Do You Need Digital Optical Cable For Surround Sound

Digital optical connections and audio formats.

Do you need digital optical cable for surround sound.

Finally coaxial cables do not have enough bandwidth to support high end surround lossless formats like dolby truehd and dts hd master audio. 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. 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. 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.

That means you can use a single cable for both audio and video for example from the. In its most basic form arc uses an hdmi cable to send audio from a tv back to a receiver or a sound bar. However if distance is an issue then optical cables are the better choice. Find out which one is better and why.

When hooking up an audio system or sound bar you generally have to choose an hdmi or optical digital audio connection. Optical cable connections will still achieve dolby digital sound and especially since a great deal of installations we have done for our customers over the years are for out of the box all in one home theatre systems they still deliver a more than reasonable surround sound result which many people are more than happy with. 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.