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Optical Leads...worth spending more than a tenner?

The bandwidth of a toslink cable is unlikely to have any impact. The differences depend on the equipment at either end. As is often pointed out, there are many cases where toslink performs better.
 
The optical cable is fine, it's the toslink transmitters - barely good for 5Mhz* . Given that SPDIF is 2.8Mhz that means a very rounded shape to the manchester-encoded data; and that is rubbish for accurate clock reclaimation in a non-reclocking dac.

GTM is right, 'Digital' audio is prey to many analogue failings.

*it's a cheapo LED and a photo diode.
Some e.g DPA for the PDM2 and later DACs went to very fast AT&T optical transmitters for the task instead at greater expense, to gain c. 10x the bandwidth.
 
martin clark said:
Providing your dac doesn't derive its bit clock timing from the spdif stream then optical is a nice thing - for the galvanic isloation - as Werner pointed out above.
Click to expand...

These days its all arbitrated in the same chip as the DAC: pretty much everything is implemented on one wafer. WRT reclocking multiple digital streams for example via a world clock still has its advantages. Multitrack digital matrixing gets very very expensive very very quickly. Wolfson's app notes are quite clear on how this is achieved. TOSLINK (which is SPDIF-in-light) or SPDIF over coax: the same data stream is passed to the same buffer. Any clocking issues will be subject to the same processes.

There are small differences between DACs but I reckon these are between the output of the DAC and the input of the Analogue gear you are using (as has been said before). Keep these simple, sane and as linear/short as possible and these differences reduce massively.

Mental note to get one of their developer boards. Superb little things.
 
In what respects does it differ from and surpass other optical cables that you have tried?
 
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