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Quite a flashback. I switched to optical TOSLINK maybe about 20 years ago, which solved all those issues obviously. It's a bit weird how rare optical outs are on motherboards even today -- clearly less than half have them -- when it is such a useful interface.

Just ordered a hat for my Raspberry Pi with optical out, with a plan to make that my main music streamer. Excited to see if that works out!

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I wish Mini-TOSLINK[1] had been more successful. It's allows you to put an optical and electrical audio output on the same 3.5mm connector (i.e. headphone port), which is helpful for saving space on crowded panels.

The trick is that your 3.5mm connector only needs to connect on the sides, so the end of the jack can be open for light to be transmitted.

This was seen pretty frequently on laptops for a while, but I think two things doomed it. One, most people just don't use optical. Two, there's nothing to advertise its existence. If you do have one of these ports, you probably don't even know you could plug an optical connector in there.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK#Mini-TOSLINK

I remember when all MacBooks had it. "What is this red light for?" used to be a common post on forums.

Ditto. It’s is hard to find non-wifi motherboards with toslink.

All the cheap boards have neither. Most of the high end boards have both

I updated my computer this year, and didn't find anything without wifi either. So it seems it's a small tax you just have to pay now.

I've at least found that the wifi+Bluetooth chips seem to be significantly more robust than the standalone bt ones.

I don't foresee any Bluetooth need either for my desktop setup. But yeah I do see that many buyers would want that for headphones if nothing else, so it makes sense to include the chip.

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