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Is the Optical Cable Dying? (cnet.com)
Geoffrey Morrison from CNET explains how the optical cable is "dying a very slow death": The official term for optical audio cable is "Toslink," short for Toshiba Link. Developed in the early '80s to connect their CD players to their receivers, it was a red laser optical version of the Sony/Phillips "Digital Interconnect Format" aka S/PDIF standard. You've seen standard S/PDIF connections a bunch too; they're often called "coax digital." Optical had certain benefits over copper cables, but they were also more fragile, and for a long time, more expensive. Though glass cables were available, for even more money, most optical cables were made from cheap plastic. This limited their range to in-room use, primarily. Through the '90s and 2000's, the optical cable was near-ubiquitous: The easiest way to get Dolby Digital and DTS from your cable/satellite box, TiVo, or DVD player to your receiver. Even in the early days of HDMI, right next to it would be the lowly optical cable, ready in case someone's receiver didn't accept HDMI. But now more and more gear are dropping optical. It's gone completely on the latest Roku and Apple TV 4K, for example. It's also disappeared from many smaller TVs, though it lingers on in larger ones, a potentially redundant backup to HDMI with ARC. The reason for this? Soundbars...
Toslink has tremendous potential, especially with better codecs.
USB and HDMI connections are susceptible to the "ground loop" problem which can cause excessive hum in amplifiers.
I might have been the only household that skipped directly from composite to HDMI.
HDMI and Display Port does it all now.
But electric vehicles are
Who would waste an entire HDMI port for ARC? Manufacturers are stingy enough as it is with ports and given CEC/HDMI 2.0 pushing 18gbps non-native switching is at the very least inconvenient.
Or deal with crummy HDMI electrical issues...Seen enough HDMI ports go bad in my life I would much rather prefer optical HDMI.
Now what really sucks ass is SPDIF over copper. You can't have a cable longer than several feet before reflections turn everything to shit. They should just use 2-wire Ethernet and put copper SPDIF out of its misery.
It has always been rare for little shitty plastic boxes to sport toslink and having it is rather pointless in my view. Most people only care about toslink from the TV to receiver. Exception to this is if you want to be able to listen to music without the TV on. I run a separate toslink from my TiVo to receiver specifically so that I can listen to music without screwing with the TV.
No not at all. Then again, if you limit it specifically to fiber audio, it might well. However that is a flawed, dumb definition.
especially with better codecs.
Also, modern plastic chemistries have tremendously improved, with things like longer distances (>100m) and/or multi-gigabites now possible on POF (Plastic Optical Fiber).
That means that if you can wire up your whole house or you whole building LAN with cheap plastic oprtical fiber (doesn't even require a termination, you just cut the cable and plug then directly into the connector of the box, a little bit reminiscent of speaker connectors), you could definitely go beyond in-room use. Distributing sound over long distances if you want, *without* any ground loops.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Old tech made obsolete, slowly disappears from new products. News at 11.
Seriously though, I had nothing but trouble with SPDIF. The finicky connection would often desync with my Xbox360 and IIRC then I'd have to turn the receiver off and back on to resync it, and it'd make a weird noise until I did. Bending the cable just wrong would exacerbate the issue.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It might also be a race to the bottom: appliances are cheaper, so not popular features get dropped. Many TVs might not receive analogue video anymore.
I grew up in the 90s and I use optical audio, mainly because my dad uses optical audio. I don't know of any other person who uses it or has used it. I find it hard to believe it was "nearly ubiquitous" for 10-20 years, I think it was little known then, and remains so now. I also think it unlikely that because cheaper devices don't have it now because it is "going away" like consumer trends are some mystical power. Its a more expensive alternative to conventional audio connections, and most people, particularly low end users will not ever want this. It makes sense for it to only be on the "bigger" but more relevantly expensive tv sets, it provides a high quality audio connection with very low interference at a higher price. I don't remember ever seeing it on cheaper tvs.
but why the fuck would you use toslink when you don't need it? most people just connect to the tv and thats it.
the tv might have digital out, sure. but a roku you connect through the tv anyways even if you have an amp!
also, why the fuck just not use digital copper coax...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
With audio equipment, dependable galvanic isolation is a good feature.
Just look at the data rates we have over copper network cables. Even the oldest coax network was 10mbit/s. The highest quality audio signal is still just a few hundred kbit/s. Why wood you need an optical for this? It has always been a useless waste of money.
