In reply to:
I had my friend patch the Denon and Kenwood into his system on analog as well, although I believe his CD player was connected via toslink.
Your friend is a fool. He paid that much money for a device that performs no different than any other CD player with a digital output.
When using a digital output, the player is basically no different than a CD-ROM in your computer. It's sole job is to spin up the disk, read the little pits, describe those pits as 1's or the lack there of as 0's and send it down the cord. Obviously, this isn't a complicated process.
The only signal that cable carries is either high level or low level. So long as the player and cable don't introduce so much jitter or skew into that signal as to make a high level look like a low level or to miss time them, the receiver will get the exact same signal.
Jitter and skew are so microscopic at the speeds that CMOS based products typically run that CMOS devices don't even spec them. We spec jitter and skew on our products because they run at 12GHz.
Anything that meets the JEDEC spec for SPDIF will be just as good at transfering those 1's and 0's as anything else. Using analog outputs is a different matter as there's the issue of converting the digital signal to an analog one, but a digital transfer is total dependent upon whatever finally decodes the signal into an analog source. In the case of your spend happy friend, that's his pre-amp.
