In addition to the long run as a tech writer and editor, Jason spent over a decade as a college instructor doing his best to teach a generation of English students that there's more to success than putting your pants on one leg at a time and writing five-paragraph essays. While his days of steering students toward greatness are behind him, his lifelong desire to delight, entertain, and inform lives on in his work at How-To Geek. Although the cables are fiber optic, the output isn't very powerful. The laser system your local fiber internet service provider uses might be able to shoot a signal down several thousand feet of fiber optic cable, but your TV's TOSLINK port certainly won't. A potential benefit of optical connections is that they won’t be affected by electromagnetic interference. In theory, coaxial could be. Optical audio cables are used extensively for digital audio applications, providing clean audio signals without interference. These types of digital audio cables are often used with entertainment systems and devices such as: The bottom line? HDMI supports more audio formats and might save you an extra cable if your system supports ARC or eARC.

So far, so good. But when you hear the DVD’s movie audio on your soundbar system, you only get stereo audio – not 5.1 surround.

Blu-ray players, DVD players, and game consoles also typically have optical outputs to send digital audio to amplifiers, AV receivers, hi-fi DACs (digital-to-analog converters), and soundbars.

Some TVs will pass through Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and not DTS – or vice versa. Alternatively, others may downmix all external audio to stereo. Let's look at three common situations where it is beneficial to use TOSLINK over HDMI. Keeping Older Audio Gear In Service Both optical and coaxial digital audio are called S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) connections and send the same quality audio.In the picture above, the optical port has a protective ‘door’ that will move out of the way when you push the cable in. If you look carefully, you will see that this matches the shape of the port on your device. So be careful when inserting the cable into your device. The consumer version of the TOSLINK standard has stayed stable for decades. A TOSLINK optical audio cable from the 1990s will work just like one you buy today.