The music industry would not allow a digital output of high resolution audio due to fears of people making countless perfect copies of the data, hence the fact that both DVD-Audio and SACD must be converted to analog inside the player -- resulting in that nasty mess of half-a-dozen analog audio cables. There are a few pieces of equipment that support a digital output for DVD-Audio (and SACD in some cases, although from what I've seen that's been a tougher nut to crack) using special encryption -- Meridian and Denon have created proprietary digital connections (Denon includes that on the DVD-5900 and one or two of their flagship receivers), and Pioneer has started incorporating the emerging industry standard IEEE-1594 (Firewire, or iLink) to allow for it on a few of their products, but it's going to be a while yet before players and receivers both pick it up. When it happens, it seems probable that Firewire will win out, but for now we're locked into analog.

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