I know that people love cable topics 🙂wall: ), so here is a question for all you experts.
I want to connect my iPod dock to my DAC. I have a choice of fibre optic cable or digital coax. The distance between the components is measured in fractions of a meter. Clearly, the signal that I wish to transfer is digital and so I just have to get a stream of '0' and '1' from one place to another. Any errors will cause the DAC to apply error correction and thus 'make up' the music based upon its algorithms.
With digital coax I might have signal losses at the connectors and in the cable. These are less of a problem (provided that the DAC can still distinguish between the '0' and '1') than any VSWR issues which could lead to bitstream errors and error correction in the DAC. On a short cable the propogation losses do not really need to be factored in, but the effect of external interference does and so effective screening is important.
With fibre optic I have to convert the signal to a light stream and decode this at the other end. This introduces a new process which will have its own error correction circuitry but the VSWR risk is much reduced. Again, propogation losses are trivial, and this time interference is unlikely.
So, I suspect that a reasonable quality coax will provide a more accurate data stream at the DAC as the optical conversion process carries the most risk of creating errors. Any views?
I want to connect my iPod dock to my DAC. I have a choice of fibre optic cable or digital coax. The distance between the components is measured in fractions of a meter. Clearly, the signal that I wish to transfer is digital and so I just have to get a stream of '0' and '1' from one place to another. Any errors will cause the DAC to apply error correction and thus 'make up' the music based upon its algorithms.
With digital coax I might have signal losses at the connectors and in the cable. These are less of a problem (provided that the DAC can still distinguish between the '0' and '1') than any VSWR issues which could lead to bitstream errors and error correction in the DAC. On a short cable the propogation losses do not really need to be factored in, but the effect of external interference does and so effective screening is important.
With fibre optic I have to convert the signal to a light stream and decode this at the other end. This introduces a new process which will have its own error correction circuitry but the VSWR risk is much reduced. Again, propogation losses are trivial, and this time interference is unlikely.
So, I suspect that a reasonable quality coax will provide a more accurate data stream at the DAC as the optical conversion process carries the most risk of creating errors. Any views?