Brand of Digital Optical cable to buy?

Any suggestions on which brand to get and where? Looking for best value.

It should not really matter. Since it is a digital connection, it either "works" or it doesn't, although the quality/durability of the connectors themselves might vary somewhat.

People report good luck with items at Partsexpress and Blue Jeans Cable.

Many people use Parts Express cables or Blue Jeans cables.

I have Axiom's 6ft Toslink cable. It looks very well made but I have not hooked it up to anything yet.

I also have RCA Digital series component video cables from Home Depot.....those are inexpensive!

Radio Shack Gold series is where I bought my Optical. I have a friend that purchased RCA from Walmart. Don't get caught up in the brand name thing, especially Monster, yuck....

http://www.monoprice.com is another place for great prices on various types of cables. Great quality also...

I also second the recommendation of the Radio Shack cables. I use the Evolution II cables (Platinum Series) in my setup and it works very well. I bought it for about $40 Cdn for 6ft. At that price, it has much better build quality than the cheap plastic Monster cables. It also has attached plastic cap savers so it won't get lost. I tried the Monster cables around that price range and couldn't tell a difference in sound quality.

Impact Acoustics has a great glass Toslink cable. Look for the Sonic Wave line. You can save 20% on everything via the Audioholics discount. Here's a direct link to the discount page at IA .

In reply to:
People report good luck with items at Partsexpress and Blue Jeans Cable.

I love BJC's products and most of my interconnects are from there. But I have never seen an optical cable there, only digital coax. A further bit about BJC: I have a blog (only 2 entries so far) that I started last month. The second entry is a price comparison between DIY interconnects and buying from BJC. This started when a friend asked me to help him make a bunch of interconnects for his system. He asked me because he knows I have made many, many cables in my time (I worked in a digital media R&D group at Intel for around 6 years, and became the de facto "cable guy"). I told him I bought my IC's from BJC because it's really not worth it to make your own. So I put the results in the blog. I already own the tools, so basically I would have paid maybe $80-$100 less to build the cables myself. But to me it was worth it to pay someone else $80 to assemble the cables.

Excellent feedback, Mark. Thank You.

But what if I wanted zircon-coated super-silver cryo-frozen mega-cable? What then? Huh?

I like Blue Jeans Cable not only because of the high quality materials and reasonable prices, but also because doing business with them helps support jobs in my "community" (in this case, Seattle; but my definition of "community" is a somewhat relative thing).

Wolf, it would be pretty tough to find an optical cable from the usual suppliers which didn't do an audibly perfect job of carrying the 1s and 0s. So buy on the basis of price either locally or from low-cost online sources such as Monoprice or others mentioned, plus Triangle .

In reply to:

But what if I wanted zircon-coated super-silver cryo-frozen mega-cable? What then? Huh?

Phhbbbbttt! Well at least 2 people have read my blog now. Ya know, I never actually looked up where BJC is located. I guess as long as it's in the fabulous PacNoWest, home of the 9-month liquid sunshine, it's all good.