Mapman - Everything depends on the type of DAC you use. If it is NOS or just regular oversampling DAC then coax most likely will sound better. This most likely is because in spite o twice larger jitter toslink breaks ground loops and helps a lot in many situations. On the other hand upsampling DACs that suppress jitter like Benchmark DAC1 or Bel Canto DAC3 are not sensitive to jitter and should sound the same - unless you compare two devices and one is not "bit transparent" (digital volume control, DSP processing etc).
Mattzack2 - your DAC is not jitter rejecting and quality of digital cable will play role. I'm not saying coax will always be better but on average it is.
In general - the slower the driver is the more threshold point of receiver is affected by noise (slow for toslink). The faster coax driver on some transports will cause reflection problems (signal reflects on impedance boundaries) and requires very good digital cable with consistent characteristic impedance. Good shielding always helps - especially when driver is slow. On less expensive transports typical driver transition is 25ns while on fancy transports it might get below 10ns.
Everything is connected (so to speak) and sound depends not only on digital cable but synergy of all three components: transport, cable and DAC (and amount of ambient noise + quality of line voltage, ground loops - practically whole environment).
Mattzack2 - your DAC is not jitter rejecting and quality of digital cable will play role. I'm not saying coax will always be better but on average it is.
In general - the slower the driver is the more threshold point of receiver is affected by noise (slow for toslink). The faster coax driver on some transports will cause reflection problems (signal reflects on impedance boundaries) and requires very good digital cable with consistent characteristic impedance. Good shielding always helps - especially when driver is slow. On less expensive transports typical driver transition is 25ns while on fancy transports it might get below 10ns.
Everything is connected (so to speak) and sound depends not only on digital cable but synergy of all three components: transport, cable and DAC (and amount of ambient noise + quality of line voltage, ground loops - practically whole environment).