Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Sony PS3 outputs

The PS3 does up-sample CD audio to 48 kHz by default. There's an option to change that to 44.1/88.2/176.4. If using that mode, make sure you've only checked the boxes in the audio output setup which your receiver can support. Most receivers don't do 176.4 over optical.

A bad optical cable will make a (digital) scratchy sound when playing LPCM, as there are no checksums, and dropped bits get turned into zeros, while still attempting to play them. (Bitstreamed DD or DTS will go silent when dropped bits are detected as errors.)