ifitsoundsgoodlistentoit:one of the most important characteristics for a digital interconnect is its resistance of 75 ohms as well as its capacitance - which should be as low as possible. like any audio cable it should also be well shielded so it doesnt introduce anything into the audio signal.
i may be wrong but when people on here refer to digital signals as "just 1's and 0's" i get the feeling that they are over simplifying the matter. yes the signal is made up of 1's and 0's, however i dont think some people(including me probably) understand quite how many 1's and 0's are involved here. I mean if you take a reasonable quality mp3 with a bit rate of 192kbps then you are looking at 192,000 1's and 0's per second.
now thats a lot of data to transfer and a lot of things to get wrong each second, and thats just just an mp3!
i think you can pass a 24 bit 192 khz signal along a digital coax cable, so i would guess there is room to spare even with most high res downloads. i personally haven't heard a difference from optical leads, and the only dac i have heard differences between transports on, was a cyrus dac-xp - which sounded best with the cyrus transport and unpleasant with my mac. into my chord dac, my mac mini sounds the same as my macbook, which sounds the same as every cdp i've tried, which sounds the same as my bluray player - all using optical.
no difference between my macbook and a cambridge audio cdp, into my cousins avi adm9.1t's either, also using optical.