I bought a dac and digital cable for my Pioneer DVL 90. How does one get the Laserdisc to play through the Dac? There seem to be Digital outputs. One is just PCM and the other has PCM and AC3 on it. Any idea which one I should use? Many Thanks Bob

I connect the digital coax cable to my dac and I get nothing.

It depends on the DAC and player but...usually the TOSLINK is going to be constantly putting out whatever digital stereo is on the LD. Most DACs should grab that signal since its mostly the same as CD.

The AC-3 output on the DVL90 is somewhat uncommon since it can put out non-modulated AC-3 and also PCM so frankly I have no clue how to hook it up. If your DAC only does stereo then its not going to be able to handle the AC-3 stream at all so don't bother using that one.

I bought a Toslink cable and it does work to my dac. I am still wondering why the coax cable doesn't work. There is a little hatch door for the toslink connection on the 90 that seems to be missing. Maybe this is the reason that the Coax does not seem to work. My worry about the Coax cable is because most audiophiles think that the Coax connection is better for audio.

I looked at another 90 on Ebay and noticed it had a cover that went over the Toslink Cable connection. Could it be since I am missing mine that it somehow will not allow a Coax connection?

No, that's simply a dust cap for the jack. Whether it's there or not will not affect the coaxial ouput.

There is no relevant signal loss with TOSLINK.

I used to make a lot of recordings on my portable MD player from digital sources and it would actually count the number of errors it had to correct. It would see something like...four, copying a 70 min CD. This is four errors out of something like...185,000,000? Nobody can hear that, you can't even measure it after the DAC.

I don't have an explaination for why your coax isn't working though. You'll have to try hooking it to other equipment to see if the jack is dead or if your DAC is just super picky.