Yup, a mess I avoided when we did our new system this spring. I ordered the AMazon cables (great cables by the way!). They are dirt cheap and 100% as good.
Think of it this way:
In the analog days cables made a difference. The data on the cable was analog, it could be anything on the spectrum from say 0-255 for a color bit or more accurately it was a voltage followed by another voltage...etc, in essence it was a wave that went up and down and everywhere in the middle. The quality of your sound is how accuratelly that wave was reproduced by the device on the other end. In this instance signal loss via resistance was a critical factor too much loss and your sound or picture come out weiird on the other end.
In the digital world it is a stack of 1s, and 0s. If the TV gets at .23, it knwos it was supposed to be a 1, also there is error checking of the packets via CRCs. In essence the cables don't matter at all as long as they are thick enough for the data to flow through free flow. (i.e. high speed, though the reality is that I am not sure you would even see an issue there either).
In any case, Amazon makes these low price cables, that are great cables and are 100% capable of anything you will buy elsewhere.
http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Sp...3503&sr=8-1http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Toslink...pd_bxgy_e_img_bAlso, one last note, these cables come in boxes, not those stupid cut them apart plastic packages... I can't say enough about how great they are. Also they are well made and nice to work with.