Decent Toslink Cables

[Jean-christophe Boulay]

Hi Aidan,

Gold-plated optical cables, huh? That is one of the funniest things I’ve seen. The part they gold-plate is usually made of plastic! These cables have zero electronic contact!

Right off the bat, no modern digital connection benefits from gold plating.The vast majority of “high-end digital cables” for consumer formats are a pure scam. In digital formats, signal degradation is not really a concern. It takes major degradation for a digital signal to suffer and optical cables are not subject to RF interferences.

Incidentally, the best optical cables I have are some of the cheapest. They’re the really thin ones with minimal shielding. You know those scary-thin optical cables that you look at the first time and think “I’ll break those in a minute, I’ll buy some expensive ones instead”? Those. They don’t pull on the plug, they’re a perfect balance of supple and rigid… they do the job perfectly.

I think mine are from some Korean semi-no-name brand which I don’t remember. There is no reason to go overboard with optical cables. If you get any signal at all, you are getting full-quality signal.

IHTH

JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com

[Aidan Clayton]

Hi, that’s great advice. I just ordered two cheapo looking cables that looked the same as the cable on my first Technics CD player. 2.2mm.

Any ideas on a cable that would connect an iPhone to enable recording of calls?

Thanks

Aidan

[Jean-christophe Boulay]

Sorry, can’t help you on the iPhone interfacing. I’m still resisting my inclusion into The Hive. I have an application to record calls on my Android phone in mp3 format, so I imagine something similar would exist for iPhone, unless that somehow violates Apple’s terms.

IHTH

JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com