If you put the SPDIF port on the Tivo, then only content played from Tivo could use the surround sound.
If you put the SPDIF port on the Apple TV box, then only content played from the Apple TV box could use the surround sound.
You put it on the TV, so the stuff playing on the TV (from any of the ports from any of the AppleTV, Tivo, Cable, etc.) is routed to the surround sound amp.
ARC is supposed to be the same over a HDMI cable. But its implementation is hit and miss.
As to why they'd remove SPDIF from Apple TV etc. what the fuck was it ever doing there? If I plugged the optical cable from the Apple TV to the amplifier, and then switched the TV to a broadcast channel, the audio would still come from the Apple TV. This is why they put the port on the TV, and its the only place it should ever be.
The problem with HDMI is that it is an A/V interconnect.
At the end of the day you need a pure audio interconnect to transmit digital audio to amp and speakers, without getting those obsoleted every few years by video codec changes. You can argue newer audio codecs are better, but the limiting factor for sound is almost always the analog part. Smarter digital encoding is not going to help vibrate the air better than a bigger expensive not replaced every year amp/speaker set.
Video is quite different as newer tech helps cramming more pixels so regular updates and not investing in long-term hardware makes sense.
So... You can build a cheap cat-5E UTP copper cable with simple tools and it can transmit data at gigabit, but you mean that you require an (relatively) expensive optical link to transmit some few Mbps of high-quality audio? It's bits, dude.
It's been a long time since we used to name standards based on their physical layer (hint: fibre channel). Nowadays it is much more convenient yo use the HDMI cable to send the EXACT same signal you would send using S/PDIF.
Actually... DRM and the fact, that the components for the alternatives are cheaper to manufacture.
I found it pleasant to use optical in a stereo setting to solve ground loop issues (hum!), since there is no electrical connection
Specifically to use optical audio out instead of analog out from my tv to my hifi.
I later found it was the antenna connection that caused the ground loop.
Nowadays I use hdmi for everything which is balanced (if I remember well), hence no hum issues either
"The reason for this? Soundbars..."
Nope.
The reason for this is - I don't want a separate connector for audio unless it's in conjunction with another connector (i.e. I either want one cable only, or one cable + additional audio to go to external devices). The external device itself could happily use the HDMI audio, and offer passthrough / splitting of the signal.
The problem is that the "other" connector almost certainly has to be able to supply video, audio, data and - sorry - power. Fibre cannot supply power. Ever.
And then most people would rather give it a whole HDMI with everything, rather than run a separate cable just for audio. To be honest, splitters are in the throwaway price range now, even with HDCP support etc.
The problem is that manufacturer's think "fibre just for audio" is a useful thing to have alongside "copper that does absolutely everything" when both are commodity pricing. Hell, just give me 10 HDMI slots and if I really want to run a soundbar, I'll run one with HDMI and/or put a convertor on it.
The other thing that matters - nobody really cares about the fibre "perfect sound" rubbish except audiophiles. But that's like saying "nobody cares about the flight simulator being pixel perfect except for qualified 747 pilots". You can't cater to that niche, as the business case isn't there to do so in a commercial product. But 99.9% of people are quite happy with MP3s, copper cables (especially digital copper cables), and the various MPEG/H264 etc. compressions.
I've been in IT for 20 years. I've honestly NEVER used an optical connection for sound. I deploy AV stuff all the time. I've even done bits of theatre stuff. The only optical connections I've ever used a networking fibres. And they are so cheap they don't even figure, what costs is the cutting and polishing, which wouldn't be present on a pre-made patch cable. So I also call rubbish on the "fibre is expensive, or can't reach across the room" line too.
But if I've never used SPDIF, I'm pretty sure most other people haven't either. And given that even RCA connectors are going the way of the dodo (and SCART in Europe), I can't say that SPDIF is going to last any longer.
Now, if you had a hybird, cable/fibre. Maybe that would serve. If it could do everything HDMI did. But HDMI even does Ethernet if you buy the right kit. So I can't fathom how you'd cut into their business.
All we really need is a merger of USB3 and HDMI and we have one connector for ABSOLUTELY everything. Including a decent amount of power. But fibre isn't necessary for that and would lose enormously if it was attempted.
I've had probably a dozen devices with an optical output, laptops, CD players, DVD players, music streaming boxes, and I'm probably forgetting something. What was rare was anything with an optical audio input, or it seems that way to me. The only thing I can recall having an optical input was this fancy (for the time) SoundBlaster card I bought as part of a computer system from my brother.
