Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format. A consumer standard, similar to the professional AES/EBU standard, (IEC-958) for encoding digital audio. Given the international standard number IEC-958, S/PDIF was originally designed to be the standard for transmitting audio data between CD players and DAT players, at a time when DAT was thought to be the next consumer audio recording medium.. The data transmission is the same as AES/EBU: four times the sample rate. S/PDIF Uses either standard unbalanced coaxial cable and phono jacks, or fibre optic cable and a connector called a Toslink, usually at -10dB. Note that the coaxis is not an RCA audio cable, but a video-grade cable: the impedance on this cable is 75Ω, and . Note also that S/PDIF carries the SCMS copy code. Both S/PDIF is a and its professional counterpart, AES/EBU, are self-clocking schemes. The EIAJ has adopted S/PDIF as CP-340 Type II.