Optical digital sound cable ..

Well, I don't know what is the difference in those optical wire. I plan to run one from my computer sound card to my home theater receiver, and while some are cheap, other are pretty expensives.

What is the difference between the cheap one and the expensive ones?

I know that there must be quality, but how does that matter?

DAMN IT!!! I get paid to do this normally because i do this at work all day but here goes....


Buy a monster 400 optical one. They are roughtly 39.99 but they have a lifetime warranty so if the cable has any problems they will take care of it which is nice.

Bascially the difference is when the light is going through the wire you want the wire to be as clean and clear as possible. higher quality cables are more clear, so the light doesn't bend within the cable. honeslty its something i doubt you would notice with a cheap cable, but i still say go with the cheapest monster or cheapest god brand you can find.

Optical wires dont have gold connections my friend.....lol

Thats the bonus about optical....you can have it like 700ft from your reciever...the length almost desn't matter (over like a mile is starts to matter....i assume you will be closer then a mile...lol)

Also you dont have to worry about bending and createting sharp angles like you do with digital coax....you can run it in a tight spiral if you want....same quality.


Fibre Optical is my personal choice for all home seups over digital for those reasons above.

the 12ft fibre optical monster is like 49.99 at BestBuy i think.
i could look it up but i am lazy.

I work at BB so thats why i know this.....


BB owns a compeny and they refr to it as "The BestBuy of Canada" but i forget the name....

but check around for some decent 12ft fibre optical cables.

what are you talking about light, optical?????

Are you saying that he has a fiber optics out on his sound card????????????

COME ON

I'll be darn!

But isn't that overkill? I mean, do you really think that you could hear the difference between fiber optics and speaker wire?

I mean you could use a couple of phono Jack plugs and cheap wire . Would there be a noticeable difference?

Yeah he said in his first post about it that he had a Fibre out on his SC....which i know a lot of cards now have....its no different then a card having a digital coax out. Same digital high quality....each has up's and down's but they are available.


And YES!! RCA jacks can only carry stereo sound....the fibre and D coax can carry a digital 5.1 signal. So would you notice between 5.1 and 2.1? I think you would.

Also its not optical TO the speakers....just the receiver. then you are using standard speaker wire to the speakers.

not really Fibre opical being in receivers and SC's is pretty new. Like 1-2yrs. and has only recently become affrodable.

The thought of optical didn't even enter my mind.
I was thinking about the pre made speaker wires with the gold plated plugs on them they sell to the gullible American consumer.

I used to use RG8 and RG58 ,coax all the time on my ham radio. I ran a thousand Watts on frequencies as high as 30 MHZ. We had VHS and UHF radios on much higher frequencies but we were not allowed to use that much power there. The higher the frequency the greater the risk for signal losses on Long runs of coax. Even at 220MHz gold plated connectors were not needed .

I was just trying to save him some money.

Optical is used for tranfering digital sound between the source and the amplifier. It's major advantage over digital coaxial is that it can be run over longer distances.

Already? I've been running an optical cable for two years on my surround sound system...It's not 1975 Russ...

Crawls back into cave.