In all reviews that I have read there was not as big a difference between 5.1 channel tests as there was with 2 channel listening. Many of the participants here are clearly as well informed as anyone, but I am not so quick to dismiss the testing done by writers in home theater magazines.
They are most certainly very careful as to the way tests are conducted and have a lot to lose if they are not. They could lose credibility and their careers. Coax is a better choice because even if it is most noticible when listening to a c.d. in stereo that is still important to most users.

Martin,

I believe we have established that "If so much as a single bit error is injected into the signal as it traverses between your DVD Player and your DD or DTS decoder, the decoder will not be able to uncompress the data. I don’t mean that it will distort or compromise the uncompressed data; I mean IT WILL NOT BE ABLE TO UNCOMPRESS THE DATA AT ALL(Harv)". You stated that in the reviews you had read "there was not as big a difference between 5.1 channel tests as there was with 2 channel listening(Martin)". The fact that these "writers" claim to be able to hear any difference at all in 5.1 channel material, howevever minor, for me, destroys thier credibility.

You are correct that many of these writers and thier rags have alot to lose, mainly, advertising dollars. Thousands of potential new subscribers are born every day, but the number of advertisers stays esentially the same. (Is this payola?) One method of engaging a potential advertiser is simply to hype thier product. Profitability is the primary goal of most any company. I'm not sure how truth ranks.

Ron

Ron,
After a very good experience with switching from Monster speaker cable to Tributaries cable based upon a Home Theater review I may have been in a trusting mood when they reviewed coax vs. optical cables. I was able to A-B Tributaries optical & coax. I was able to do the same thing with XLO coax vs. optical. In both 5.1 and 2 channel modes
the coax was preferable even if by only a slight margin. Obviously no criteria seems to satisfy the
participants of this conversation and of course my opinion is inherently subjective but There It Is.
I used to know many musicians who could talk the talk but didn't really have the chops to back themselves up. Most of the answers here would put some reviewers to shame but I do wonder as to just how good most people are at listening critically.
There are no credentials that satisfy everyone but I have had many unususual experiences in my 30 years of working professionally as an award winning writer, producer and recording engineer that confirm that my opinion can withstand strict scrutiny. Try the A-B tests yourselves and return the cable that you don't prefer and if you don't prefer either keep the less expensive pair.

Very entertaining reading. Wonder if Martin has $1249 spare laying around to purchase "The Finest Digital Transfer Cable In the World?" ROFL - Carl

PS Don't forget you get two shirts laundered with each interconnect purchase.

Carl,
If you read my earlier notes you might have found that I recommended spending between $20 - 100 on cables. Where do you buy yours? at K- MART? ROFL

A Toslink Optical will rarely if ever outperform a coax link over the same distance. On the other hand if you are using EBU optical this is a different story. Consider that the former is plastic while the latter is glass fiber. Consider further that the former is found commonly on main stream consumer gear while the latter is usually onloy found in the pro side or high end consumer gear. Coax on the other hand is found and used in both areas. It also partially relates to the transmission devices feeding/reading the signals onto the fiber. Given the choice, most often the order of performance Best to Worst would be Glass Fiber EBU, Coax, and then Toslink.

Jack, how much does a glass fiber cable cost? and do these ratings of yours apply to anologue stereo as well as 5.1 channel? I am aware of the complications of comparing this way . I am asking for your opinion.

Jack,

Since all three types of cable are passing 100% of the audio data without so much as a single bit error, I am unclear on how one could be judged to outperform the other in this application.(digital audio) If a coat hanger can handle the bandwidth necessary for DD and DTS (see [Link: magnani.net]), then the performance capabilities of the three cable types is a non-issue. They all sound the same, including the coat hanger.

Ron

Ron, Try the link [Link: hometheatermag.com] that Doug W.sugested earlier and tell me if you can find fault with that article. Doug supplied a direct link to save time typing. I understand what your saying but maybe you are missing the point here. There is not supposed to be a difference , but there is.

