24 May 2004
it was a science experiment
So I have this expensive receiver at the center of my home audio system, right? It’s got lots of inputs, right? Well, it doesn’t have nearly enough optical digital audio inputs, as it seems I now need at least one more. Whatever shall I do? Lower myself to listening to analog audio again?
Pshaw.
Instead, I scoured the web for a toslink splitter. Such things must exist, I insisted, and was proved by the very existence of such a thing. Except… everybody described it as a 1-in, 2-out splitter for sharing one input (e.g. a minidisc player) between two outputs (e.g. a minidisc recorder and a stereo receiver). Shouldn’t it work the other way around, I wondered, and then the question of if anyone had asked that very question before me.
I found scads of four and five source switches, but nothing that merely took two inputs and made them into one. Was I asking too much?
I returned to my scouring. It seemed that across everything Google indexed, be it newsgroup, forum or web page, nothing came up for my search. I was the first to ask such a question. So I asked around, emailing an expensive audio products retailer (no reply), asking jeeves (nothing useful), and even checking in on the ol’ Usenet alt.audio.minidiscs and there, at last, was my answer.
“Yes, as long as only one source is ‘on’ at a time.”
At last! As long as I wasn’t planning to play a PS2 game at the same time as CD, I was fine. I found the most easily obtained specimen, ordered it from Amazon, and have now the pleasure of saying to all the world:
Yes, you can hook two inputs to a toslink splitter and have only one output! Now I will sleep better, having put that earth-shattering issue to rest.