Do You Need Digital Optical Cable For Surround Sound

You can check if your devices support toslink audio cabling by looking on the back of the device for the distinct toslink port.

Do you need digital optical cable for surround sound.

The types of digital audio signals that can be transferred by a digital optical connection include two channel stereo pcm dolby digital dolby digital ex dts digital surround and dts es surround sound formats. That means you can use a single cable for both audio and video for example from the. 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. Also as a general rule if your receiver speakers have an hdmi port you should use that instead as it offers much better 5 1 compatibility with windows 10 drivers.

However if distance is an issue then optical cables are the better choice. Digital optical connections and audio formats. 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. 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.

Finally coaxial cables do not have enough bandwidth to support high end surround lossless formats like dolby truehd and dts hd master audio. Coaxial cables are known to lose signal strength over long distances which is not a concern for the average home user. Find out which one is better and why.