Today, with a few exceptions, all motherboards on the market that have an integrated sound card have S / PDIF digital output. You will be able to see that when the equipment is turned on and if this outlet is not in use, despite the fact that most have a small hinged cover, a red light will appear, and this is because your equipment is ready for use. ‘use both at the hardware level, as the software.
What is optical audio output and what does it entail?
In fact, the optical audio output is called S / PDIF (although some directly call it SPDIF) because of the S / P-DIF protocol, which is the format of digital interface Sony / Philips, and its connector is TOSLINK; Essentially, instead of using copper to transmit the signal, it is literally transmitted over a fiber optic cable, and with that a pretty accurate analog is if we compare the old ADSL copper connections with the fiber optic that now serves most Internet. houses in the countryside.
Specifically, all optical audio outputs of PC sound cards usually have a small cover that can be folded inward when inserting the connector. TOSLINK
Therefore, the difference between the old minijack audio output and the optical audio output on the PC is basically the connection method (or communication to be more precise) and the cable used. Obviously, if it didn’t matter much to use one connection over another, there would be no point in using the optical output on analog, right? But as you will already assume, there are some advantages to using optical output.
As you can already assume, a digital fiber optic interface has a lot of more bandwidth than an analog interface with a copper cable, which means that with just one digital cable we can transmit multi-channel audio. In other words, with just one cable, we can integrate the signal to 5.1 surround sound and formats like Dolby True Surround or DTS, while doing this digitally requires a much larger amount of wiring which, in addition, can result in signal loss.
And with regard to signal loss, this is where we find another of its main advantages: being a digital audio output by optical fiber, either it works or it does not work but there is no no “halftones”, that is to say that when it works it works simultaneously. to the maximum of its possibilities always, unlike the analog signal which can suffer interference O degradation depending on environmental conditions. For convenience, comparing the mini jack analog audio outputs to the S / PDIF optical audio output on a PC is like switching from a VGA video connection to an HDMI connection.
Is it better to use digital or analog audio on the PC?
In all areas (and not just speaking of audio), digital differs from analogue by continuity: in a digital system the changes are always drastic, because it goes from one to zero (binary system), which means it is passing current or not flowing, or it works or it does not work, or it is white or it is black. However, the analog signal allows changes to occur in a gradual and gradual manner, maintaining continuity at all times.
Now we can think that then the analog audio is better than the digital because we will notice the tone change better but the reality is very different because it does not depend on what kind of connection you have but how the audio has been encoded. Think that at the end of the day we are talking about connections on a PC and wherever it is from, if the sender of the signal is the PC, it is digital and therefore the quality that we perceive later will depend on its quality. .
In other words, the quality of the audio will not improve because you are using optical digital output since the quality does not depend on this but on the bitrate and others of the audio track that is reproduced; However, what you can notice using this audio output is that there will be no interference or signal degradation, because being digital as we explained before, either it works or it does. does not work, there are no half measures.
Therefore, and already answering the owner’s question: yes, it is better to use the S / PDIF optical audio output of your PC as long as your speakers or sound equipment have this input. Really, all of them are advantages, because even if you will not gain in quality, neither will you suffer a loss since there will be no interference and degradation, and you will also have the convenience of being able to centralize everything. audio from the equipment with a single cable regardless of how many speakers you have (obviously if you later have 5 speakers plus a subwoofer, these will each have their own cable but the difference is that you will not have to connect them all to the PC, but only one of them).
Therefore, our recommendation is that whenever possible you choose the digital optical audio output on the analog mini jack, as you will avoid the problems and the connection will be much more comfortable.
