Which is better sound, HDMI or Optical?
HDMI is capable of sending uncompressed PCM while the optical is limited to lossy formats. This really only matters if you have a surround sound system. If you’re sending to the TV there’s no reason to have anything but HDMI. With the PS3 you want to send your audio as PCM (not bitstream) from your HDMI. The only time you don’t want to do this is if you have a receiver that isn’t HDMI compliant or can’t handle uncompressed PCM bitrates, in which case you send it via bitstream optical. Or if you don’t want to send your video through your receiver you could send it directly via HDMI to the TV and send the audio separately via optical to the receiver. In other words, there’s really no reason to *not* use HDMI unless your systems are incapable of handling it. Their is no advantage to optical over HDMI. And HDMI can handle not just uncompressed audio, but also 7.1 surround. The optical can only do 5.1 surround, so Meilien is wrong. Also, the PS3 decodes HD audio, so it’s a moot point whethe
