Optical cable mixing ardour

Anyone used ardour with optical toslink output, for years I’ve always used XLR balanced or rca for some setups, but lately optical cables seem like a nice alternative since speakers I’m planning on getting has a coax and optical output

Ardour doesn’t care what hardware you’re using or what type of connectors it has.

Many people (including me) have used optical cables to transport both ADAT and S/PDIF formats between the computer and some other destination. It works as well as anything else, maybe better depending on your scenario.

My question is if the speakers have a optical and my sound card has a optical, which device is used to let me hear the quality or audio quality of the sound. Like if I used XLR I know my soundcard has a dac but If my speaker has a optical wouldn’t the speaker have a dac also that has a sound quality good or bad that would not be as good as my soundcard or audio interface dac

No simple answer. Somewhere there has to be a digital-to-analog converter, and “sound quality” will depend on that more than anything else. No way to know the quality really, without testing it.

Well I mean if speakers have optical doesn’t it also mean there’s a dac or does it only receive the audio form my audio interface which has a dac and optical output for example

The optical cable transfers a digital signal, so for sound output the DAC must necessarily be after the signal has gone through the optical cable.

In your case, you say that your speakers have optical input. That means that the speakers must have a DAC. Like Paul says, the only way to know about the quality of the DAC is to test it. My guess would be that it is likely suitable for your needs.

Right the issue I had is, whether or not the audio interface I have is important since the speakers I’m going to use will have its own dac that will affect the end result of what I hear not what my audio interface has. I’m thinking maybe it’s not a big deal as the new question would be does the speaker sound good and have a good optical dac vs how good my audio interface dac will be

Even cheap dacs are quite good these days. The speaker cabinets, speaker elements, the amplifiers inside the speakers and even the room will probably affect the sound more. You can have a decent dac in a 100 dollar sound card, but you won’t get decent speakers for 100 dollars.

Thanks I’ll look into the best speakers I can get