Compare optical cable and HDMI

Per­haps, every per­son wants his house to be a place not only for sleep­ing and occa­sion­al meals, but also for a good rest. And man­u­fac­tur­ers of house­hold appli­ances offer a vari­ety of devices for enter­tain­ment. Huge TVs, pow­er­ful gam­ing com­put­ers, 7.1 mul­ti-chan­nel audio equip­ment — all this will help you relax, unwind and get new impres­sions.

But, if spe­cial tech­ni­cal skills are not required to use such devices, then they are need­ed more than ever to con­nect and con­fig­ure. Ques­tions arise already at the instal­la­tion stage. For exam­ple, which wire to con­nect your 7.1 speak­er sys­tem to the sound source — opti­cal or HDMI?

In this mate­r­i­al, we will fig­ure out which is bet­ter — an opti­cal cable or HDMI?

Optical cable

Opti­cal cable in home audio sys­tems is used exclu­sive­ly for trans­mit­ting high-res­o­lu­tion mul­ti-chan­nel audio. Thanks to this, it can be used to con­nect pow­er­ful stereo sys­tems.

In addi­tion, the opti­cal cable sup­ports audio sig­nal trans­mis­sion with Dig­i­tal The­ater Sys­tems (DTS) or Dol­by Audio sur­round play­back tech­nolo­gies. They are per­fect­ly com­pat­i­ble with mul­ti-chan­nel audio sys­tems (2.1, 5.1 and 7.1 types), and also pro­vide real­is­tic repro­duc­tion with the cor­rect con­struc­tion of the scene. DTS and Dol­by Audio are at their best when watch­ing movies and lis­ten­ing to music.

The opti­cal cable has anoth­er impor­tant advan­tage — the “light sig­nal” is com­plete­ly “indif­fer­ent” to the action of exter­nal elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields. There­fore, inter­fer­ence in such wires is not induced. Opti­cal cables are rec­om­mend­ed to be used for con­nec­tion in rooms where there is already a huge amount of equip­ment, and not lim­it­ed to just routers and TVs.

There is only one dis­ad­van­tage of an opti­cal cable (well, except for the fact that it is used only for sound trans­mis­sion) — the wire itself is quite rigid and not flex­i­ble. But only in this case it is able to con­duct light. When installing, it is worth con­sid­er­ing these fea­tures of the wire — most like­ly, it will not work to quick­ly hide it in a cable chan­nel or behind some kind of dec­o­ra­tive plug.

It is worth not­ing that the opti­cal cable exists in three ver­sions. The most pop­u­lar is coax­i­al. It is he who is used in the vast major­i­ty of devices with an S / PDIF con­nec­tor.

S/PDIF TTL is sim­i­lar in prin­ci­ple to coax­i­al, but uses a slight­ly dif­fer­ent inter­face of the trans­mit­ted sig­nal. The wire type is the same. S / PDIF TTL is used in high-end sound cards — for exam­ple, in pro­fes­sion­al ones — but in home audio equip­ment “a rare vis­i­tor”.

TOSLINK is an extreme­ly unusu­al stan­dard. It is used in lap­tops and is often com­bined with a 3.5mm head­phone jack.

HDMI cable

HDMI is a uni­ver­sal inter­face for mul­ti­me­dia trans­mis­sion. In fact, it’s even reflect­ed in its name. The abbre­vi­a­tion stands for High-Def­i­n­i­tion Mul­ti­me­dia Inter­face. This inter­face is used to trans­mit both video, audio and audio-visu­al sig­nal at the same time.

It is through the HDMI inter­face that in most cas­es high-def­i­n­i­tion play­back devices are con­nect­ed to the TV — dig­i­tal tele­vi­sion receivers, game con­soles, home the­aters and much more. One wire is used for both video and audio.

The main advan­tage of HDMI is that it sup­ports true mul­ti-chan­nel audio. For exam­ple, the Gen­er­a­tion 2.0 inter­face intro­duced in 2013 sup­ports up to 32 chan­nels of audio! Of course, sur­round sound tech­nolo­gies like DTS or Dol­by are also imple­ment­ed.

Also among the advan­tages of the inter­face, you can add sup­port for ARC — Audio Return Chan­nel. This is impor­tant for some home mul­ti­me­dia sys­tems. ARC has been sup­port­ed since the 1.4 gen­er­a­tion intro­duced in 2009. How­ev­er, it is used in very exot­ic sit­u­a­tions.

Among the short­com­ings of HDMI, one can only sin­gle out the lim­it­ed length of the cable. So, with a wire of 2 meters or more, the high-res­o­lu­tion sig­nal may already be par­tial­ly lost. How­ev­er, if you use the inter­face to con­nect audio equip­ment, then a sta­ble con­nec­tion will be achieved even on 5‑meter lines.

So, let’s sum up.

It’s worth not­ing that HDMI also exists in mul­ti­ple iter­a­tions called “gen­er­a­tions”. Despite the fact that the wire itself, regard­less of the ver­sion, is uni­ver­sal, the inter­face may dif­fer in func­tion­al­i­ty.

So, the same 32-chan­nel audio sig­nal is only avail­able in gen­er­a­tion 2.0 and new­er. But own­ers with equip­ment equipped with gen­er­a­tion 1.4 will have to be con­tent with 8‑channel (audio sys­tems 7.1).

Comparison and which is better

So, an opti­cal cable is an inter­face for trans­mit­ting only an audio sig­nal, and HDMI is both audio and video at the same time. But the dif­fer­ence between the wires is not lim­it­ed to this.

In the vast major­i­ty of cas­es, it is bet­ter to use an opti­cal cable to con­nect an audio sys­tem to a sound source (home the­ater, dig­i­tal receiv­er, game con­sole, com­put­er).

HDMI cables are best used in more exot­ic sit­u­a­tions. For exam­ple, if the sound source sim­ply does not have an S / PDIF con­nec­tor. Con­nect­ing an audio sys­tem via HDMI is imple­ment­ed only if the trans­mit­ter has an out­put con­nec­tor, and the receiv­er has an input con­nec­tor. In this case, ARC tech­nol­o­gy is just involved. How­ev­er, there are very few TVs with it — and the cor­re­spond­ing out­put con­nec­tor.