Why are optical cables jitter prone?


A friend of mine convinced me to purchase an electrical (RCA jack) digital cable for the home theater. He said that even though optical looks neat, it is extremely succeptible to jitter. I thought both kinds were. But, low and behold, I switched to the RCA type and my bass immediately got louder and tighter. Does anyone have a short and sweet explanation as to why? Thanks.
argent

Showing 2 responses by argent

Is it easier to build optical--fiber optic--outputs? I've seen some of the cheaper DVD players that only have coax outputs, i.e. my Toshiba DVD player for my second TV, while on the other had players like the Sony Playstation seem to only have optical outs. It might be a manufacturing issue that we are missing here. I personally use the Kimber Illuminations D-60 coax for my main system. I will never go back to optical, but I was just curious if it is a transmission technique that will get better in the future. I always assumed that the optical cable we could buy non-commercially was not up to par quality-wise with the fiber optic stuff that Sprint and others are putting in the ground. But perhaps distortion is not as big an issue with them--however I would have assumed it was considering the amount of traffic on the lines.
Normally in a manufacturing sense it is harder and more expensive to make something with a tight tolerance. Not sure if he just stated himself wrong, but having a "high tolerance" means having a loose fit. I would expect optical cable dimensions to be critical, and thus need to be as exact as possible. Can anyone else fill in the blanks here?