Pack in complaining Starstreams - I'm not an andmin or a mod, but the software here is on a couple of forums I use and the missing edit button I think is a feature that can have a time lock, post count, period of membership and even reputation status attached to it and if you don't have it, then youre just going to have to wait until somebody, over the christmas holiday gives up doing family things and comes here to log in and read your messages. It's a button not a pending heart attack! I'm working over Christmas, and HAVE to answer emails on Christmas Day and answer the phone. Unpaid forum people don't! Wanting to edit a post is hardly worth getting so angry about - take a chill pill and calm down. If you edit your post, nobody is going to go back and even read it? I never read anything but the ones on th current screen!
On the S/PDIF front - the stories here are EXACTLY what we had in the 90s - confusion over the connectors vs what was going down the cable. The TOSLINK was developed by Toshiba. The connector was also used by Alesis - and like MIDI cables in the 70s, they mostly worked fine. MIDI cables were far more trouble a they looked exactly like some European Hi-Fi cables - but had different wiring - so failed for MIDI, and dedicated, correctly wired MIDI cables failed for connecting Hi-Fi.
The trouble with S/PDIF was to do with poor transmission through the connectors - especially when a bit dirty. The light level dropped and at some point the signal was invalid and muted - or worse, would hover just over or just under the go/nogo point. The coax version was more reliable.
The upshot was simple S/PDIF was Toslink or RCA connectors, and stereo. ADAT was TOSLINK and 8 channels. Pretty much that was it. Short optical cables worked better than long ones - I guess based on today's fibre optic evolution that might appear odd, but I think the actual fibres back then were just less resilient, and got bent around sharp edges and some fractured. Now we know how clean and dust free fibre has to kept. Back then a red light carrying music was magic.