Optical or Coaxial

[Link]

Are there any differences in Digital Opitcal or Coaxial? It seems like most DVD players I have looked at have coaxial outputs.

[Ric]

I was just looking into that myself. Most say that there is little to no difference until you run into long runs. If side by side, the digital coaxial is just as good as optical and you can reuse any RCA cables for it. Audiophiles may claim uniqueness but as far as getting a DTS signal from my DVD to my receiver and sound great - no problems so far today.

[Mark Lamutt]

For digital coax, you should use a video grade (RG59 or better) RCA cable, rather than one of the little tiny RCA audio cables. Other than that, there's no such thing as a specialty digital coax cable.

As for which is better, I don't hear any difference between the two, so use whichever is more convenient.

[cdru]

Fiber is more fragile then coax especially regarding bend radius, but once it's ran it likely doesn't get moved much. It is also immune to stray RF noise. This likely isn't too much of a problem as if there was enough to cause problems on a coax run, all your other cables likely would be having problems.

You probably see coax more often on cheaper DVD players as it saves a few cents in production costs. An RCA jack is cheaper to make then a fiber jack.

[dhomoney]

Remember folks, this is for digital audio, if the bitstream gets their, then there is absolutely no difference between fiber and RCA. Fiber's advantage is in its potential for long runs and it isn't affected by RF, that said if you get a signal to your receiver it will be the same either way.

[hometheaterman]

I use coaxial but my dvd player and reciever have both. I am using some Monster Cable Digital Audio Coax cable from my DVD player and another one from my CD player to my reciever but People say monster cable is a rip off which I don't know if it is any better than any other cable but does work ok.

[dhomoney]

Well the reason they say it is a ripoff, especially for digital audio, is that there is no difference in the signal between them and a walmart brand. The reason for this is it is digital, ones and zeros, and if you get sound out of your speakers you are getting the signal. Now for analog stuff you can get a warping of the signal.

[MarkA]

The advantage to fiber is that it doesn't have an electrical connection. Helps avoid ground loops. Till we have fiber video, etc it means nothing though