Cable TV digital music

Hey Avrij, I don't follow you, what do you mean by "pre/pro". I just assumed the rca jack output on the cable box was a digital out and my pre amp converted it to analogue. Are you saying I need a separate DAC?
jb

Hey Bry, sorry it took so long to get back. anyway, yea, my motorola # is: DCT 6416 III
anyway, I'm just getting around to trying this out. I found the little "trap door" you mentioned, it's labeled "optical spdif", so I am going to get a coaxe cable and try going from there to the Cary coaxe in and see how it is. There is also a separate orange rca jack labeled "spdif" sandwiched in between the rca audio and video input jacks. I can't tell if that's an input or output jack.

UPDATE; it turned out the coax and toslink outputs on the motorola cable box were defective. the cable co. said they had a whole shipment of them on the streets. He swaped it out with a "Pace" unit. BUT.. the digital coax output works fine sending the audio signal to my Cary cd/dac out to pre/amp/speakers on the regular tv channels. BUT, the cable music channels do not work using the coax, I can only get sound out of them going through the analogue rca output jacks to my pre-amp. I wonder if Face was right, the music chanells are only transmitted in "low rez signal"...analogue??? jb

Hi Zen,
the unit is just a Motorola cable box. It's labeled "dual tuner: dvr/hdtv" It just has rca jacks.
jb

Bruce, the Motorola does hae something labeled: optical SPDIF, it is an orange rca jack but it next to the "audio in" jacks. in a row underneath the SPDIF jack are 3 rca jacks; a green one labeled "y", a blue one labeled "Pb" and a red one labeled "Pr" but no toslink output.
On the back of theCary unit there are both in/out puts labeled coaxial (rca jack), a toslink, and a balanced AES/EBU (what does that stand for?) any way, on the front you can switch from the CDP to any of the 3 digital sources: AES?EBU, coaxial or toslink. So, what do you think? Should I just try hooking up from the Motorolan RCA SPDIF jack to the Cary coaxial jack? thanks, jb