Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Have I gone crazy about my Toslink cable?

Hi everyone. I hope you can answer this question for me: I recently moved my girlfriend 400 miles away to go to college. She took our furniture and everything once we found an apartment, and I started looking for a job to move down with her eventually. She would come up and visit me once in a while. ANYWAY, when she came up, she'd bring our DVD player to hook up up north, since that was the only one we had. NOW, we hook it up normally with a Toslink, but when she'd bring it up to visit, she'd leave the Toslink downstate and we'd just use RCAs. Now that I've moved down here, I went to hook up the DVD player via the Toslink and it seems like the ends don't fit. They are long and skinny instead of blocky-square shaped. Am I CRAZY, or is it possible in unhooking a toslink that the ends can just come off? My girlfriend insists she didn't remove the blocky ends, but I can't figure out why my cable won't fit into my equipment anymore, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. When I purchased the cable, I didn't buy adapters or anything, so as far as I can tell no obvious parts are missing.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can shed some light on this.

Very strange. If the ends of your toslink cable don't look like this:



Then it's not going to work. Are you sure it's the same cable you had before?

Are you sure she brought back the same cable as the one you sent her with? Describe "long and skinny ends". Like RCA connectors or what?

Optical cables also come with "miniplug" ends that look like this:



Is this the type of connector you've got? They do make adapters for these that convert them into toslink. Maybe your cable came with those adapters and they got lost during the moves?

man peter, you must have one hell of a clip art library. you always seem to come up with a graphic.

A long and skinny end huh? Well...dipping into my IT knowledge...you may have a firewire cable there...or perhaps a USB cable. Either one, of course, will not work with your DVD player. Go off of the pictures that have been provided here to know what it SHOULD look like.

I KNOW it's the same cable, and yes it now looks like that (beautiful image by the way) second picture. So are you saying my cable CAME with adapters, and they've since been lost? I KNEW I shouldn't have let her unhook the DVD player without me. I'm no expert, but I would have at least noticed pieces coming off!!!
Thanks for all the quick replies!

Might the adaptors been left stuck in the DVD player, and receiver, when she removed the cord the last time?

All sorts of crazy things happen with those cables. I had a friend let me borrow their receiver when I had none and she had the plastic cover that covers the optical tip on the cable stuck into the input on the back of the receiver for the digital optical input. She had just shoved the whole thing in there. It's amazing that it all fit...and that the cable's beam still worked through it! I, of course, removed it and just didn't say anything...