Mistercrash,
The reason you are getting that noise is your cable box is outputting a 5.1 signal (Dolby/DTS) and you are trying to convert it with a 2 channel DAC. The two aren't compatible. The cable box needs to be able to downsample to stereo PCM in order for that set-up to work.
I had the same problem and what I had to do was connect the cable box to my tv using HDMI and then use the toslink output on my TV to a stereo DAC. This worked because my TV only outputs stereo (no multi-channel) through toslink.
The reason you are getting that noise is your cable box is outputting a 5.1 signal (Dolby/DTS) and you are trying to convert it with a 2 channel DAC. The two aren't compatible. The cable box needs to be able to downsample to stereo PCM in order for that set-up to work.
I had the same problem and what I had to do was connect the cable box to my tv using HDMI and then use the toslink output on my TV to a stereo DAC. This worked because my TV only outputs stereo (no multi-channel) through toslink.