Translations:ALSA/55/en

HDMI can carry compressed Dolby/DTS and uncompressed (i.e. Blu-ray) Dolby/DTS signals. The audio market has favored this connection, but still preserves S/PDIF connections. One concern being, HDMI cables are copper wire, still susceptible to electrical cross talk or interference, similar to S/PDIF Digital Coaxial connections. There are HDMI Optical cables, but too expensive for the consumer market. If audiophiles have S/PDIF Optical ports, they will use the S/PDIF connections for other media such as music and DVD movies, while only using HDMI when needed for processing uncompressed Dolby/DTS encoded material such as Blu-ray media. Again, the basic user will likely just use HDMI, avoiding the fuss of changing configuration files around.