It has been argued that coax generally sounds better than optical.
Coaxial or Optical?
I'm looking for a very good external soundcard for the purpose of playing music through my stereo. The computer will be ~35 feet from my system. I'm going to run a digital out, at this length, is it better to use the coaxial or optical s/pdif? Does it even matter? These will all be uncompressed wavs or some other lossless compression so quality is important to me.