Personally I think that the reason for the difference in sound is the difference in the speed of light through glass rather than plastic. The digital "packets" maintain their "punch" and "zest" and "zing" and "pow" much better in glass and this translates into much cleaner, clearer, dynamic and punchy sound. It's for this reason that I use only glass fibre in my cold fusion-based perpetual motion machines!

Jeff Mackwood

Ouch!...sorry, just bit my tongue while it was pressed against my cheek.

But from a maintenance stand point, is glass fiber good for audiophiles who don't do windows?

Good to see the senses of humour alive and well There was a semi serious debate of glass vs plastic awhile back:

http://ubb.outlawaudio.com/ubb/Forum14/HTML/000064.html

Personally, plastic is the way to go...glass keeps the laser too strong and harms the equipment

I find I have to keep the glass shuttered away from the window near the AV system.
It makes soundtracks entirely too 'hot'.
I found a tinting lacquer for 230 a bottle, but can't decide which density of tint. I hear there's a blackmarket version, which goes a shade darker than legal.

Seriously, I find that the best optical cables are glass cables with green-tinted glass.

Just like drawing the green line around the outside of CD's, the green-tinting limits the amount of internal reflection in the cable and, therefore, transmits the signal with less ambient interference and greater data integrity.

I believe that the glass is made from reprocessed Coca-Cola bottles.

I am taking a break! This is information overload!

Of course I forgot to address the other side of the thread: namely coax.

We all know that electrical signals travel relatively much slower in copper than the speed of light. So to properly configure and "balance" a system that is comprised of both optical and copper digital streams one most choose the proper matching length of copper to go along with the fibre.

The method of doing so is to first pick a set length of fibre for all of those connections. Let's assume that it's 1 metre. (Americans in the crowd can pick 1 yard instead - just to spite the French - and I don't mean my Quebec confreres!)

Take that one metre length and multiply it by the ratio of the speed of the electrical signal in copper to the speed of light in glass (or plastic for all of the non-Soundhound converts out there.) Next, shorten your coax cables to that new length.

In this manner your coax signals will arrive at the right time and you will avoid corresponding problems with clearly audible sound effects / delays. Your intimate "club" recording would otherwise sound like you are sitting at second base in Toronto's Skydome - with the lid closed.

Trust me, it makes an amazing difference.

Jeff Mackwood
National Research Council of Canada
(thought I'd throw that in to clearly establish my bona fides)

Jeff,
I thought that if your "cutting the cables to the relative wavelength" would work for coax it must make a difference for plastic optical as well. So I figured out that I needed to cut precisely 6.2mm from my optical cable conecting my CD player and my newly purchased 950. It was a bitch getting the end back on but after a little bit of time with some super-glue (not the generic stuff but the stuff actually made for glass) and some duct tape I finally got it to transmit the signal again. And what a signal it was. I popped in my favorite Michael Jackson CD (listened to Thriller as I do when I audition all my equiptment) and it sounded simply amazing. The soundstage openned up so incredibly I thought that I was in the recording studio. I heard things on this CD that I never new existed. It sounded like it wasn't just Michael singing but Michael, LaToya and Janet all singing in harmony. Thank you so much for giving me this tip.
Aaron

About that adjusting the lengths of the electrical coax lenghts to the optical cable lenghts so that the signal travel time in the respceitve media are equal: nice start.

(To find out speed of light in an optical media, divide the speed of light in a vacuum by the index of refraction of the optical medium.)

Matching the signal travel times in the cables is only a partial solution. Whatever video and audio circuits are involved will have their own "travel" times: delay in the respective circuits for signal propagation and processing.

Whether optical or electrical, the travel times for the signals is on the order of a few tens of nanoseconds or so, which may be a LOT less than the delay introduced by audio or video processing.

Paul

------------------
the 1derful1

Paul:

There you go again, trying to inject logic into the argument