LED than the ebay glass cable.
 
That led me to the conclusion that what really matters is how much light the cable can let pass. The surface area of the LED is like 4x bigger than the optical surface of the cable so the cable only covers like 1/4 of the led. So a cable with a bigger optical surface will let more light pass through which will give a better sound, and it  also helps if the cables tip is as close as possible to the LED.
 
I actually found a way to test this. I have this little USB to optical converter Ive been using (link below) because it sounds better than the optical out from my mac. I decided to connect it directly to my dac without an optical cable 

!!! This would allow the full light output from the LED in the onverter to be sent to the reciever. I used a 3ft usb cable to extend it and I rolled a little paper into a small cyinder which I painted black and I put that in between the converter and my dacs optical input, this helped keep it in place and I think it also helps keep some of the light from escaping so it goes more direct to the optical receiver. I also made sure the paper was short enough so that the dongle and the reciever were as close as possible.
 
This made a very noticeable difference in every way there was just much more to the sound especially more detail and it was also a little louder.
 
I then took it a bit further. I removed the case and I cut part of the plastic that extends from the optical out of the converter so this would get me even closer contact between the LED and the receiver, this improved the sound a little further in the same way but there was an especially good improvement in the extension of the notes from the instruments and the singer, like when the note from an instruments decays before going to the next note the you could more clearly hear that or with the singers voice the words extend longer.
 
 
 
I put pics below so you can see the light output from the source and how much actually gets passed through the cable, I also put a pic to show how I connected the converter to my DAC.
 
heres is the link
 
http://cgi.ebay.com/Xitel-MiniDisc-MD-Port-DG2-PC-Link-Optical-Audio-Cable-/220582822530?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item335bc2c282
 
 
 
Cheers
-Cris
 

 

 
 

 

[leeperry]

hehe, good point! that dutch toslink cable is said to have a convex lens on both ends...and actually I've got a luxmeter, too bad I already tossed the ebay cable

 
it's too bad the new forum becomes unreadable when large pictures are posted...so you've stuck the USB dongle to your DAC input? haha!

 

[haloxt]

I also noticed going from various plastic to my sonicwave toslink that the sound becomes less harsh, this is a quality you hear in lossless over some lossy formats.
 
Very cool mod Kawai Man, I tried doing something like that before with 2x optical adapters out of transport to dac but cut up the optical connector too bad. I'm still searching for a new hard drive based transport to replace my h120, when I do I might try to do what you did.

 

[rosgr63]

Nice work Kawai Man, thanks for sharing.