Yeah, TOSLINK is only really necessary if you’re trying to ground-isolate your audio system. Depending on how your power is set up, you can get a ground buzz between two audio devices. Literally an audible buzz at whatever your local AC frequency is, caused by a difference in potential across the two devices’ ground connection. So probably 50 or 60Hz, depending on where you live. But since TOSLINK is optical and doesn’t have a conductor to carry a ground connection between the two devices, there is no risk of a ground buzz.
It is also great if you want to split it up/duplicate it, so have multiple outputs on one source signal. Just a cheap splitter will do just fine, and I can simply only turn on the device I currently want to use without any interference or noticable delay whatsoever. No need to tell the duplicater which device I want to use. I tried the setup with aux/chinch y-cables and it was just horrible. It is even fast enough to have the TOSLINK duplicater, then a TOSLINK to chinch splitter, than use that as input for my good old 5.1 system. The other TOSLINK channel parallely goes to 5.1 headphone sender.
Yeah, TOSLINK is only really necessary if you’re trying to ground-isolate your audio system. Depending on how your power is set up, you can get a ground buzz between two audio devices. Literally an audible buzz at whatever your local AC frequency is, caused by a difference in potential across the two devices’ ground connection. So probably 50 or 60Hz, depending on where you live. But since TOSLINK is optical and doesn’t have a conductor to carry a ground connection between the two devices, there is no risk of a ground buzz.
It is also great if you want to split it up/duplicate it, so have multiple outputs on one source signal. Just a cheap splitter will do just fine, and I can simply only turn on the device I currently want to use without any interference or noticable delay whatsoever. No need to tell the duplicater which device I want to use. I tried the setup with aux/chinch y-cables and it was just horrible. It is even fast enough to have the TOSLINK duplicater, then a TOSLINK to chinch splitter, than use that as input for my good old 5.1 system. The other TOSLINK channel parallely goes to 5.1 headphone sender.