Toslink VS Coaxial Digital Connection

My opinion, and opinion is all I have to offer from personal experience. I have a SAT receiver that forced me to use Toslink on a 18 foot run and recently I got a new receiver that had coax. I switched back to coax soon after and I feel that I have a better separation of the 5.1 DD. I really beleive that Toslink is probably as good or so close to the quality of coax at a 1 meter distance. But as the length increases, I beleive that it dimishes proportionatly. I think if you use toslink that the quality of the cable must be better than that of the coax. Some may argue that the quality of coax is crucial but I feel the higher quality of the coax is just bonus at best. But a quality toslink is crucial with length. And again all opinion, some more experienced
experts may answer this thread with more factual data.

My experience using a Mac Mini with under 1 meter runs, was that I preferred the sound of the TOSlink directly connected to my DAC, over the sound of a high quality coaxial into a HagUSB SPDIF converter. I was sceptical at first, but my ears told the tale. I had tried TOSlink in previous setups without a good DAC, and always went back to coax. But now, between my DAC, and the quality of the optical information vs SPDIF provided by the Mini, my vote has gone to the TOSlink.

As far as I know the only difference is jitter (noise in time domain). If you have jitter suppressing DAC like Benchmark DAC1 (upsampling) then it should not matter. Otherwise it might depend on other factors like noise or ground loops (that toslink breaks). I use both glass toslink from my TV and short coax from cd/dvd player into Benchmark DAC1. I cannot tell the difference but both are very short. If you decide to go with coax make sure that you get proper impedance cable (and connectors if you make cable yourself) since reflections appear on impedance boundaries.