Can I use the cheapest TOSLINK cables for ADAT lightpipe?

[sodiumcycle]

Or is there any special requirement? I noticed that some of them are listed as 'terminated' and others are not.

(BTW, audiomidi has the 2in/2out ADAT Scope IO cards for $150 right now.)

[Neutron]

as long as the light passes through they are fine. digital signals work or they dont, despite what some consumer electronics salesmen might tell you.
i would get the fat ones though, the skinny kind may get damaged more easy (depends on your setup and how much you move stuff etc)

[Shroomz~>]

Agree with Neutron. The cheapo cables work absolutely fine, but if you buy better quality, heavier duty ones, they'll last longer. The thin ones are more difficult to keep free of knots & potentially creases over a period of time unless they're permanently cabled & not moved around/disconnected/reconnected etc. Something that's worth checking as well is whether the connectors on the cables firmly click into the ADAT ports or not. The cheap (thin) ones we used to use here just pushed in, but we bought some heavier duty ones from a reputable cable co. on ebay a few years back & they actually click into the ADAT ports, requiring quite a bit of effort to remove/pull out.

Mark

[valis]

With optical cables the 2 main things are the cable material (glass or plastic, and what type of plastic? if plastic) and the length of the run. Cheaper plastic cables are fine for short runs, and are the most common lightpipe / TOSLINK material (glass is actually expensive and rare to find in my experience). Maximum distance for plastic lightpipe is typically quoted as being 10 meters (33 feet) by most manufacturers.

I think most toslink cabling is fine these days at lengths up to 3-4 meters, given the prevalence of home theatre/surround sound products. 10 years ago it was more difficult to find decent cabling and the cheaper products used lesser plastic (from what I recall).

Anecdote:
8 years & 2 residences ago I was in an 'attic' bedroom/studio (more like bedroom with some stuff thrown in it) and I couldn't stomach the noise from 4 computers, so I moved everything with a fan or harddrive into an attic crawlspace that was well ventilated. However the cable run was so full for just the PC monitors & keyboards etc, that I ran all audio cabling along a second route (which is a good idea anyway). All told it was about 21 feet of cable run, and I used 2x 24' toslink cables for the Scope box's connection to my RME (which was still in the room with me for easy connectivity, routed back to the HDSP PCI card in my PC via a longish Firewire cable). I actually had occasional sync errors, but these were the best toslink cables I could find at the time without spending rediculous amounts of money on true glass cabling (which has a much longer transmission distance). My cabling was NOT the 'thin' kind but rather the kind that 'clicks' in as Neutron says.

After a bit of research it turned out that running all 8 channels of audio (or 4 in s/mux etc) down the cheaper plastic cables did reduce transmission length, as most quoted specs are either for a stereo pair or in terms of encoded surround sound streams (where 7.1 is not actually full audio bandwidth for all 8 channels). Adding the optional sync bracket to my Scope cards and using BNC wordclock (with proper resistance cabling) cleaned up the occasional digital 'clicks' I was having, and the data error rate went back to being something I couldn't measure.

Again though I think that cabling is much higher quality in this "HD" era, since there are so many people making use of it in the consumer realm the economies of scale have taken effect. Also most people don't need 20-25' cabling runs... I use 2 meter cables now btw.