Pioneer's iLink. Is it good?

I have the same dv47ai and the vsx55txi. They were together fantastic. Sacd, dvd, cd all works well. I run my receiver as a preamp to a Sunfire cinema grand signature with 800 watts per channel to my all Martin Logan surround set up. It is a very critical set-up. I have absolutely no problems. The I-link firewire is awesome. Not having the extra cables doesn't hurt either.It is also a treat just to turn the receiver to DV47 and automatically detect whatever you put in the DV47ai. The automatic speaker adjustment can't be beat. No more hours of adjustments. Just make sure you adjust the bass output in the expert mode to about -30 or so. Otherwise your subwoofer will lack. Also if you are running 5.1 with a sub, make sure you set the fronts, center and surrounds to "small" in the normal mode. If you don't, your sub wont run in the music mode. It is a great way to go, but takes some playing with.

iLink is a FireWire based digital interconnect standard. It works great for HD video transfer, but won't help you if you want to listen to SACD - your player only outputs analog from the SACD layer (copy protection), so you'll still need the analog interconnects.