I know :( I wish I knew then what I do now, before purchasing the Onyko. I assumed as it's one of their top of the line products, it would've had it...
But anyways. I feel I should also explain that the primary sources for the AV Receiver: They are a Satellite Box, and a Media Center PC running XBMC. I think this explains the "hiss" as they are receiving silent noise from these devices, and because the BL5's are almost maxed out, the hiss is very much audible. The BL5's are not hissing on their own, it's definitely as a result of the silent noise being fed to it, either from the AV Receiver itself, or by the respective sources connected to it .. Which is why I wanted to re-think my setup..
I could go with one of these devices that concert SPDIF to RCA/line, however I would be concerned whether or not it would fix this "hiss" sound (can't seem to think how it would though) and whether or not audio signal would degrade by introducing this component into the setup.
Wondering if there is a better setup I could consider that would solve the hissing issue, and how other people have connected and setup their BeoLab 5's with Non-B&O receivers/Amps etc.
P.S. I did make my own Powerlink - RCA/Line trigger box cable, which allowed my Onko to both trigger the BL5's on automatically, and control their volume automatically. This was perfect - auto power on trigger, with no hissing! Except for one big issue - the sound coming from the BL5's was clipping/distorting. I've yet to figure out why, and had to resort to the LINE - LINE connection, whereby the BL5's have to be manually powered on, and the BL5 volume is hard set by myself using Beo4 remote. This results in the hiss which I can hear as a result of me setting the volume on BL5's near max. Like I mentioned before, I wasn't really keen of the thought of leaving the BL5's hard set on half volume to reduce the audible hiss, and controlling audio via the AV Reveiver, because I would always only be using half of the BL5 potential, and also if It was setup like this, and i was to manually control the BL5's volume for when I want more sound like you suggested, then the volume levels would be out as the BL5's would be higher volume than the rest of the speaker setup (BL3's & BL7-2)...
Since my home made trigger solution didn't go great, I was thinking about purchasing this:

http://uk.bosscom.com/product.asp?id=1082
thanks for your response so far.