[Mr. Furious]

The problem with many of the sources reporting "the true deal with Optical vs. Coax" is that they all have a vested interest in keeping the cable market alive. As long as there are people willing to pay thousands on cables, there will be a market to supply it. With the increased pressure to scientifically quantify the value of a digital interconnect, we're seeing more cable and HT sites (who often make ad revenue off of cable suppliers) making the case for expensive cables. However none of them are actually showing any real world statistics, scientific studies, or even raw data to support their argument. It's always an article based on theory (or limited / single user experience).

I'm willing to keep an open mind about this. I believe that there is a potential for "bit differences" between the different mediums. I believe that some error may occur due to a poor medium, but I also believe that any well designed digital system will have error correction. I'm not convinced that digital components cannot compensate for problems in the bit stream. I cannot believe that we're the only ones who have thought about buffering Audio/Video and resending the data when there is an error.

Further, evidence in other fields tells us that digital systems operate very consistantly from one application to another. AV is not a completely separate entity. That is not to say that there isn't any unique challenges - simply that some knowledge from one digital system can be applied to another.

Why has no one been willing to run a study on this? Could we come up with the conditions of a challenge / study?