| One neat thing about specifications like toslink is how flexible they are -- or perhaps, how arbitrary they are. At the core, both coaxial and toslink were just transport mediums for the same SPDIF bitstream. One used copper, and the other used bendy plastic fiber optics. And yeah: Toslink was more-limited on bandwidth, by specification. And one would think that this would be because the optics are not so good (they're definitely not so great), or something. But then: Alesis showed up with ADAT, and ADAT's Lightpipe could send 8 channels of 24-bit 48KHz audio over one bog-standard Toslink. They used different encoding, of course. Even at a very low level, rather than detecting a rising edge 1 and a falling edge as 0, it detected any edge as 1 and a lack of an edge as 0. This did let them pack a lot more bits in. But in doing that (and whatever else they did), they multiplied the functional bandwidth of a lowly Toslink cable by a factor of about 6 -- using the same optical components at each end that Toshiba sold, and the same Toslink cable from the big box store. I think we've beaten sound cards and SPDIF to death here. :) It's been fun. Perhaps we can do this again some day. |