>>If I change to my 1990 Denon DRA 325 50 Watt stereo receiver, I will not have the option of connecting the CD player via the optical audio (toslink? - someone help me with the terminology here) connection. How important is this?
My first impression is that most people with a good (well, "better than crappy") CD player tend to stay with analog signals and slightly prefer them. My "really cheap" CD changer seems to sound better with a digital coax connection than with the analog connection.
I'm starting to suspect that middling-good CD players have good analog output quality and sound great with analog connections while the cheapest of the cheap have crappy analog outputs and sound better with a digital feed.
If your receiver does not have a "pure analog / bypass all the DSP stuff" mode (aka "Stereo Direct" etc..) then I imagine a digital connection is the way to go. Stereo receivers always operate in "bypass all the DSP stuff" mode cause they normally don't HAVE a DSP
