[Shady Deal]

Hi, I have my twin connected via scart to my TV. My TV audio out is connected to my Yamaha amp.

As the twin has an Optical out am I likely to get better sound quality if I use that? I could understand if freeview used 5.1 surround, but just plain stereo/dolby surround am I not getting a equally good sound feed with my current connection??

Thanks

[LV426]

Aside from anything that might be introduced by routing the sound signal to the TV first, and then on to your amp, the other question is one of where the best digital > analog converter is - in your Pace or in your amp. And it's probably in your amp. For the sum of both reasons, using the optical link may produce marginally better sound.

[MartinImber]

Optical link is MUCH better - the analogue out on my Twin is a bit noisy.

Also allows transfer to MD in digital domain!!

i agree with nigel and MartinImber use the optical if posible i have tried both and its a cleaner sound. also the suround sound on freeview is very good even better on newer programs like lasts nights drama Wire In The Blood 11. i dont care what TV people have and how big they have i dont like watching any TV now without good sound and freeview plus a good amp makes it all worth watching.

[Pottsy]

Can I chip in a little something? I had my Twin connected via optical and yes, the sound was OK. But the treble was a bit harsh and splashy. Replaced the ancient unbranded optical cable with one from Supra (big blue thing, can't remember the name) and it was miles better! Much smoother treble and now encourages loud volumes.

Digital via optical is inherintely flawed which is why cables make a difference.

One minor thing to note. If you run a video via the pace box, you still get the live tV on the digital out. You need the analogue out to hear the video. Makes sense as the pace does no A/D conversion of any form.

-Ian

Digital transfer to minidisk may well be "in the digital domain", but it's also compressed (with ATRAC), and thus sometimes causes a bigger quality drop than a well-made analogue stage.

The way to fly is obviously to get a nice pristine un-recompressed* copy onto dat/adat or computer, if quality really is that much of a dealbreaker when you want to make permanent copies of your audio.
[*]The audio on the box already has mpeg artifacts (you'll be lucky to be getting better than 128k/sec of less than wonderful layer 2 audio at the best of times), so it's always going to be less than perfect to start with. It's certainly degraded sufficiently that it'd score lower side-by-side with a pristine recording from FM on a good tuner, in a proper subjective listening test.

On another rambling note, has anyone shoved a drive froma twin into a pc yet, to see what the format is? I was thinking of doing this after I upgraded my box's hard drive, using the old one for grisly experiments. I plan to look at for known partition table types (dos partn table? some slice format? something else?) and try and take it from there. Is this really stupid for some reason that escapes me, and indeed, has it already been done?

[MartinImber]

Well analogue out from TV to MD is not as good as digitalout from Twin, usefull for recording music concerts and Radio 6