What is Toslink Cable and Where to use that?

Use Toslink to Connect Your Home Theatre for Best Audio Quality

Okay, you spent a ton of money installing a home theater system and you obviously want the best audio-visual performance for your investment. All the more reason to use a Toslink digital audio interface, instead of one of the more common analog interfaces (like RCA cabling and jacks). Toslink optical cable (also known as EIA-J) is basically a fiber-optic digital audio cable that carries digital audio data using pulses of light rather than electricity.

Why use Toslink instead of coaxial cables?

Toslink Cable

                                       

Coaxial Cable

For starters, Toslink electrically isolates sender and receiver and eliminates ground loops (that annoying AC hum picked up from power cables). Toslink delivers the cleanest possible signal, even at the most extreme volume levels. And because it's an optical cable, Toslink eliminates some of the distortions inherent in copper cable--caused by imperfections of inductance, capacitance and resistance in the wire. You also get low-loss, low-jitter performance while overcoming the usual limitations of cheaper fiber-optic cables.

Toslink optical cables can be used with digital audio inputs and/or outputs commonly found on many newer Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound receivers, DVD players, CD players, cable boxes, MP3 and DAT recorders, outboard AD/DA converters and satellite dish receivers.

While Toslink supports a variety of different media formats and physical standards, it's most often used to make digital audio connections using the rectangular EIAJ/JEITA RC-5720 (also CP-1201 and JIS C5974-1993 F05) connector. A Toslink optical interface for digital audio connections typically supports a 125 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps data rate.

Originally designed to connect Toshiba CD players to their receivers for PCM audio streams, Toslink was quickly embraced by most CD players. Toslink uses the S/PDIF standard (a data link layer protocol and a set of physical layer specifications for carrying digital audio signals between devices and stereo components over either optical or electrical cable.) S/PDIF is now almost universally used on DVD players and some game consoles to connect the digital audio stream to Dolby Digital/DTS decoders.

There are a number of ways a Toslink connection may be achieved. One way is to use inexpensive 1 mm plastic optical fiber; another is through the use higher quality multi-strand plastic optical fibers; and, depending on the bandwidth and application, quartz glass optical fibers may also be used.

For best transmission quality, Toslink cables should be no longer than five meters. And you're really pushing it at 10 meters--unless, of course, you use a signal booster.