QED's new Glasscore™ technology employs multiple fibre bundles of ultra-fine boro-silicate glass optical fibres (GOF) of no more than 50um each to make up the 1mm diameter necessary to conform to the Toslink standard connectors. Because the fibres are so small the different paths taken by the light rays are similar in length virtually eliminating the timing error and introducing less distortion and jitter. This has the effect of increasing bandwidth and the accuracy of the data transmission.
The quartz fibres are coated with a cladding of low Refractive Index to guide the light signal.
This vastly exceeds the demands for high definition multi-channel HD digital audio. In contrast to conventional acrylic glass optical cables quartz glass cables can deliver signals up to and including 24bit/192kHz with very low jitter . Reference Optical Quartz can provide a much higher bandwidth than a single acrylic glass fibre with 1/10th of the attenuation.
QED have calculated that jitter (distortions caused by timing differences between the different light paths) in conventional optical cables could typically reach up to 145ps. In Reference Optical Quartz, timing errors are virtually eliminated, introducing less distortion, jitter and ultra low loss < 0.03 dB/m.