Actually Steve says it should either be greater than 1.5M or very short (less than a foot).
ALL the TOSLINK interfaces used by everybody are all made by Toshiba (hence the TOS part) they only offer a fairly limited range of devices. The receivers come in low bandwidth and really low bandwidth. They used to make a much higher bandwidth receiver, but they stopped making them a few years ago. The transmitters generally have greater bandwidth than the receivers. There actually is a significant difference between glass and plastic. Plastic is almost always a single fiber which has a much greater diameter than the wavelength of light used. It behaves like a "light pipe", light "rays" bounce off the walls with the signal zig-zagging down the length. On a longer cable you can easily get a significant differfence in path length between rays that enter the fiber at different angles. A glass one is usually a bundle of very thin glass fibers, the light doesn't zig-zagg in this arrangement. Rays entering the bundle at different angles hit different fibers, all of which have a very similar "flight time". With short lengths this difference is probably not much of an issue but for longer connections it could easily be significant. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84751 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
