If you can run it as digital you may as well. No mater how good the leads they all carry some capacitace and inductance to to longer it is the worse your signal will be. Higher frequencies will experiece worse effects. What kind of distance are you thinking? Because if it's just within your house I can't imagine the sound to be noticibly bad if you use good cables.

buy a booster, will improve quality no end

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w: www.luketerry.com

You shouldn't worry about the "quality" of wire if you have good RCA cables (they run about $30 or so for 20ft) with gold plated plugs and shielding. Monster cable has good cables and speaker wires. You can run RCA cables about 50 ft before you'll start to get signal loss, and if you want to run it more than that, I'd use XLR before you go with optical--that is unless you have about $200 or more to spend on optical. 3 meters of audio grade fiber will run you about $45 or more and if you want longer than that you'll probably have to go to a high end audio store (like ovation if you have that around you, or the listening post may be able to point you in the right direction) and get it made for you. Fiber will be very expensive, and you'll have to take great care not to bend the fiber very much otherwise you will get signal loss. The resistance of light traveling through the fiber is very low, but with the internal reflection, you actually can't run fiber that long without a signal booster of some sort. That is why they don't sell fiber in lengths longer than 3 meters anyway, aside from the cost. You can probably get signal boosters, but I have no clue how they would work with fiber, where you can find them or how much they cost.

Well, the actual fiber will be free for me, so the only thing i need to spend money on is bringing it in to get it terminated on both ends. I know I can run fiber w/o signal loss multiples of how far I can run RCA. Im thinking it will be about 50 or so feet I need to run.. So maybe I can stick with RCA...?