Toslink is an "economy" implementation of an optical interface. Really good optical drivers/receivers are several hundred dollars each.

Glass optical medium has less loss (important for miles of cable run from the entertainment center room to the family room). For runs of more home-frindly distances, high quality plastic is fine.

In the case of optical interconnects (v.s. electrical interconnects), there is the additional electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical conversion.

For my use, I use electrical connectors to take the audio digital bitstream (Dolby digital, DTS, or whatever) from my DVD player to my receiver. Beings this audio bitstream is already compressed with a lossy algorithm, I do not have high-end audio expectations for it and therefore I would not be broken-hearted if I had to use the optical connector.

As far as using the optical or electrical audio bitstream to supply CD pcm data to the receiver, no way. The DACs in my DVD player and my CD/SACD player are much better than those in my AV receiver.

Paul

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the 1derful1