AudioQuest Forest OptiLink 1.5m (4.92 ft.) Full to 3.5mm Optical Audio Cable

While, thanks to HDMI, Toslink is not so often used to connect a DVD player to an A/V receiver, Toslink connectors are common on cable-boxes, TV sets, subwoofers, all sorts of products. And now, the 3.5mm Mini Optical connector, also somewhat incorrectly known as Mini-Toslink, is everywhere ... from the 3.5mm dual-purpose headphone jack on a Mac laptop, to inputs on some of the finest portables.

For these many reasons, AudioQuest has refined and renewed our line of serious high-performance OptiLink cables. All models and all lengths are now available Toslink- Toslink and Toslink - 3.5mm Mini Optical.

When the question is "how can a fiber-optic cable change the sound?" ... the answer is easier to explain than for almost any other type of cable. If the light source were a coherent laser, firing into a vacuum, all the light would stay straight, arriving at its destination at the same time. Even if the LED light source in a Toslink system were coherent, the light entering a fiber-optic cable is scattered and dispersed by imperfections and impurities in the fiber. This can be measured as a loss of amplitude ... but amplitude is not the problem, a 50% true loss would have no effect on sound quality.

The problem is that the dispersed light does get through the cable, but only after it has taken a longer path, like a pool ball bouncing off the side-rails, causing it to arrive later. This delayed part of the signal prevents the computer charged with decoding this information from being able to decode properly, or even at all. The inability to decode shows first at higher frequencies (not audio frequencies, this is a mono stream of digital audio informa-tion), so reduced bandwidth is a measurable signature of light being dispersed by a fiber. The punch line: The less dispersion in the fiber, the less distortion in the final analog audio signal presented to our ears.