I just plugged my Dishnetwork receiver into the DA section of my CA player using the Toslink connection.
At the same time, I made a few setup changes to the receiver. I turned OFF the setting that reduces dynamic range. The help screen says this is useful for late night listening. I changed the output from PCM/Dolby to PCM only, since I have no Dolby anything.
XM radio was nice before, but now it is downright good. I'm leaving the changes in place.
I've been looking this up. All I can currently find is that it is encoded using MPEG-2. This is probably some kind of variable bitrate system. More research may yield a better result. Until than, I won't care because for background purposes, it is better than fine. Especially on the Jazz and Watercolors feeds. Even the 'All Sinatra' channel is pretty darn good, even on old recordings.
I suspect, just from the sound of it, that it is NOT a lossless conversion, but somewhere around MP3-320. At this point, with my signal chain at its best, I'm now at the mercy of the broadcaster / engineer /
Tomorrow I'm heading up to WalMart and buy another 6' of optical. This one will go from my OPPO upsampler to the OTHER channel of input of my CA840. At that point, I may do some reprogramming of the Logitech remote and jerk out a handfull of RCA cables.
Overall, a successful experiment. Even the darn XM or Sirius (whatever) from my smalldish sounds more open, less grungy and better dynamics. Anybody wanna buy some BlueJeans LC-1 interconnects?
congrats Im getting ready to go optical with my pc as well.....i have it hooked up to my 46 inch lcd tv in 1080p now i want to use the pcs optical output for the sound out to my denon home theater receiver