Digital out - optical or coax?

[StescoG66]

I am out of touch with the HiFi scene these days from my days working in it (I departed 12 years ago)
In my time, Coax was preferable to optical for transferring digital data from source to DAC or amp. Is this still the case??
As I say - just curious as I am somewhat out of touch but my interest in matters HiFi is slowly being re-ignited following the purchase of the Denon network player. Still have a notion to swap out for the Cambrisge NP30