02-09-09: Richard_stacyOh, I just remembered: Even if you send the audio from a Blu-ray player to your Casablanca over a coax or Toslink digital cable, in many cases is WILL sound better than the digital feed coming off a garden variety DVD.
johnnyb thanks, what i was afraid of. i'm pretty sure that is correct. was not sure if the digital input formats would work but i guess not. oh well!
it really is hard for me to imagine things sounding that much better anyway.
Why? Because the Blu-ray player downconverts the uncompressed multichannel signal to send over the digital link, and this bitstream comes at two to four times the transfer rate that comes off a regular DVD. In many cases it downconverts to DTS, which is less lossy than Dolby Digital.
So even though it won't be lossless, it *will* be an improvement. This is how I run mine. I use a PS3 for Blu-ray. It has Toslink, HDMI, and analog stereo outputs, but no multichannel ananlog outs. So I use the Toslink into my Boston AVP7 and it sounds really good--incrementally better than most of the DVDs I've watched.