Toslink or 110 ohm aes/ebu?

"Stereophile magazine presented jitter measurements in the article "Jitter Games" where they stated "Critical listeners agree that the Toslink sounds substantially inferior to coaxial"

Since S'phile says so- it is gospel! Its funny that the same rag eschews measurements as not being reflective of performance but when it suits their purpose, they pull the measuremens argument to support their flimsy conclusions. All probably done to allow manufacturers a rationale for marketing overpriced coax cables. Trust your ears, go with what sounds better to you. The previous argument is similar to the one where LP users love the sound due to the additional distortions in the medium, makes it warm and fuzzy..

In spite of your suggestion of Stereophile dishonesty I would rather trust their opinion then yours. Monarchy (second link) that measured jitter does not have any interest one way or another.

There are valid technical reasons why Toslink is worse. In order to have low jitter good transport is needed. Good transport have most likely transitions (coax output) in order of 10ns (average transport about 25ns) and limited bandwidth of Toslink causes smearing edges and introducing jitter especially when system noise is present. Regular Toslink has bandwidth of 6MHz reaching 9MHz for very good one. It is too low to output fast transitions.

It is all system dependent especially when Toslink breaks ground loops and I don't question that Toslink might sound better to you - just speaking in general terms.

Ive had a couple cec transports over the years .Ive run aes cables and ive run coax .Ive never used toslink before just cause of myth of them .Just remember this ,CEC has a transformer in the curcuit for aes/ebu to convert it.CEC has always recommended to use the coax out to any dac based on thats how they built the transport around ,although I used some great big name aes cables and loved it, the coax always beat it out in long run. So to answer your post heres the order. 1 coax, 2 aes ,3 glass,4 toslink , call anyone who repairs the cec and they will confer.Remember the less hardware in curcuit the better

I would suggest we should trust our "own" opinion above all else. In my experience of 22 years and having tried many good value and high-end pieces of equipment (e.g. currently Theta CB3 Xtreme DACS, Classe SSP-800, DVD-10AX, SCD-1 to name just a few) I have ended up sticking with a toslink connection. Perhaps part of the reason may be my reluctance to shell out $400+ for a COAX cable (maybe thats what it takes to get better sound) but the bottom line is that the 3 toslink inputs (in the CB3) are occupied while the coax inputs sit unused (unless forced to go that route due to 4th source component). Many of the criticisms of toslink have nothing to do with cable itself, more with how the output jack on the source component is designed. There is overemphasis on the solidity/rigidity of the connection itself, as stated earlier the intent is not to suspend a component by the cable!
In a nutshell- I prefer the toslink to coax in my set-up and furthermore recent experience with SSP-800 indicates that HDMI for audio is even superior (have to listen critically in 2-ch audio mode) but more on this later.

I always get the best sound in my system using AES/EBU Cables.

Interesting comments from people, I have an acquaintance in CA who swears by Toslink. Of course the noise in CA is much worse then here in Colorado over the power line and my friend feels that his system is much quieter when he uses the optical cables. I live less than 3 miles from the power plant and never found the advantage he did. Now SPDIF coax uses .5 volts while the AES/EBU uses 5 volts. I think the higher signal level makes for a improvement in signal to noise ratio. At least for me in sunny Colorado.