I've also had a lot of things with S/PDIF copper inputs and outputs but I don't recall ever having a situation where I actually used them. Most cases for using audio cables from a device to another is connecting an audio source directly to an amplifier. I've had hi-fi stereo systems in the past but the lack of anything with digital inputs meant all those things with digital outputs would be connected with the analog outputs to the pre-amp.
I guess I would have used the optical cables if there were more products that had optical inputs. I suppose I didn't really look all that hard for them but then if all these devices had optical outputs then someone was using them, right? No one I knew used them, but then that's not something that comes up in conversation often.
Now we have digital audio over HDMI, USB, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and more. These cables do more than carry audio too, such as video, power, and remote control signals. I liked the idea of optical audio because it gives a digital signal and keeps electrical isolation, but it never seemed to get off the ground for me.
Optical audio only seems to come up for me when I have a poorly configured Linux audio driver that turns on an optical output, I notice a red dot on a wall, and it takes a minute to realize where it's coming from. I then think for a second on how it might be nice to use that digital audio for something, and then remember I don't have anything with an optical input, and forget about it again.
Is optical audio dying? I have to ask, was it ever alive?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
aka "We put shit speakers in the television so you would be forced to buy them separately."
I still use S/PDIF in one form or another, and some of my computers only have the optical version. For starters, I don't have a TV that can input audio via HDMI, and if I did, I'd still need a S/PDIF from that to my amplifier. The display is a regular monitor which I might some day recycle into desktop use.
I first came across S/PDIF last decade, as I found out my laptop could output the optical version through the 3.5 mm plug with an adapter. I still think it's a great solution to the limited space issue for laptop connectors. However, they seemed to disappear the moment HDMI came about; who needs separate geeky cables, when you can just buy an all-in-one solution for docile consumers.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I tend to think connections die because it just was never widely supported and understood by the consumer. In fact even today most people are fine with cheaper analog connection. Although HDMI has been one connection that was universally accepted, optical was never something people really considered. Strangely my Bose Cimemate system basically had only RCA analog and optical for audio in. About the only place I use optical these days, but it does work well.
the more I think of it, the more I suspect this is designed to "get rid of the analog hole"
removing the headphone jack (unencrypted analog audio), and the toslink/SPDIF connector (unencrypted digital audio) goes towards the goals of the mafiaa...
You miss the point, its an audio only connection used to drive amplifiers. It's used on the speakers for surround sound devices. It's use is to connect the TV audio out to the 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound amplifier for your home theatre amplifier. That way, your chromecast or smartTV can play audio to the surround sound speakers.
"was it ever alive"
Yeh, it continues to be the main way to send audio to an amplifier.
"Now we have digital audio over HDMI, USB, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and more"
None of that is relevant to a surround sound amplifier.
Honestly, just go buy yourself a 5.1 surround sound amplifier, connect your TV audio ooutput to that amplifier audio input via the optical cable. Then you'd understand what its there for.
I use it almost daily. Not only on my home stereo when streaming from my rMBP, but also in the office, for high end audio / mic setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
my reaction to the headline was that ethernet or fiber optic cable was being replaced by wifi for internet access or something - whatever this audio thing is, it never lived, so it can't be dead
Fiber optic cable is far more expensive to make and even more expensive to terminate than copper, and modern modulation methods allow extremely high data rates over the latter, making optical fiber irrelevant for the throughput required for home A/V systems.
I actually just started using them in the past year.
I bought a few Chromecast Audio's, and since I could I used optical cable to connect them to the amplifiers for minimum noise.
I also got a NUC not long ago, and wanted to connect the audio from the NUC to my desktop computer so I could listen to stuff on the NUC using the same headset I use for my desktop.
To do this I got a HDMI audio splitter, and fed that to my desktop. I tried using the regular 3.5mm line-out to line-in cable, but the background noise from the NUC was intolerable. So, I switched to using an optical cable which has zero background noise.
So, I'd say it still has a place, though the combined 3.5mm copper/optical jack seems to be a better solution going forward compared to the slightly awkward TOSLINK connector.
The merits of TOSLink notwithstanding, why is it, in 2003, I had SoundStorm built into my motherboard, and it allowed me a 5.1 Dolby Digital sound path to my A/V Receiver from my computer for ALL of my audio, including game audio - yet in 2017, I need to buy a Xonar sound card (forget SoundBlaster, because their digital drivers suck ass and their high end card sits on a shelf here) to get the same functionality?
