Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions how to connect optical toslink cable?

thanks. time to get the mits' manual out, but only paying about $250.00, doubt it has the features you mentioned. last weekend when i told my wife i needed to stop at bb she rolled her eyes and asked what i needed now...just a couple of wires i said, but i was pressed for time and never made it. good thing she's working tomorrow, i can have it hooked up b/4 she gets home. kinda funny tho, i thought the a's sounded great. now i can't wait, think they open at 9am. that would be 6 west coast time

Saturn,

For non-24/96 content, the decision to use the analog outputs boils down to wether the DVD player has the better DAC or the receiver/pre-amp. Whichever has the better DAC will do the best job of converting that bitstream into an analog signal for amplification. For 24/96 content, you'll have to either use the analog cables or you'll need a receiver/DVD-A combo with Firewire (there are also a few cases where individual companies produced high bandwidth, proprietary digital connections such as the Denon AVR-5803 and DVD-9000).

yes indeedy...

I have a Pioneer 656A dvd/dvd-a player. I use the optical output for 2 channel stereo and movie watching, as my Rotel processor has much better DAC's than the dvd player.

When I do listen to DVD-A discs, I must resort to using the 6 analog output from the Pioneer.

spiff,

Does your system allow you to toggle easily between the two or do you have to muck around in menus?

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Firewire is a lot more flexible because it's just a serial digital standard for high bandwidth applications. It' doesn't much care what information is being carried and it has a respectable amount of bandwidth. DVI on the other hand is a parallel standard, I believe, and only carries video. I'm not aware of anyone using Firewire to transfer video to a monitor at this point but I don't see why they couldn't. It is the digital transmission standard of choice for DVD-Audio, and, as you mentioned, offers some unique network capabilities as well.

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Yes, DVI-D is a multi-channel standard (not byte-by-byte parallel, though). I believe that all DVI-D connections currently found in the HT gears is "single-link," which uses 3 "channels" (a channel = pair of copper wires) plus a clock pair; in contrast, the double-link DVI-D for larger computer displays uses 6 channels plus a clock channel.

I see that one nagging problem of both DVI-D and FireWire as they stand today is the cable-length limits -- DVI-D cables are usually limited to 5m (16') due to its high bandwidth (up to 165MHz/channel). One vendor, RAM Electronics, sells copper DVI-D cables of up to 15m (50') long. But I am not 100% sure about their reliability in carrying a full-HD digital video over a 15m run. I am not familiar enough about the cable length limitations of FireWire, but I believe it is much shorter considering its 400MHz bandwidth. I guess this, along with FireWire's bidirectionality, is a major reason why FireWire has been adopted only as the video recorder interface (besides the multi-channel audio) so far in the HT applications.

The video cable length might be a non-issue for people using a "television" as display device. But it is a real issue for people with front projectors, since the projector is often placed close to the back wall, while electronics are often located along the front wall. In my own case, in order neatly run the cable around the room, I need ~75' of cable run. Currently, the only way of carrying the DVI-D signal over 75' is to use the optical DVI-D extenders -- which cost well over $1K!!!

With the on-screen display, I have the menu up, and it's a quick toggle back and forth between optical and analog inputs. I do need the on-screen display on to do it though.

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Does your system allow you to toggle easily between the two or do you have to muck around in menus?

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Yes, my Elite 45TX selects the multi-channel analog input by one push of a remote button, and it remembers the selection for the given source gear.

Switching to multi-channel is indeed a single button push, but toggling between optical and analog inputs requires the onscreen menu. (For me at least)

On my Elite, switching between the optical/coaxial SPDIF and analog (and the auto-select) is also one-button, and again it remembers per source equipment.

Oh yeah! Well...umm...ah...



OK you win.