DAC newbie: toslink vs. coax and more...

Hi Rebbi,

Question: My impression is that coaxial is the preferred link from CD to DAC (as opposed to toslink). Do I have that right?

In general, for transport to DAC use, coaxial is the preferred method by many.

Any thoughts on what's sane and cost-effective in the "coax cable" department? And is there any difference between "coax" cable and a standard RCA interconnect?

Well, I bought the Signal Cable Silver Resolution coax. I'm satisified with it. I will likely try other cost-effective cables at some point. It is relatively inexpensive. You should be able to fine a good coax cable for well under $100. For coax, you must have a coax digital cable to carry the signal from transport to DAC. A coax digital cable is definitely different than an rca interconnect. A digital cable is required in this application. Good luck and welcome to the world of external DACS!

Thank you very much for the helpful response! Subsequent to posting this (I should have done so at the outset) I did a Google search on this topic, and came up with tons of hits, both here and elsewhere. Thank you!

Coax isn't always better than toslink. Like everything else, it depends on the application and implementation. If you're running a signal from a noisy source like a computer or cable box, toslink eliminates any electrical noise issues between the two components by isolating them electrically. My Apple TV 1 has optical instead of coax for this reason. I've tried coax and optical from my cable box, and optical was a good bit better. That's not an apples to apples comparison, as different coax cables sound different. But for the money, a cheap optical cable easily beat out a $200 or so coax cable. It wasn't the coax Cable's fault, IMO as its a great coax cable; rather, it was the implementation.

I have a Sonicwave glass toslink cable that was about $25 from Amazon. Sounds far better than several boutique brand plastic cables I've tried that were at least 4 times it's price.

At the end of the day, it all depends on the transport - noisy stuff usually does better with optical, and quiet stuff usually does better with coax. My Rega Apollo as a transport into my previous DAC sounded far better with coax than optical. Like the cable box, only in the opposite manner, it wasn't close.

All we can do is report our experiences. Your's may be different!

The performance results with toslink and coax depends a lot on the quality of the cable, and whether you have ground-loops in your system. Obviously, if you have ground loops, the toslink will help with this.

If you use a very good 1.5m S/PDIF coax cable, such as the Ridge Street Audio Poiema, then there is no toslink that can compete with it.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Thanks for all the advice. I'm gonna try coax first and report back.

Turns out that a local audio shop bought out the entire stock of a discontinued Nordost cable which works for coax and regular RCA analogue; it's called "Omni Konnect." It was 1/2 off original retail. I'll give it a go.