DSD TECH SH-AU02A USB to TOSLINK Coaxial SPDIF Audio Adapter Support 96K 24Bit

I really did not expect this USB-CoAx converter to be as good as it is. Connected to a high quality DAC the audio quality is superb.

This device is perfect for me. Solves a number of connection issues in one fell swoop.Connected from iMac to an old school DAT recorder using Digital COAX connection - as well as being connected to a similarly old school Minidisc recorder using the SPDIF connection. Both pushing a pure digital signal at the same time.Fantastic.

Audio volume control is unavailable on Apple devices

This is the second of these usb-> toslink dongles I have tried. This one is better, but it still suffers from audio drop outs, so I will probably have to send it back.The problem arises because USB audio is just a stream of bits with no background clocking signal, but spdif encodes a timing clock into the signal that the receiving DAC must extract. It is claimed that a poor quality timing signal in the SPDIF signal can degrade audio quality, so ESS dacs, which are quite common, perform a trick to extract a timing signal from the data without using the signal encoded in the input.Unfortunately this causes audio dropouts when the SPDIF signal is low quality and jittery that make music unlistenable. This is a problem with some low quality TV optical outs (search for PLL width tv audio), and appears to be a problem with these low cost usb to spdif converters as well. The converter had more audio dropouts when I fed it a 24bit/96kHz signal and worked best when I fed it 16bit/44.1kHz, but it always had audible dropouts in the sound. This suggests it is not really able to generate a clean 96kHz signal.Overall then the SPDIF output is not the cleanest output, but may work for you if your dac is not too fussy. I'm surprised at how hard it apparently is to produce a robust USB->toslink converter. You would think it would only require a cheap encoder to extract the bits from the USB stream and convert them to optical PWM, but the quality threshold needed seems to be beyond most of these cheap dongles, and once you get to higher prices you might as well buy an entire usb dac.

had to send back, simply don't work, who knows if i was unlucky, modern electronics should have 99.9% or better quality control so i would have been very unlucky or using devices that were too fussy.nicely made physically and good form factor, just needs compatibility to be stated or improved at a personal guess

I got this for patching my laptop into an existing home-recording setup. It works seamlessly for audio output for hours at a time, but eventually I noticed some glitching and traced it to this, so it must be dropping samples. What a shame.

Some users have had this device working well, and that's good. But using the SPDIF (cable) connection I tried a number of different settings on my (very high-end) D/A converter and only got badly damaged audio, ranging from continuous noise to constant clicks or gaps, depending on clock settings. So, I have sadly had to return the device as unsuitable, and as they say, YMMV.