Glass v.s. Plastic Toslink

however, the red LED looks better, smoother, easier to look at at the end of the monster cable plastic monofilament than at the end of the 280 strands glass cable I have.
In theory, glass is better to conduct light, no doubt, but I bet that the strands within my audio cable are fractured because of bends and frictions. the length I use is 3ft. I have tried 2 glass toslink based on opinions, but plastic stays in.

The thread was started quite a while back, but I'll chime in...

I've been using the Sonicwave cable mentioned here. Easily better than any plastic toslink cable I've used - Kimber, Audioquest, and 2 others that escape my memory.

I've heard from a few sources that the connectors are critical in optical. Mine click in pretty snug. One or two of the others didn't do this so well. Another part of the connector is the length of the pin, so to speak, that goes into the component - some are too long, some are too short. There was a glass cable that a lot of people didn't like very much, and it happened to not fit tightly. I think it was a Parts Express cable? Or maybe they sold it. People on the Red Wine Audio circle at Audio Circle were complaining about it, as were a few others elsewhere.

At the end of the day, what sounds best is a personal thing. My Sonicwave cable sounds better than anything else I've tried. Then again, it's the only glass cable I've tried. And for once, it was easily the cheapest one I've tried.

The Litepipe from Silfatec comes in two styles, the flimsy plastic coating (white) or metal cased. I was told by the rep you could run over the metal version.
Just in case you were worried about crimping.
The connectors are quite snug.
Plastic? Meh...

I have read an interesting comment on the lifatec silflex website saying that the quality of Plastic Optical Fiber is so good that we are not giving up in performance using plastic over glass, especially over 3 feet!
In addition, the Toshiba opto electrical components were designed to be used with plastic fiber of a specific aperture.
By bundling many strands, you will not achieve the exact aperture of a single plastic optical fiber.
As one mentioned, a lot of it is how that cable is hooked up to the optical module.
I have to add that the DVD/CD transport I am using is a Yamaha S540, and I believe it was on the market probably around 2002. So it may not have the latest blu-ray ready opto electrical components that actually may be designed to work with glass fibers.

Not all optical Toslink cables are the same and neither do they have the same kind of filament. Common plastic fiber filament Toslink has a bandwidth of about 6 MHz and this is what has given Toslink such a bad reputation because it chokes out the harmonics of the 3.3 MHz fundamental which needs bandwidth out to 10X that of the fundamental on order to form a nice square wave.

Back in 2002 I bought an 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Glass Toslink cable which has the same Fused Silica Glass filament that they use in their ATT/ST Glass cables. Over the last 10 years I have compared it to many coax cables up to a price-point of $600 and I have yet to find one that has the absolute transparency that the Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink has in that it has a 30 MHz bandwidth which is sufficient to allow the full development of the Digital signal's harmonics which is essential for the best sounding digital music playback.

Most recently I used my old Musical Fidelity V-Link to compare my .99999 silver Illuminations D-60 coax to the Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink and although the Illuminations D-60 sounds absolutely great on its own when compared to the Fused Silica Glass Toslink it immediately becomes apparent that a lot of low level detail is being completely glossed over by the Illuminations D-60 and a portions of the harmonic structure of the Music is not being fully fleshed out.

Those who have never used or heard a 30 MHz bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink will continue to assume that Toslink is vastly inferior to coax and will never be bothered with what their Music might sound like using a 30 MHz bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable like the one John Atkinson used to allow the V-Link add so much additional fidelity to the Benchmark DAC in his Stereophile Magazine Review of the V-Link...

"I then changed to the V-Link, had it feed the Benchmark via a 1m length of AudioQuest Optilink-5 glass TosLink cable, and did not touch the Benchmark's volume control. The violins in the Sibelius were now slightly less steely, the soundstage a tad wider and deeper. More important, the sounds of individual instruments, such as the horns at the start of the first movement, and the timpani and plucked double basses at the start of the second, were slightly more of a piece with the surrounding acoustic."