How much improvement with better toslink cable?

Here is how I shopped Toslink. I contacted Steve at The Cable Company www.fatwyre.com, and I used their cable lending library. Upon his suggestion I got a wireworld 5 and a Cardas cable that he suggested I try. The wireworld was very analytic and the Cardas was much more warm sounding. I wound up buying each cable as I has use for each of these qualities.

You have to call them about the lending library. It is not easy to find on their web sight.

Borrow some cables and shop without spending money on experiments. Yes, to answer your question glass is better.

I've got an echoaudio Layla 3g and tested the Bel Canto Dac3, the Berkley Alpha Dac, and the Audio Research Dac3, with some very expensive coax cables. All sounded better with the optical connection. Yet the guy at Berkley thought I was nuts for using optical. Is there some prejudice against optical, it seems like it should obviously be a better way to transmit digital information.

Btw, it was Radioshack optical cable, maybe I'll go get me some glass eh?

I've been very happy with a glass optical cable that I purchased from this place.

http://www.uniqueproductsonline.com/gltodiopca.html

I purchased it from their ebay store. For less than $20 shipped, you can't go wrong.

I have to say digital cables is the component in my system I hear the least difference with from wire to wire. I hear clear differences between most any two analog ICs I try.

Mapman - Everything depends on the type of DAC you use. If it is NOS or just regular oversampling DAC then coax most likely will sound better. This most likely is because in spite o twice larger jitter toslink breaks ground loops and helps a lot in many situations. On the other hand upsampling DACs that suppress jitter like Benchmark DAC1 or Bel Canto DAC3 are not sensitive to jitter and should sound the same - unless you compare two devices and one is not "bit transparent" (digital volume control, DSP processing etc).

Mattzack2 - your DAC is not jitter rejecting and quality of digital cable will play role. I'm not saying coax will always be better but on average it is.

In general - the slower the driver is the more threshold point of receiver is affected by noise (slow for toslink). The faster coax driver on some transports will cause reflection problems (signal reflects on impedance boundaries) and requires very good digital cable with consistent characteristic impedance. Good shielding always helps - especially when driver is slow. On less expensive transports typical driver transition is 25ns while on fancy transports it might get below 10ns.

Everything is connected (so to speak) and sound depends not only on digital cable but synergy of all three components: transport, cable and DAC (and amount of ambient noise + quality of line voltage, ground loops - practically whole environment).