Likewise, we have 7.1 and greater speaker systems, but the stores all push 2.1 soundbars. Ugh. I've been enjoying surround sound since the early 90s. I like having noises behind me when watching shows.
I remember laughing out loud when I was looking for a toslink cable a few years ago, and I noticed it had gold plated connectors.
Yes, a gold plated optical cable! What the f...
Of course, that was the only one they had, so I actually own a gold plated toslink cable, damnit.
My stereo is old enough not to have HDMI switching, but it's DTS so why replace it? My TV has HDMI switching, and it has a digital audio passthrough to my stereo in the form of an optical output. My amplifier has one coaxial and three or four optical spdif connections. The last thing on which I actually used the coaxial connection was an Apex DVD player of yore. There was no good reason to use optical cables (it's digital audio, so you can solve the ground loop problem easily enough without degrading the signal — does coaxial spdif have enough power to run an opto-isolator?) because of the low bitrates involved, but that's what everyone chose to implement. My PC has a coaxial digital audio output, but I've never used it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My country confined cable service to capital cities (until satellite delivery) and VHS didn't offer digital audio. So co-axial digital and optical digital occupied the niche period where DVD was state-of-the-art but audio devices didn't accept HDMI inputs.
Netcraft does not confirm it.
Status: hoax.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I use my Toslink for my sound bar. All my HDMI ports are dedicated to my various content boxes or gaming systems. Optical audio works well enough.
My soundbar is connected via optical, I only needed 2 channel audio and the soundbar only has optical and RCA jacks.
Most of the time they're worse than a good TV's built-in speakers, why even bother
HDMI consists of 19 different pins in a massive cable with huge connectors. Its very versatile but it is also way overkill. Keep in mind, not everyone needs to transmit video. When connecting digital audio, TOSLink is pretty damned good. The TOSLink cables are nice and flexible and very thin. Maybe they need to be replaced, but replace them with HDMI? That's crazy.
Also HDMI has that fun HDCP. Please don't use this more than they make us. Older tech might not be as good but if it doesn't have DRM, that makes it better in my book.
HDMI has "changed" every few years, but the cable is exactly the same and compatibility hasn't really changed. No, we don't need one more competing standard.
Anyplace people use variable speed drives for motors and don't install reactors on the drives.
It's not a "laser", it's a bog-standard red LED. Come on, who is writing these stories? Creimer with his penchant for aggrandizing everything like an eight-year-old seeking attention?
and it works great.
At work we have a very nice looking executive conference room that was mostly configured before I worked here. If you look at that picture the audio equipment is behind the wall with the pictures on it. The main screen is behind the photographer, and so is the PC that runs the main screen. The tech who did part of the original setup ran an 1/8" to RCA cable from the TV's output all the way to the audio amplifier behind that other wall, past florescent lights and everything else in the ceiling. To say the least there was a buzz in the system that I could sometimes get rid of by wiggling cables, putting a little shielding here or there and praying for the best. I didn't like that solution.
Now, I can work fiber optics, I learned that from my years at NASA. I had never really worked with TOS before beyond using some cheap plastic light-guide short distances on stereo equipment on occasion and with my Turtle Beach headset on my work Mac, main system sound went to the dongle via TOS and the USB portion did voice - an awesome setup on what would have been an awesome headset had they not used the most brittle plastic they could find to mold it. I started calling fiber suppliers looking for the connectors so I could make my own cable - they didn't call back. It took a little research to find out that TOS doesn't work on standard OC3 cable, or any other fiber I have run in the past, part of the reason my suppliers didn't carry it. I also found mixed information about the range of TOS saying it topped out around 15 feet or so, and some giving it a lot more.
I figured out it's a lot like Ethernet - some who learned Ethernet 25 years ago is going to keep in mind there's a limit to accumulative cable length throughout the whole network, the longer you make one cable the shorter the rest have to be, that it's a collision based system where only two systems can talk at a time, etc... Things that used to be true and are still true on really, really old equipment, some of which may still be in use, but using more up to day components there's a new reality. You can now buy TOS in high quality glass fiber, and it will go further. You still have limitations because the width of the fiber has to be "wide" to accommodate signal - at least I assume it does, I don't know if it's single-mode or multi, but I'm assuming it carries a wave form instead of a simple on/off since the requirements seem to stand. I eyeballed the room - I didn't really measure it, and I shopped. I found a 65 ft cable from a company I had never heard of and I have to tell you it works great. No more static, the sound quality is great. The only complaint is they can no longer use the TV remote to change volume, but the volume keys on the keyboard work. Since they only use the Direct TV in that room during really big soccer matches I don't see an issue.
