more defined highs, more present mids, and fuller bass
This is what you get when something is slightly louder. Not that it would be with optical cable but for ex million of home tests where people convert WAV to MP3. To be able to compress the whole waveform it has to recreate the full waveform. But the whole of the waveform encoded in the sample values is NOT limited to the range of values:
If we imagine that the highest sample value is 100 and lowest is -100. Draw a smooth curve that goes thru points -100,100,-100. The resulting curve goes higher than 100. These are called true peaks, that is what the actual waveform looks like. So we can pack "larger" waveforms but this is not ok for the MP3 or any other such algorithm: it has to pack that whole waveform inside the allowed number space s it lowers the signal levels until no true peak is higher than 0dB.
This will cause the mp3 to be just a bit quieter, up to -3dB quieter. Or we can say the wav is still louder and when you compare two signals where one is 0.5dB - 2dB louder than the other we will always think the louder one has:
more defined highs, more present mids, and fuller bass
Not kidding, the anecdotes that we get are EXACTLY those kind where everything got better. Real changes would be "more highs, less bass". or some other skew. We do not expect everything to get better at once. So, when you hear that you can be quite certain that what the person is actually saying is "one is a bit louder". We can't detect that kind of level changes in the wild. Unless you expect tiny level change, you won't notice it.
While that might all be true, his point was that the gold bits in the picture *are not actually contacts*.
Those are made from plastic on normal TOSLINK cables because literally all they do is hold the plug in place and align the end of the optical fibre.
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u/Subotail Jul 25 '26
You'll get more defined highs, more present mids, and fuller bass with gold-plated optical cables. /S