Well, it looks like this thread is old but I will add new observations. I had been fighting getting a nice living room system to receive digital streaming over TOSLINK. I was using a Mac Mini outputting over a 50 foot TOSLINK cable to a Musical Fidelity MX DAC. It was unreliable. What is weird is it worked fine for a few hours and then after some cable re-arrangement it became extremely unreliable.
I'm not entirely sure what was going on (MX flaky? cable too long?) but after a long conversation with a person more knowledgeable, I came to the conclusion that 1) TOSLINK is the least referred connection, 2) the distance is simply too great for TOSLINK (jitter?).
I have abandoned TOSLINK except for very short distances. I am in the process of replacing the Musical Fidelity DAC with a Cambridge Audio music server (over ethernet versus TOSLINK).
This seems to be the better solution overall for several reasons, musical fidelity being one ...choice at the terminal point being another.
This is my first post: Feedback is solicited on the approach above. Thanks! vic