I don't think I could have stretched HDMI that far. I could have converted it to SDI and changed it back to do it, but that would require an active box on both sides since nothing in play supports SDI natively. SDI is great for professional equipment, but the budgets I get to do thing usually don't allow for true professional grade equipment - not to mention pro grade equipment is usually a little behind consumer grade equipment when it comes to screen sizes and other little features that advertising people lock onto and "must have". I think I'm finally past having to explain to desktop users why they're better off with a wired keyboard and an Ethernet cable instead of wireless and WiFi, the power of news and buzz words is incredibly strong to marketing people and even though pure logic can win a lot of arguments, when the person who controls the money wants the biggest things with the right buzz words you sometimes have to get it, and SDI isn't a modern buzzword, even if modern SDI can support 4K.
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I agree with other posters here that I don't think it was ever truly alive. I used it on my systems but then I'm the tech of the family (and the extended family) and knew how the stuff all worked and that included friends and family that were big into music too. I think I'm the only one that actually used the XBox 360 toslink adapter!
But, still, even with the convenience of one cable connections via HDMI (if they ever get all the kinks worked out) - there was something nostalgic geeky cool about connecting your components with light cables!
There are audiophile lunatics out there who will argue with a straight face that USB into a DAC gives you better sound than optical in, but of course digital in is digital in and it makes not one iota of difference what cable you use so long as the filtering stages are the same. I use toslink because my DAC has only 2 USB ins and I have way more than 2 input devices so my CD player is relegated to optical-in.
If you ask anyone who cares about music, be they audio enthusiasts or musicians, they will tell that if you care about sound quality when playing music from your computer, either get an external sound interface or a heavily shielded internal sound card, because all the digital noise inside a computer will be picked up by the sensitive analogue circuits in the sound card.
Well, there's a different option. Many onboard sound cards have a Toslink out, and by using it, you are keeping the digital noise of the computer away from the analog side of whatever D/A converter you have on the other end.
If you already have something with a Toslink input, this may be a much cheaper alternative to getting an expensive "pro" sound interface.
Dying?
Since I first saw the socket, I've been waiting for it to become relevant.
I've never needed to use it, so I've never bought a cable.
When compared to copper cables. I had my PS2 hooked up to AV receiver, and boy, it was twice as loud than RCA/cinch plugs. And the sound fidelity was also awesome. Crispiest sound I have ever heard up to this day.
I don't understand where the comments about being expensive comes from when talking about the current situation. As far as I can see, TOSlink is the cheaper of the three digital alternatives (coax/HDMI), especially with longer cables. 5/10/20 meter TOSlink cables are $3/5/8 on Ebay, which is less than the alternatives, and will be a fraction of the diameter of the two other cables at those lengths.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the convenience and progression of other standards killed it?
Newer standards like the latest HDMI or USB Type-C, plus older ones like DisplayPort are making the whole video+audio thing a one cable matter, there's not a whole lot of incentive to go beyond that.
I also have to say that standardization and how different types of media used the Dolby standards and stuff like THX and whatnot were pretty inconsistent. This is one of the things that made me give up the bother.
I guess the newer soundbars that can do some really advanced and neat stuff regarding surround sound might be the final nail to the coffin, but optical audio has been dying for quite a while now. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that it never quite caught on in a mainstream sense... I dunno many people who uses it. Then again, a whole ton of people I know just uses plain TV speakers, or crappy generic pair of speakers for computers.
I have some really old Logitech 5.1 speakers that I used Toslink/spdif for quite a while... it made sense back in a time you either used that or 3/4 different analog audio cables for the job. This was back some 15 years ago.
Problem is that a whole lot of content that was supposed to be Dolby Digital and THX certified came with all sorts of different levels for center channel and subwoofer, I'd often have to tweak it individually, and at some point it started bothering me so much that I ended up just skipping the whole deal and turning on the double stereo setting and leaving it at that (it uses plain regular stereo sound and replicates the same thing for the front and back speaker set). Also a problem that everytime you wanted to watch regular content without DD and THX you had to switch the profile manually.. perhaps newer speaker sets does this automatically. But on my set the result is a mutting of dialogues and overall audio weirdness that was just irritating.
