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If I may add my two cents at this late date, it seems most people are hung up on side issues. I've had a Master's in electrical engineering for over 25 years. I just finished designing a Gigabit router that had both optical (Sonet)and coax transmission. Believe me when I say that bits are bits regardless of whether they are sent over coax or optical cable. If you hear a difference in the sound quality, it is not due to the transmission mode (there are a lot of other things in the total path that have nothing to do with the transmission method). If there is a transmission quality issue that the error correction routine can't correct, the result will be either 1) silence or 2) very loud static (try listening to a data CD in an audio CD player to see what I mean). All other things being equal, I prefer optical cable for two reasons. First, there is no impedance matching problem. Second, there is no electrical connection between the two units eliminating the possibility of a ground loop.
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