van den Hul Optocoupler MK II

Voted "Best Buy" by What Hi-Fi in their 2001 awards, in our opinion, one of the best digital optical cables money can buy. "The vdH makes for a sound that's wide open and packed full of detail and dynamic subtleties. Musiccomes through with superb clarity and exhibits none of the low-level haze and mild squashing of dynamics that is the case with other optical leads." - What Hi-Fi Sound and Vision.

The most important benefits of optical signal transmission are obvious; Never any noise or interference caused by external electrical and/or magnetic signals, and optical fibres are free from any deterioration.

What makes the Van den Hul OPTOCOUPLER Mk II special is the fact that both ends of the single fiber are shaped in the form of a convex (spherical) lens. This has many advantages :-

• The OPTOCOUPLER Mk II’s lens shaped input and output surfaces produce an extra focusing of the light beam. Light entering the cable at an angle is focused and therefore undergoes 50% less wall reflections per unit length inside the fiber (i.e. the light path is shorter). This not only reduces the loss of light intensity (attenuation) (even when the cable is being bent), but also the time difference of travel between the light rays traversing the fiber at various angles (so-called modal dispersion) is much reduced; A pulse of light traversing the optical fiber therefore undergoes less time-smear and this in effect reduces the amount of jitter distortion experienced at your D/A converter.
• The OPTOCOUPLER Mk II’s convex shaped fiber ends furthermore bring about a better controlled fiber top surface contacting the optical transmitter and receiver-end. In this way optical insertion losses are reduced to a minimum.