It was certainly worth for a few stuff, but just doesn't make a whole lot of sense anymore. Harder and more expensive to get working switchers and extenders, you have to worry a whole lot more on installation, it's less flexible and you can't tuck it around some corners without risking to break the cable, and then the advantage on interference and whatnot is just not quite there anymore. Newer standards are pretty shielded, hiss and hums will most likely only bother audiophiles.
Not only that, but wireless transmission advanced quite a bit too. Back then it was either impossible or cost prohibitive to get a device to transmit audio+video wirelessly. It's still not exactly cheap these days, but it's reasonable enough.
A pitty though. Because another huge issue is simply stagnation. The standard never changed or evolved much.
I have a few pieces of audio equipment in my house that either take analog or Toslink. I will always pick Toslink over analog. Particularly for long runs. Long runs over analog is the domain of the utterly stupid. I don't need expensive Monster Toslink cables. I buy mine from eBay. These things are dirt cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
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Optical fibres are great for transatlantic data transfer. For getting data from coast to cost. But for local installations, they are just not cost effective. Splicing fibre is too expensive, transceivers are too expensive. 100Mbit Ethernet was often over fibre, but now everything is twisted pair, up to 10Gbit. HDMI is twisted pair. DisplayPort is. Coax and fibre are dead.
I really hope they don't phase it out of TVs because for me headphones are important in apartments where you can't get by with any kind of sound whatsoever at night..
The easiest way to hook up a pair of surround headphones is to get ones that use optical connections (A Turtle Beach I have for XBox does this) and hook it up to the optical out of the TV.
This way my headphone is connected to everything. PS4, PC, Xbox, Switch, and Amazon Fire.. without having to have multiple headphones or other headaches.
I made the mistake of buying the same type for PC. It only has a USB 3.0 wireless connection. They are basically a paperweight. If I use them for PC gaming while streaming, I can't record the audio in OBS because it goes to the headphones and a lot of cards removed the "Stereo Mix / What U Hear" option.
To me hardware audio >>>>>>>>>>> (like REALLY >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>) USB or other PC-only type connections.
S/PDIF does not transmit electricity, therefore, noise coming from an impedance mismatch between the source and destination does not occur. I love SPDIF because there is no audible hiss. I would not purchase any amplifier without it, and I will add a discrete sound card if the motherboard lacks it.
I still use the older types and newest HDMI.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Try passing a 4k signal through a receiver with only HDMI 1.2 support so the receiver can get the audio, then tell me "compatibility hasn't really changed". It's people who bought their audio equipment before the current version of HDMI even existed, but who wish to use the features of the current version, who need an audio-only return path, separate from HDMI, so they don't have to upgrade their receiver every time a new version of HDMI comes out and they wish to use it. The audio-only connection allows them to remove the audio receiver from the video path, where it really doesn't belong in the first fucking place.
Follow?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Or, we need the standard to allow pass-through of signals the device doesn't understand (and pass through the EDID of the TV for capabilities) - the audio portion of the standard doesn't have to change. USB 1.1 devices work fine on a USB 3.1 bus.
ARC mostly solves this in a different way, because the TV handles input switching and only sends audio to the receiver - provided that all of your devices requiring the higher standard are connected directly to the TV.
Also provided that your TV and receiver both support ARC. A surprising many still do not.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Neither my TV nor my receiver does. You can only fix problems like that going forward. A lot of 4K blu-ray players have 2 HDMI outputs - one for the TV and one for the receiver. This is not a good way to handle it. ARC is its own separate protocol negotiation, so I hope by the time I need a new receiver, they'll have it to a point that there is some degree of forward compatibility.
I got lucky and got HDMI 1.4a support 7 years ago, so I haven't had any needs change. I'm still looking for a passive 3DTV, but the whole market disappeared while I waited for the specs I wanted.
In my case, when I replace my receiver I'll actually want to re-purpose the old one. Probably for audio only. I'm hoping by then that ARC
You seem to have dropped some of your post...
When you made that 7 years claim, I looked it up... HDMI 1.4a has been out for 8 years? Why is there still so much HDMI 1.2 gear not only still on the market, but still being released?!?!?!
This is why TOSLINK is still around.