With all due respect, I don't believe that either you or Joe Hageman (the author of the arcticle in question) have a grasp of the science involved. To suggest that the sound of a DD or DTS signal can be at all changed by the cable (aside from not delivering it) would be analogous to saying that a MP3 file downloaded via a T1 would or could sound any different than the same file downloaded via AOL or NetZero. Sure, if you had a T1 ($1000 monthly price tag) you would feel great about it but the MP3 files you downloaded would contain the same data as the same files downloaded via NetZero ($0 monthly price tag).

Martin, your credentials are impressive and I'm sure that when it comes to musical content you are deserving of the awards you have garnered, but this issue (the transference of DVD audio to DAC) is not within your area of expertise. For you to deny the undisputable truths as proven by Al in his work ([Link: magnani.net]) that could withstand the highest degree of scrutiny and to ask me to rely on nothing but opinions of others not privy to these truths, is much like you insisting that I admit the world is flat after I had sailed around it many times. I have seen the light, and I shall never traverse under that darkened sky again.

If you wish to see who has the tallest trophies, the dearest friends, or the biggest d__k then I'll gladly continue this correspondence via e-mail (so we might provide photo attachments) but for now suffice it to say, the world is not flat no matter how many people you find that are of the opinion it is.

Respectfully,
Ron Davis

Ron ,I read that article and it seems conclusive.
It has certainly widened my perspective . It is true that this is not an area of expertise of mine. I don't deny the conclusions of research, but I would appreciate an explanation of my experiencing definite differences in timbre when comparing cables at home. The source remained the same and every cable sounded a little different. I assure you that I am not imagining this. Well.. we have certainly beaten this topic to death and I would like to thank everyone involved for their spirited and enlightening insights. Good luck and good listening to all.

Martin, if I bought at cables at K-Mart I would be paying too much. ;-) I hope that your comment wasn't intended as an insult. As to the real debate about cables - the diffrences do not exisit in the sonic realm. They perform the same there. Consturction quality, connection, longeivty, corrosion, etc. can all be influenced by how they are built. I would probably buy the coax for that reason (tends to be less fragile than TOSLINK.)

However, the included cables with most gear are perfectly fine. Also, if you do some research on the placebo effect, you will find that there are patients who have had serious maladies treated effectively by sugar pills. This just goes to show the power of the mind.

Carl, no insult intended but this "placebo" idea doesn't really answer the question. I had no expectations whatsoever when testing cables, I was not "looking" for any result. I still trust my ears and perhaps the differences lie somewhere other than the wire, but there are differences. The psycology is as vague as the reason for sound differences. AS I stated earlier I am not imagining this.

I don't know if this has already been said as I haven't had time to read all the messages but there is a reason why coax is better than optical. The digital signal starts as an electrical signal, in a coax it is sent as an electrical signal and used as an electrical signal at the processing end. When using optical the signal has to be converted from an electrical signal to light and then back to electrical again. These conversions can result in errors in the signal finally received by the processor.

Martin:

The placebo effect applies to your test in the following way: you listened to the cables looking for a difference in their sound. Therefore you heard one. A good way to test this is to have someone claim to have switched the cables on you, and see if you hear the "difference" between the cable and itself.

Eddy:

The short answer to your explanation is that digital transmission is impervious to these minor signal degradations. Why? Well, the whole point of digital is to quantize the values to 0 or 1. For example, circuits (processors, RAM, etc.) consider anything less than 0.33 to be 0 and above 0.66 to be 1. (I might have the exact numbers wrong, but that's the right ballpark.)

So let's say the electrical-to-optical-to-electrical conversion introduces a 1% error (which would be extraordinarily high). That means your receiver would see 0.01 or 0.99 instead of 0 or 1. But it would 'know' that 0.01 really means 0 and 0.99 really means 1. So it sees 0 and 1, even though there was minor degradation over the wire.

That quantization is why digital data is so accurately transmitted, copied, etc.