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An expensive optical coupling grease is made to facilitate the light trandsmission in Toslink (or actually commercial fiber optic) light transmission.
Has anyone ever TRIED any in a Toslink conenction??
Edits: 08/11/12Follow Ups:
Great thread Elizabeth!
I purchased a new preamp/DSP/dac (Dspeaker Antimode Dual Core 20),it's a great unit except that the SPDIF input is optical only. It also has analog and usb inputs, but I have yet to embrace computer audio, so I'm stuck with the optical coax. My transport is coax only and I use a MSB Digital Director for coax to optical conversion. My optical cable is an older glass Wire World Nova 3.
So with this thread being a few weeks old:
Has anyone tried using the "grease" and to what effect has it made?
Chris
"Grow older not up !!!"
Jimmy Buffett
Thanks for bringing this up.
I am very interested to know how to improve sonics of my emm lab combo, and this little tweak is certainly worth considering.
If you don't like its effect, you cannot completely reverse it.
There hasn't been enough investigation on the long-term stability of these optical gels. (The refractive index could drift over time.) Not to mention the potential for contamination (collecting dust particles) over time.
Todd, as I'd mentioned. Index matching fluid/gels are commonly used by the Telecom industry. They have been for decades.The gel would actually block the entry of dust and contaminants in to the connector air gap, which is otherwise vulnerable to such intrusion. Yes, your average audiophile isn't a Telecom technician, so, Murphy's Law could easily intrude.
_
Ken Newton
Edits: 08/15/12 08/15/12 08/15/12 08/15/12
Don't know if they still do-- anyway Mike Moffat told me at Newport he prefers the Toslink over USB for his new stuff.
Des
What's the deal w/ the SE DAC? What are the mods and where did you get them?
My manufacturer recommends an index of 1.58 and Google hasn't seemed to help me find it. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
ET
In an optical connector, where the fiber is being butt connected, there will be a small air gap between the butt ends of the fibers. That air gap will have a refractive index different from the fibers, hence inducing some reflection of the optical signal at the air gap. While I have no experience with this particular brand, in general, such a product is called an 'index matching fluid'. What a good index matching fluid does is to fill that air gap with a substance having a refractive index closer to that of the optical fiber. A properly formulated fluid does indeed work. Such fluids are commonly used in the telecom industry.Any variation in refractive index along an optical fiber, or at the optical connectors, will induce some reflection of the light being conducted, which in turn will give rise to increased jitter upon reception. That's what this product is supposed to address, minimizing sources of jitter on the TOSLINK interface. This is an optical impedance effect, analogous to the electrical impedance of a wired interface.
_
Ken Newton
Edits: 08/12/12
Do you dip your toslink head into the jelly can, and squirt some into the optical orifice?
I would tend to place a drop on the tip of the cable end. And that would be enough to fill the void between cable tip and internal sensor tip
Edits: 08/16/12
Knewton is absolutely right. The index of refraction of a vacuum is exactly 1.00. Air is 1.003, so it is essentially the same as a vacuum. Acrylic (plexiglass) and other similar plastics are used in TosLink cables. The index of refraction of these plastics is typically around 1.5.
This means that unless you use some special grease to fill the air gap, there will be a *huge* reflection (50%) at both ends of your TosLink cable. I have never used any TosLink so I can't say how much of a sonic difference it makes, but I would say that it should be quite large.
See the post above entitled "Elizabeth is right" for information on how the length of the cable impacts this. It may be that if you have a 30 foot TosLink cable (the signal travels significantly slower in TosLink than copper-based cables) that the improvement from the grease would be much less audible.
Charles:After my Phillips transport died in my Trivista SACD and no more were available I used another player as a transport. I used a "decent" Vampire digital cable and tried a friends $500 cable. They were only a meter long but no big bends. After reading some posts on Digital I bought and tried a TosLink cable that is about $60. I never would have tried one based on my understanding of how TosLink works. Well, I was amazed at the improvement when going to the optical cable and it wasn't small. Perhaps I'll try some of this fluid and see if it even improves it more. Thanks for your posts as always.
ET
Edits: 08/13/12
The receiver in a TosLink system is quite slow and has a relatively rise time. This slow rise-time will tend to increase jitter, which is generally considered a bad thing.
On the other hand, TosLink is completely non=conductive (electrically). This means that there is no chance of added ground loops. If your DAC was connected to a video system in any way, using TosLink will provide isolation between the video ground and the audio ground. This is one of the best things you can do for both systems. So there are definitely some systems in which TosLink will outperform copper.
I guess the coax cables I used were bad. I have no safety grounds on my system nor is it connected to a video setup. I've heard about the ground issues and that drove me to try TosLink. I always poo poo'ed TosLink but for now at least I'm doing a lot better with this cable. See link, second cable down from the top. I use my Trivista SACD w/ a dead transport as my DAC. Thanks for the reply as always.
ET
Interesting post. Three thoughts come to mind:
a) The Toslink cable you use has glass fibers with highly polished ends rather than the cheap plastic fibers and cut ends found in most TosLink cables. This could partially explain the reasons as to why your system sounded better with Toslink.
b) There is more to the S/PDIF circuit than just the cable. The manufacturer must also make a complete circuit that applies isolation (or not), gain, signal limiting and/or clipping, comparators, et cetera. There is a *huge* variation in the performance of these circuits. On the other hand, a Toslink optical receiver is just a "black box" that takes light pulse inputs and outputs electrical pulses. Even a poor manufacturer will have a hard time screwing up the sound of one of these.
c) I would still recommend trying out the goo. It should make a noticeable difference.
Happy listening!
Thanks again!
ET
"On the other hand, a Toslink optical receiver is just a "black box" that takes light pulse inputs and outputs electrical pulses. Even a poor manufacturer will have a hard time screwing up the sound of one of these."
In that case you don't need the goo!
Don't you suppose that their designers tear out their hair trying to hit the right balance between photonic efficiency, stored charge, gain, noise, speed, symmetry and power supply rejection just like anything else? If there is any general rule in "high-end" audio (referring to performance not cost) it appears to be that reliable "don't cares" are as rare as, as, well fill in your favorite...
Regards, Rick
No high end manufacturer makes a TosLink receiver from scratch. The just by one of about ten different models manufactured by Toshiba. Toshiba doesn't sweat the details. They just want to save $0.024 per unit. As long as it works, that is "good enough.
And yes, the goo will improve the performance of them no matter what price they are.
.
.
Someone did post in diyaudio.com may be 6 years ago, having used several kinds of additives and swore by them. This included an expensive pro product. Messy though.
There is sound reasoning behind it as the weakness of Toslink is in coupling integrity.
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