Is optical audio actually any better than standard?
short answer: Optical audio will almost always be better than connecting to a speaker system with an aux cable. The hierarchy is roughly aux cord < optical audio < HDMI Audio.
Medium answer: just watch this technology connections video.
Long answer: let’s talk about audio amplifiers, encodings, and digital vs analog.
Let’s talk a simple use case. You have a DVD player, and a speaker system, and you want to connect them to each other.
The most obvious way to do this is an aux cord, a 3.5mm male/male cord. These transmit an analog audio signal to whatever’s plugged in on the far side. In fact, they transmit TWO analog audio signals: left and right, for stereo audio.
This signal is produced by a Digital Analog Converter, a kind of circuit that can take in a binary value and produce an analog voltage proportional to that value. If you have say, a four-bit DAC, you can create 16 different voltages. DAC’s are a deep and complicated topic and there are like a hundred different ways to build DAC’s each with their own pros and cons, so let’s just say that DAC’s can have varying quality in how accurately they reproduce what you give them. The more bits a DAC has, the closer the signal it produces will be to a smooth analog signal, and a higher quality DAC will be more accurate when reproducing a voltage.
(note: If I write a number like this: 101₂, 431₈, 5A7₁₆, that subscript is indicating which base it is in. ₂ is binary, ₁₀ is decimal, ₁₆ is hexadecimal, etc.)
For example, let’s say we give four-bit DAC the signal 0101₂, which is 5₁₀. A four-bit DAC can produce 16 different levels, 0 through 15, so 5/15 is going to be ⅓ of the maximum voltage. If you has a 6V maximum output, an ideal DAC would produce a 2V signal in response. A good quality DAC will do this with minimal wobble, no overshoot, and without much noise. A poor-quality DAC might have a small voltage offset, wobble all over, hiss with noise, etc. No DAC will be perfect, but you can be better or worse. In the below image, the orange line is the ideal signal that the DAC is trying to produce, and the blue line is the output of the DAC trying to get as close as it can using only a few voltages. In practice there are ways to improve this a little, but that’s the idea.
The digital data stream is fed through the DAC, which imparts some badness. Then this signal has to be amplified, usually to a few tens of milliwatts. This is enough power to drive small headphones, but if you plug it in to a big speaker system, it’s just not enough. Cheap laptop speakers are usually around 10W. Bigger speaker systems run upwards of 100W. Notably, this amplification step adds some more badness: no amplifier is perfect, so it will distort the audio. How much depends once again on how well designed the amplifier is.
When you play audio out through your DVD player, the computer inside looks at the audio signal, which is a list of binary numbers. These numbers must be played out through the DAC, usually at a rate of 44100 times per second. If you feed the output signal of that into some speakers, they will vibrate to reproduce the original recorded sound signal close enough that no one notices the digital edge. There’s a few intervening steps here, though.
(EDIT: it should be pointed out that the "steps" in this can and are removed by filtering circuits. The limitation that digital imposes is mostly in volume: if you don't have enough bits, you can't accurately convey a song that has very loud parts and very quiet parts without doing something bad to one of those.)
But now you feed that low-power signal to your speaker system, and it has to amplify the signal again, up to however many watts it needs. This introduces even more badness to the signal. You’ve now got three different sources of distortion: whatever DAC is in your DVD player, the headphone amplifier in your DVD player, and then again for the speaker amplifier in your sound system. There’s also some analog noise picked up on the aux cable, because it’s carrying an analog signal.
Depending on who you are and how much you care, you might think “well this sucks, even if I get a really cool sound system, I’m stuck with the audio my DVD player spits out. What if the DAC and amplifier in there sucks? Do I just have to buy a really expensive DVD player?”
Enter digital audio!
Digital audio means that the DVD player doesn’t do anything with that raw stream of data off the DVD. Instead, it packages it up and streams it, unchanged, to a dedicated audio device. The audio device can then decode the stream, and use a single DAC and amplifier to produce the output signal. As a result, you can buy a really nice high end sound system with a shiny DAC and a nice clean amplifier and get high quality audio. Optical is a (but not the only) way to do this.
Optical audio is TOSLINK, an optical audio standard that was developed in the 80′s by Toshiba. It implements a protocol called S/PDIF, the Sony/Phillips Digital InterFace, which was developed by Sony and Phillips when they were standardizing the CD. The idea was exactly this: rather than needing to have a CD player, DAC and amplifier in one box, you can have a separated player that you can plug into anything, and send the digital data directly. S/PDIF can also be sent over a normal coaxial cable as an electrical signal, which used to be pretty common in studios.
The big benefits of S/PDIF are that you almost always reduce noise over having to use two amplifiers, and if you go the extra mile you can select hardware with high quality DACs and amplifiers. You also get some secret bonuses: S/PDIF can transmit Surround Sound. By default, S/PDIF transmits two uncompressed, high quality digital audio channels, left and right. This is not too different from the aux cable. The real trick is that because it’s digital, you can put whatever you want down there.
If you’re a the audio team on a movie, you have probably recorded the movie in high-detail surround sound, so that it can be played back on theater speakers. This is usually 7.1 audio: three speakers in the front, two on the sides, two in the back, and one bass channel with bone-shaking low frequency sounds. If you play this back through a two-channel aux cable, it all gets crushed down to two channels, left and right, with the bass layered in on top. A speaker system might use a filter or intelligent levels to direct more bass to a dedicated subwoofer or a particular speaker, but it won’t compare to having a channel of audio going directly to each speaker. Using S/PDIF, you can feed a home theater system, which will usually be 2.1, 3.1, 5.1 or 7.1 speakers.
A generic 7.1 layout
S/PDIF can provide a compressed 7.1 audio stream. Compressed audio is pretty good: I can’t tell the difference the handful of times I’ve used it, and tons of hardware going back over 30 years supports S/PDIF. It’s great for if you have an old speaker system, or if you want to save a buck picking up a used home theater rather than buying new. Now you’re not just better than an aux cable, you’re doing something that, fundamentally, an aux cable cannot possibly do. Great choice, if, of course, anything you’re listening to has surround audio. Most blu-rays will be surround. Some DVD’s will be surround. A lot of new video games even do surround sound!
There is something better than S/PDIF, which is HDMI Audio. HDMI can carry up to 8 channels of uncompressed, extraordinarily high quality audio. If you have a new speaker setup that has both S/PDIF and HDMI, HDMI is probably better, but if I’m honest, I can’t hear the difference.
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Best lg tv reviews Toslink Optical Digital Coax Coaxial Toslink to Analog Audio RCA L/R Adapter Converter
Best lg tv reviews Toslink Optical Digital Coax Coaxial Toslink to Analog Audio RCA L/R Adapter Converter
Features
PROZOR 192KHz Digital to Analog Audio Converter: Converts coaxial or toslink digital PCM audio signals to analog L/R RCA and 3.5mm Jack audio simultaneously ( not capable of being reversed)
Input Audio Connector: 1 x Toslink, 1 x RCA (Coaxial); Output Audio Connector: 2 x RCA(R/L), 1 x 3.5mm Jack; Powered by 5.5mm USB Power Cable (Power Adapter is NOT Included); Do Not Use…
