of all the technologies we have right now that suggest we really are living in
the future perhaps nothing sounds more futuristic than the fact that we can
transmit data with laser light indeed
many of the highest capacity cables that form the backbone of the internet use
fiber optics and fiber to the home connections that deliver very high
speeds have become more popular in recent years but did you know that one
optical technology that used to be pretty commonplace in home audio is now
getting replaced by good old-fashioned copper i'm not talking about cds which
you can learn more about up here i'm actually referring to the toshiba link
or toslink connector if you're not sure what that is there's actually a good
chance you have one on the back of your desktop pc it's a square-ish looking
connector that's lit up with red light they were also extremely common not so
long ago when dvd players ruled the world you see although toslink was
originally developed in the 1980s to connect cd players to other audio
equipment it made its way into dvd players and computers as an easy way to
deliver digital audio over just one cable so if you had a 5.1 surround setup
for example you could use a single toslink cable to send a digital signal
to a receiver that would then decode it
rather than one rca cable for every channel which would suck and it did and
another cool thing about toslink was that because it used light it wouldn't
suffer from interference from other nearby electronics so what we had was a
convenient clean futuristic pathway for high resolution audio
so why is it going away well one reason
is that it's actually not very good at carrying signals over any kind of
significant distance which is counterintuitive because those
fiber optic cables on the ocean floor use light to transmit data and they work
for huge amounts of information being sent thousands of miles away so what
gives the answer is in how the cables are physically constructed unlike higher
spec high bandwidth fiber optic cables optical toslink cables are often built
with how you say cheap plastic as a transmission medium inside contributing
to the light attenuating or losing its strength as it travels down the pipe
this means that not only do toslink cables have a maximum length of around
10 meters or 33 feet but also that they're bandwidth limited compared to
other solutions the latest version of toslink has data rates up to 125
megabits per second which is certainly fast enough for high-res audio and even
theoretically for high def video at the same time but the release of HDMI in the
early 2000s created a very sticky situation for toslink not only did HDMI
offer a relatively easy one cable solution for both audio and video even
the very earliest versions of HDMI were a lot faster than toslink meaning they
were not only good for consumer applications but also professional
settings where users needed to work with uncompressed video on audio despite the
fact that HDMI just uses copper cables without any fancy optical data transfer
their construction meant that they could carry faster signals over longer
distances and tossling cables also had a bad habit of breaking if you bent them
too much due to their more rigid cores something that HDMI cables could
withstand a lot more easily so as time went on the industry concentrated on
expanding the HDMI spec to support more and more audio standards such as
lossless dts master audio dolby true hd
and the newer dtsx and dolby atmos which you can learn a lot more about up here
toslink on the other hand was more or less left to languish although
it certainly would have been possible to update the spec and make it compatible
with newer fancier formats no one ever really got around to it because HDMI
largely made it irrelevant but that doesn't mean that toslink is totally
useless today it still works well as a simple hookup for compressed digital
audio like bog standard dolby digital or dts 5.1 and you'll still find it on many
sound bars out there as an easy way to connect to a display even if there's no
HDMI out available even some small devices use mini toslink which can be
combined with a standard 3.5 millimeter jack in order to save space and if
you're using a vintage audio receiver maybe that doesn't have HDMI so you got
to get to your tv somehow so it's not quite dead yet okay just don't tell
those corners from monty python in the holy grail a reference from before you
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