how has noone mentioned this yet (did i miss it) ?



Optical digital audio
The Power Mac G5 comes with audio capabilities that are not usually found on personal computers. The state-of-the-art optical digital audio in and out ports use the S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) protocol over Toslink cables for connecting to devices such as decks, receivers, digital instruments, and even 5.1 surround-sound speaker systems.

http://www.apple.com/powermac/expansion.html


so yeh, PC users can officially suck it. oh and of course not to mention the performance and the oh-so-hot industrial design...

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No coax? They cheaped out.

In that case, here is an ebay listing with ubercheap glass toslink:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=3031210203

-Mag

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yeah. I've tried the glass toslink. They can sound good over some coax. ( but not all ) The optical I've tried sounded much better than Cardas Lightening, for instance.

After much screwing around, I still like my coax cable better.

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Not quite. Coax is cheaper to implement than optical.

Incidentally, for computer sources, optical is probably the better choice (for RFI rejection, dirty ground isolation, etc.).

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If they implement optical right, probably not.

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Maybe so on paper. I'm not sold on it yet.
It seems it's case by case, sysetm by system, listener by listner which one is preferable.

In my case, and trust me I wanted optical to work since it would been cheaper, but certain coax cables sounded better than glass toslinks i have tried. And I was not going to try out 1000$ toslink just to beat the already acceptable one I had in the house.

Well maybe in stock configs some PCs don't have digital out but nearly all PC consumer add in soundcards have some sort of digital out. I don't see what the big deal about that is.

Performance, it doesn't really matter as computers are fast enough for general use.

Industrial design, my PC has been in a gorgeous aluminum case for a while. My Mac live in a 4U rackmount case.

I guess for stock config, the G5 is pretty sweet.