Toslink or 110 ohm aes/ebu?

Magfan,
Stereophile claims low word clock jitter (258ps)on digital output and 10x worst performance on analog out (sidebands).

http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/505apple

I use Airport Express (smooth and clean) but my Benchmark DAC1 is jitter suppressing so I cannot really comment. Your unit might be defective or Toslink (or adapter) don't make good connection.

Toslink was measured to have on average twice jitter of coax. It is because of additional conversions to light and back and relatively slow optoelectronics.

I have no clue how Toslink can improve your bass performance since it affects only jitter and jitter is basically noise in time domain. Lower amount of noise might create impression of anemic sound the way clean jazz guitar sounds less dynamic than distorted guitar.

Stereophile magazine presented jitter measurements in the article "Jitter Games" where they stated "Critical listeners agree that the Toslink sounds substantially inferior to coaxial"

You can also find jitter measurements showing twice more jitter for Toslink here: http://www.monarchyaudio.com/DIP4.htm

In spite of your suggestion of Stereophile dishonesty I would rather trust their opinion then yours. Monarchy (second link) that measured jitter does not have any interest one way or another.

There are valid technical reasons why Toslink is worse. In order to have low jitter good transport is needed. Good transport have most likely transitions (coax output) in order of 10ns (average transport about 25ns) and limited bandwidth of Toslink causes smearing edges and introducing jitter especially when system noise is present. Regular Toslink has bandwidth of 6MHz reaching 9MHz for very good one. It is too low to output fast transitions.

It is all system dependent especially when Toslink breaks ground loops and I don't question that Toslink might sound better to you - just speaking in general terms.