Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Question about PCM lossless and optical cable

What I was trying to say without saying it, is that quality optical and coax (for reference see the telco world where 45 Mbps is routinely transmitted over RG-6 coax) are more than capable of handing the bandwidth required for multichannel, lossless audio. The truth is the studios did not want to update the S/PDIF specification, an unencrypted interface, to carry the new codecs. So it was mandated that they only be sent over HDMI.

So yeah, any player will only send the lossy "core" of the lossless codecs to the optical interface.