How much improvement with better toslink cable?

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).

Tos-link or Toshiba Link is every bit as good as spdif over wire IF and only IF you use a glass cable, It makes a HUGE difference. I used a plastic Tos into my Museatex Bidat and it sounded really bad (actually multiple plastic toslink cables) and then I purchased a Monarchy Audio glass Tos for $50, well let me tell you it is the ONLY digital interconnect (and their have been MANY down through the years from $300 to $2000) that matched my FIM digital spdif cable. When people say they can't hear the difference, I of course believe them, but that doesn't mean you wont hear it... it AINT (improper grammar for effect) subtle :) You needn't spend a lot, but the worst connection you can possibly have is a plastic toslink. Trust me, it is not the interface it is the medium. A lot of people are not aware that plastic was used in industry with AT&T st-optical but it was far inferior to the glass....same thing with toslink. Mine sounds remarkable and like I said, in direct comparison to the best wire based digital cable I know of.

Hi all. I noticed that there had been some traffic on this thread I started months ago. Well I took the leap of faith and bought an Audioquest Optilink 5 and it was a nice improvement. Easily sounding better than the freebie cable I was using. I also had a chance to compare it to a Wireworld and Van Den Hul optical cable that a friend lent me. I thought the Audioquest cable was clearly the best sounding of the bunch. It is also the most expensive.