Are DAWs outputting a digital signal or analog?

[visheshl]

So the recent soundbar thread got me thinking, that i have a soundbar with digital in.
So what if i connect it to my music production machine via toslink ?
But what baffled me is when i searched for usb to toslink connector, every one of them had an analog to digital converter.
Which got me thinking, that usb is basically getting the analog stream, the converter converts it into a digital signal and then sends it via toslink to the soundbar, then it converts it back into analog and outputs it thru speakers.

Isn't this a redundant AD-DA process?

Shouldn't the DAW send the digital signal itself straight to USB, then the converter sends it straight to toslink,
rather than the DAW convert it to analog, send the analog stream to USB and then it is again converted to a digital signal by the converter?

Any audio Gurus here could enlighten me on this?

[rcbuse]

If you have something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Douk-Audio-Conve ... B085XPRSGM

It is going to show up as a new soundcard device on your computer. If you select this soundcard device as the output for your DAW software, the digital audio is going to be pumped out on that toslink port. You can then connect the toslink to the soundbar and the digital to analog conversion is done on the soundbar.

Those other devices you are seeing that have both analog and toslink are more of a multipurpose audio interface. Typically most people want an analog-to-digital converter because they need a way to get their audio IN to the computer, microphones, instruments, etc. DAWs typically don't like splitting audio interfaces between multiple pieces of hardware.

[visheshl]

Okay, thats what i was wondering.
Thanks.
Maybe they also have analog outs, thats why they need the converters.