I got a new television for Christmas. It has an orange plug digital audio output. Can I connect a sound bar or something else to that, or do I need something special?
As long as your soundbar has “coaxial digital audio” as an input you’ll be OK. It looks like many only have optical digital audio. You might want to check and see if your TV has that output available.
ETA: The coaxial plug will be round and look like an RCA-type plug (the old red/white plugs). The optical will be more of a rounded-off square. They are completely different cables and are not cross-compatible.
Digital audio out normally goes to something like a receiver that can process the digital audio. If your sound bar has a digital audio in (also usually coax orange), you should be fine. Don’t plug it into a red or white plug.
You could try what electrical engineers refer to as the “smoke test”. Plug it in and see what happens.
Obviously, if the input isn’t orange-coded, it probably wasn’t intended to accept that signal. Otherwise, it’s lik plugging your analog phone into an ethernet port and expecting it to work. Wrong signal, wrong connection.
The orange digital audio and the fiber optic digital audio cables cannot be mixed up, their plugs are completely different shapes and it would quite literally be trying to put a square peg into a round hole. The orange digital audio carries exactly that, a series of ones & zeros, on/off electric pulses generated by a digital audio processor that can only be decoded into sound by another DAP chip. The red & white RCA audio plugs use a smoothly varying signal to represent an ‘analog’ of the original sound in an electronic medium. You won’t break anything if the plug one into the other, you just won’t get sound…
To actually answer the OP: Yes, you can connect it to any sound bar or reciever that has a S/PDIF input.
See posts 2, 3, 4, and 5. All you did was add a new vocabulary word.