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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I think it's amusing that optic fiber connectors have had so little success in the market though I have a few TOSLINK and the coaxial equivalent in my upstairs home theater (I have a Sony 300 disc CD changed packed with DTS 5.1 Music Discs so I'm living the surround music dream) and downstairs (computer to stereo, computer to minidisc recorder, etc.)

I recently got a cable to hook up a Meta Quest 3 to a PC for PCVR. My understanding is that works like a high-spec USB 3 cable but has an optic fiber in it for the data so it can be really long.

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I tore down oculus link cable - it's just copper internally.

Also oculus works fine over the "charging" type c cable + type-c to type-a + a classic copper usb3.0 extender of another 1.8 meters.

I use it for other things and it performs admirably. (In particularly my Sony camera has trouble with cheap cables) It is one of two "elite" USB-C cables I keep near my computer, the other one is the shorter cable that came with the Looking Glass Go.

You can see the fibers clearly in this teardown video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spa_pAn871c

> I think it's amusing that optic fiber connectors have had so little success in the market though I have a few TOSLINK and the coaxial equivalent in my upstairs home theater ...

Is TOSLINK that unsuccessful? I was already using TOSLINK a very long time ago (in the nineties) and I'm still using TOSLINK today. Enter any audio store and they have TOSLINK cables.

It's very old by now though and I take it there's better stuff but TOSLINK still does the job.

My "music" path doesn't use TOSLINK:

    source, eg QOBUZ for (lossless) streaming -> ethernet -> integrated amp (which has a DAC) -> speakers

But my "movie" (no home theater anymore atm) path uses TOSLINK:

    TV -> TOSLINK -> same integrated amp -> speakers

For whatever reason that amp is quite new and has all the bells and whistles (ARC and network streaming, for example) yet that amp still comes with not one but two (!) TOSLINK inputs.

I'd say that's quite a successful life for a standard that came out in the mid eighties.

TOSLINK is completely successful, but ethernet over fiber is a datacenter thing, not a home or office thing.

TOSLINK was historically heavily suppressed and gimped https://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=1990

Same reason Sony pretty much killed MDs in the crib by not allowing digital write access to first two gens.

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