Do You Need Digital Optical Cable For Surround Sound

Find out which one is better and why.

Do you need digital optical cable for surround sound.

The real benefits of an optical become apparent when you look to use surround sound but there are quite a few criteria your pc will have to meet. Coaxial cables are known to lose signal strength over long distances which is not a concern for the average home user. However if distance is an issue then optical cables are the better choice. That means you can use a single cable for both audio and video for example from the.

In its most basic form arc uses an hdmi cable to send audio from a tv back to a receiver or a sound bar. Digital optical connections and audio formats. The port is typically labeled optical audio toslink digital audio out optical or something similar but you certainly don t need a label to identify it. You can check if your devices support toslink audio cabling by looking on the back of the device for the distinct toslink port.

Finally coaxial cables do not have enough bandwidth to support high end surround lossless formats like dolby truehd and dts hd master audio. If you re using an optical cable to connect your tv to your soundbar or your av receiver these signals will be converted into a simpler surround format like dolby digital 5 1 before they get. Optical cable connections will still achieve dolby digital sound and especially since a great deal of installations we have done for our customers over the years are for out of the box all in one home theatre systems they still deliver a more than reasonable surround sound result which many people are more than happy with.