The Battery sucks and it overheats - Page 3

Not to be a stickler but I am a big audiophile and this statement above is just not true. Digital coax is better than optical for one reason.... you can decide if it is important to you or not. Optical suffers from jitter errors, that coax does not suffer from. This is caused by the light passing though the cable bouncing off the walls. Each time it bounces or passes around a bend in the cable the waves of light get a bit out of sync from each other. This causes jitter in the timing of the digital signal. Without highly precise timing you can get audible distortion. Some of the extremely high end D/A converters can compensate for this quite nicely. But unless you have a D/A that was quite costly, you will be better off with coax digital cables. Or if you simply don't care, then use optical. On the other hand, optical has a couple advantages over coax. It is completely immune to any interferrence. And it can travel over longer distances before the signal degrades to the point the D/A cannot compensate. (Again you must have a high quality D/A converter). But for short distances it is common audiophile knowledge that coax is the better cable over optical. Professional audio engineers never use optical if they can help it.

Regards,
Sean

You must mean 50C. There is nothing wrong with a laptop idling in the 40s. geeez. I hope no one returned their unit because of that statement!

The quote was 40C "Range" equals 40-49C.

Coax is the preferred cable when available as stated. Of course you must have equipment capable of revealing the jitter which most do not. Another advantage of coax is the cable itself is much sturdier and less likely to come loose when moving your equipment. Might seem like a small point but when you do a lot of plugging and unplugging such as when the kids put the xbox up on the HT the optical much more quickly becomes "loose" and will not give a good connection anymore. It can also be frustrating when you are trying to move your pre/pro with some 50 odd connections back in the rack and an optical gets jarred loose... Like the one going to the xbox.

Could you clarify this a bit? Wouldnt this only be true if the cable was actually moving during playback, otherwise, any one pulse of light would be travelling the same distance (and therefore time) as the next, and there wouldnt be a sync difficulty?

Aside from that, from what I know about the spdif protocol, the decoder requires an entire frame before it can begin to convert to analogue, so a significant delay could either cause a misinterpretation of that frame and the parity check would likely fail, or the signal would be received perfectly. I'm just not clear on how what is essentially a digital data transfer depends so much on cable quality. That is unless you're saying samples are frequently dropped completely on cheap cables, and less so on high quality ones.

Sorry for all the questions, I just like to understand how all this works.

You might be right for DTS and Dolby digital signals, as I think they are sent as packets and not as PCM... so they might be less prone to jitter problems introduced by the cable... but I definitely know that CD playback, and for that matter mp3 playback that is converted to a PCM stream etc. are very prone to jitter problems. Also there are no checksums in digital audio. What would be the point. The reciever could not ask for a packet to be resent if it is dropped or incorrect, the stream is one way only, so why bother checking and waste bits that could be used for the signal itself? Both DTS/Dolby and PCM are streams of data even though DTS/Dolby use packets. THe only reason DTS/Dolby use packets is because the cables (coax or optical) do not have the bandwidth to send each channel (up to 8 channels for 7.1) individually, and instead the audio signal is encoded into packets to be decoded and converted by the D/A converter back into individual channels. Once you know what jitter sounds like, you can tell within a few seconds if there is jitter present in the sound. Of course, like someone else posted, you have to have a good system to hear jitter or any other kind of audio problem for that matter. Most people have such crappy speakers and systems that jitter is the least of their concerns. One thing is certain. Jitter is not snake oil like some other things audiophiles get caught up in (like cable risers etc.). In a double blind test, almost 100% of the people tested can hear if jitter is present in a signal or not. But some people when asked which sound they prefered chose the signal with jitter! There is no accounting for taste .

Here are some links to get you started understanding jitter:


http://www.dcsltd.co.uk/papers/jitter.pdf


http://www.audiovideo101.com/learn/a...nid=101&List=7


http://www.jitter.de/english/sound.html

This thread is weird , oh well with summer approaching everyone wants to have something to do.

So umm the SPDIF output is an optical (toslink) connection then? Or is it coax?