At any rate, I have no dog in this race. Similar to your quest for a 3DTV, the receivers I wanted have dropped off the market. In my case, it happened while I was transitioning from being a penniless twit to having money to throw at this, and I haven't had time to research the market and figure out what I want to get instead.
Off hand, do you know of any decent 7.1 receivers currently on the market that will properly downmix to 5.1 or 3.1, rather than just dropping those channels if I don't have speakers on them? My setup right now is 3.1 and I'd have to talk the wife into 5.1 in this apartment (she hates having speakers placed around); 7.1 is a no-go here, but we aren't gonna live in this place forever, so that's temporary. I want a receiver that will work for me now, but can also come with me when I move to a place where a 7.1 setup is feasible. ARC with CEC would be nice; I honestly don't know if my TV has ARC support, but it does do CEC quite nicely and, well, coming up on 6 years old it's probably the next thing I'm replacing. The ability to stream Pandora natively would be a plus, but not a deal breaker if not present, though bluetooth with apt-x and AAC support is more or less a must.
I'm not asking you to do my research for me, but if you already know of something that fits that bill it would be greatly appreciated.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
No way to go back and edit - but I said what I wanted to say earlier in the post and forgot I originally started it further down. I got a refurb Pioneer VSX-520-K for just over $200 back then. It's a 5.1 with DTS-MA and TrueHD support. The VSX-521-K had ARC.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about dropping the other two speakers off of 7.1. It's not like they would have different audio, just different positioning than the other rear speakers. As long as you have rear channel audio I can't imagine you'd lose anything of value from the other two (if you don't have the speakers anyway). And if you don't have 5.1 yet, you'll have to realize that rear speakers are a very rarely used effect anyway. 3.1 is 90% of the benefit - it's all about that good center channel (and a sub to a lesser extent). Which is something I didn't realize until I bought my first good center channel speaker.
I'm a real cheapskate in this space. I started with a DVD Home Theater-in-a-box over 10 years ago and the only external input was stereo RCA (which did at least handle Pro-Logic II downmix). Later, I bought the Pioneer receiver and a powered subwoofer and kept all my cheap speakers to start (and no - they were the wrong impedence - too low - and I'm glad I never fried the receiver). I replaced two-by-two, after I bought the center channel about a year later. I didn't replace my rear speakers with good ones until just a few years ago.
I still see refurb and overstock VSX-series units floating around - some with HDMI 2.0. They're all discontinued, I think. I don't have anything to recommend, but Onkyo and Pioneer seem to be the better priced for what you get.
These cables, aka. the concept of light used to transfer data, are till used in huge, in networking and super-computer cabling. So yeah, it maybe dead for audio(toslink), but the principle still lives on (widely) in the computing/networking world!
Onkyo and Pioneer are the two brands I look at first, thank you for confirming the merit to my bias. Yamaha is in the running as well, but I'm not as much of a fan of their consumer gear as I am of their pro and prosumer stuff. The use case for 5.1 and 7.1 is more so I can hear my buddy coming up behind me in CoD, but I do also have a few Blu-Rays where it's actually used quite effectively, so I don't want to discount it right out of the gate.
I looked at a great many HTIB solutions but they all seemed to have the same input limitation you mentioned, so I never bought. Looking back, now I wish I had.
Thanks again for confirming that I'm at least looking in the right direction, and for the tip about the 521 vs 520.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
S/PDIF has the audio sample in bits 4â"27 of the 32-bit frame. The original AES3 has bits 4â"7 optionally assigned to a secondary audio channel not used by S/PDIF, so the bits have no other assigned function than to carry the low bits of 24-bit audio samples.
(The other 8 bits are 4 bits of sync header, 1 bit of sample validity used by CD players to mark errors, 1 bit of "channel status" used for things like the famous copy-protect flag, 1 "user" bit not used by S/PDIF, and 1 bit of parity.)
Now, S/PDIF sends samples left-justified so that devices can interoperate by just ignoring low-order bits that they don't support, and it's likely most devices don't support those bits, but they're in the spec.
As for sample rate, AES3 and S/PDIF are self-clocking and support arbitrary sample rates, but implementations are only required to support a small range around 44.1â"48 kHz, and 192 kHz is very non-standard. It could be done in theory, but that would imply a raw bit rate of 4Ã--6.144 = 24.576 Mbaud, and the common TOSlink optical modules only support up to 16 Mbaud.