AudioQuest Forest Optical Cable The AudioQuest Forest Toslink cable is a great choice if you need to get a digital audio signal from a source item like a CD player or Universal Blu-ray player to either a Flat Screen TV or AV Receiver. It features a thoroughly engineered, finely polished conductor to provide a distortion-free connection. Many of the design and material elements that have proven so effective in AudioQuest's analogue cables are every bit as meaningful for digital and computer-audio cables, including S/PDIF optical (Toslink) cables as featured here. Insulation materials, proper geometry and overall precision of the manufacturing process are no more or less important at the frontier of digital-audio cables than they are for analogue cables. In The Beginning: The audio frontier is all abuzz these days with the pleasure possible though HDMI, USB, FireWire and Ethernet connections. However, these current generation digital technologies are only part of the story, just as the challenge of designing, manufacturing and choosing the best analogue interconnects and speaker cables is as important as ever. The S/P-DIF (Sony Philips Digital InterFace), which arrived in 1983 along with the CD, is still very much a part of our world today. S/P-DIF is transmitted through Digital Coax and Toslink fibre optics (EIA-J), making them still some of the most important cables in electronic entertainment. Thanks to HDMI, Toslink is not so often used to connect a DVD player to an A/V receiver, but Toslink connectors are common on cable-tv-boxes, TV sets, soundbars and all sorts of other products. For these many reasons, AudioQuest has refined and renewed their line of serious high performance OptiLink cables. All models and all lengths are now available Toslink to Toslink (as featured here) and Toslink to 3.5mm Mini Optical. High Performance - Budget Price: AudioQuest designed the Forest OptiLink cable for those seeking high performance on a budget. Even though it's their most affordable Toslink cable, it's been engineered to provide a distortion-free connection between digital audio source components — CD players, Universal/Blu-ray/DVD players — and naturally A/V receivers, DACs, and even some soundbars. Audioquest OptiLink-Forest Series Optical Cable: AudioQuest OptiLink-Forest optical (toslink) cables feature a thoroughly engineered, finely polished polymer fibre conductor to minimise signal loss and jitter (time-based distortion). The plug's brass ferrule also contributes to ideal light transmission and the highest quality sound. The conductor is surrounded by a black & green braid flexible nylon PVC jacket. Each connector has a clear plastic protector that should be removed before use. The plug is shaped so that it will only fit one way into the component's Toslink connector. Why Is It Important? Digital audio was really never just ones and zeros. Indeed, the analogue interconnects that connect your outboard DAC to your stereo are as important as the AC power cables that connect the computer audio components to your home's AC power supply. It's the same with digital audio/video cables. Optical cables carry signals as pulses of light rather than a stream of electrons, so they are virtually impervious to magnetic or electrical interference. Unlike cables made of wire which require some type of metal connector to transfer the signal between components, in an optical cable, the very tip of the connector is the fibre itself, and it requires special polishing to reduce light refractions. Whether you're feeding stereo music to a DAC or Dolby Digital surround sound to your receiver, the optical cable is a crucial link in the signal chain and shouldn't be overlooked. Therefore, the entire computer-audio experience will be more fun and more involving if low-distortion cables are employed throughout your entire audio video system. When the question is "how can a fibre-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 fibre-optic cable is scattered and dispersed by imperfections and impurities in the fibre. 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 information), so reduced bandwidth is a measurable signature of light being dispersed by a fibre. The punch line: The less dispersion in the fibre, the less distortion in the final analogue audio signal presented to our ears. There is another serious dispersal mechanism in the Toslink system. The fibre is a relatively huge 1.0mm in diameter, and the LED light source is also relatively large, spraying light into the fibre at many different angles. Even if the fibre were absolutely perfect, the signal would be spread across time because light rays entering at different angles take different length paths and arrives with different amounts of delay.
