In reply to:
People report good luck with items at Partsexpress and Blue Jeans Cable.
I love BJC's products and most of my interconnects are from there. But I have never seen an optical cable there, only digital coax. A further bit about BJC: I have a
blog (only 2 entries so far) that I started last month. The second entry is a price comparison between DIY interconnects and buying from BJC. This started when a friend asked me to help him make a bunch of interconnects for his system. He asked me because he knows I have made many, many cables in my time (I worked in a digital media R&D group at Intel for around 6 years, and became the de facto "cable guy"). I told him I bought my IC's from BJC because it's really not worth it to make your own. So I put the results in the blog. I already own the tools, so basically I would have paid maybe $80-$100 less to build the cables myself. But to me it was worth it to pay someone else $80 to assemble the cables.
