I gave up reading HiFi magazines years ago so I was hanging on to the conventional wisdom that the Toslink light-pipe was inferior to the cable alternatives because of the interface hardware available. What had always puzzled me was that Alesis chose an optical link as an option for its 8 channel studio ADAT standard. If studio hardware could cope with 8 channels at 48kHz/24bit down a light-pipe why couldn't domestic stereo do justice to just 2 channels at 44.1kHz/16bit?
So, it seems it could - and can - given an appropriate DAC. I dug out an old (10+ years) Cambridge Audio TOSLINK cable and hooked it up between my SB3 and MF kW250S realising instant A/B comparison was possible. I have a less than stellar listening room and Castle speakers, but within those limitations the difference between TOSLINK and Kimber digital cable at first sounded negligible. If anything, the TOSLINK has a bit more clarity so I am going to switch to that and assume that the electrical isolation might have some bearing. Longer-term listening and evaluation is required. Note: the MF DAC re-samples / up-samples and so, in theory, this should eliminate any jitter discrepancies between the 2 input types. So thanks for this great thread and encouraging me to try something that might add to musical enjoyment, even if only marginally. -- dBerriff SB3, Boom, Musical Fidelity kW250S, Castle Stirling 3's ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dBerriff's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=12247 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=65893 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
