bigro said:

  It seems to me Apple TV is targeted towards the crowd that wants Bluetooth on everything and are perfectly happy with sound bars being the solution for all audio. Do I agree with ditching the Optical?  Nope I like Having Options of connectivity without having to add a possibly Inferior converter into the chain even if it is just an Apple TV . I have an older Apple TV with optical out and it works well but I understand Why they may have made the decision. Possibly the same reason why the Modi Optical Does not exist anymore. We probably have all 5 People on the planet who own Apple TV's and Use the Optical output on this thread. I help a lot of people with Setting Up A/V and I am the only person I know who uses or even knows what to do with an optical out. The majority of people want the convenience of 1 cable for all so I suspect the optical output dropping off went unnoticed by a vast majority of apple customers.
I did Try a amazon HDMI to Analog converter...it sucked. Back to amazon that went.
 
While we are on Apple TV I suspect they have done their share of market research and still opted for a non phone/ iDevice remote. While the phone app to control the world makes for great marketing, supporting various flavors of Operating systems and updates as well as wireless protocols superseding others will also present issues long term for support. When you buy a DAC that can be upgraded and you can actually get upgrades then the chance is  very good it will be around a lot longer than the lifespan of the idevices available today.

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Wouldn't be great if Schiit released a better quality HDMI converter, like the Wyrd, with a HDMI input and USB or Optical outputs. It would certainly solve the problems of those of us who don't have an optical output in their apple devices (New apple TV, MacBook Air, etc..). What do you think?

samgamegie said:

 
Wouldn't be great if Schiit released a better quality HDMI converter, like the Wyrd, with a HDMI input and USB or Optical outputs. It would certainly solve the problems of those of us who don't have an optical output in their apple devices (New apple TV, MacBook Air, etc..). What do you think?

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Stick to the cheap ones.

samgamegie said:

 
Wouldn't be great if Schiit released a better quality HDMI converter, like the Wyrd, with a HDMI input and USB or Optical outputs. It would certainly solve the problems of those of us who don't have an optical output in their apple devices (New apple TV, MacBook Air, etc..). What do you think?

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I think the market might be too small, currently, to justify the development costs.

Also, look into how HDMI handles audio data, and your hair will stand on end. It is absolutely the worst method for transmitting audio--far worse than Toslink optical, possibly worse than out-of-date isosynchronous USB 1.1 protocols. I mean, really, astoundingly bad. 
 
I understand there will be systems where HDMI is going to be primary, but at that point, seriously, go to an AVP or a AVR that is designed for the protocol, the manufacturer has paid the usurious licensing rates, and has staffed up to support the neuroses of a constantly-changing connection protocol. I personally use an Emotiva XMC-1 and XPA-7 for home theater duties. There are plenty of good AVRs that cost less than $500. And, if you're into the Audio 1% thing, there's always Datasat and their $20K decoders.
 
Horses for courses.

atubbs said:

   
Meh. The Apple TV converts your material to 48kHz, even if it's 44.1kHz. Because reasons. Why are we getting hung up on whether or not there's an optical digital port?
 
In any event, they provide digital audio on the HDMI port like everybody else. It's where the industry is going, along with the desires of 99.938% (scientifically pulled out of my butt) of their customers.
 
There's no loss of capability to speak of and let's be honest, does anybody really think optical SPDIF is a good idea in the first place? HDMI is the connector de rigueur for AV in the same way that USB is the connector for things plugging into computers. There may be arguably better mechanisms, but we might as well bemoan that firewire ports have transitioned from being esoteric to an endangered species. Nobody cares and neither should you. Good riddance, optical audio. You were a mistake and nobody will miss you.

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Ok, so it converts to 48kHz because Apple would rather spend money on soft conversion rather than adding more parts (divider or another crystal clock), since pretty much all video is 48kHz anywyay.
 
I will argue on the loss of quality here in the form of jitter, as long as it is implemented correctly. I am sure Schiit is aware of this extra jitter if they are do do anything with HDMI. Many manufacturers like Pioneer and this tested Onkyo from the article. Also from the article you can see that Coax is actually the worst at jitter sideband noise. HDMI and Toslink (optical) measured the best on that particular unit.
 
The other reason for my dissapproval of the removal of the optical means that if I want this new device, I now have to upgrade my receiver, or get an extra device to strip the audio off of it. When I plug in an HDMI to my TV, the optical output of the TV gives me nothing. I have been able to get by with a receiver from 2001 for my 2.1 setup just fine. Sure there have been improvements in audio (Dolby TrueHD & DTS-HD), but those formats are not standard, while Dolby Digital is, as well as PCM. And by Burr Brown DAC is just fine (for me).
 
So I only complain because it strips me of my flexibility of setup where I have to rethink where stuff goes while optical is still very viable even with it's bandwidth limitations. But when upgrading one thing makes you think about having to totally upgrade another is where I take pause. I would love nothing more than to tell the wife, "but it won't work without a new receiver", that is not going to go over well. Same for when Apple started phasing out Firewire - then when they did, so did all the PC makers, and now I have a legacy FW interface that only works with legacy computers (a device mind you that has an AK4358 DAC chip).

samgamegie said:

Wouldn't be great if Schiit released a better quality HDMI converter, like the Wyrd, with a HDMI input and USB or Optical outputs. It would certainly solve the problems of those of us who don't have an optical output in their apple devices (New apple TV, MacBook Air, etc..). What do you think?

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Seriously, just get one from Monoprice. 
 
http://www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=10251&gclid=Cj0KEQiApruyBRCFqoDu1pbk9rkBEiQAF8EFdfrz0S_HjOeS61qq80KgZ2GVg5IotRo8FyhNey5JtNgaAhD28P8HAQ

bigro said:

  I did Try a amazon HDMI to Analog converter...it sucked. Back to amazon that went.

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I don't understand.  Why not get an HDMI-to-Optical (Digital) converter instead?
 
Any device that converts digital audio to analog is a DAC (and the whole thread has many details about why that requires several hundred dollars of cost to get right).
 
So cheap converters should stay digital.

samgamegie:
     I only use HDMI as a medium for video transmission with the exception of direct from cable box to Tv which does not matter much because Tv speakers are crap anyway.  Jason confirmed My suspicions about HDMI audio so while a converter from Schiit would be cool,   I prefer a separate medium for audio in general . If the Medium/protocol that is being used is mediocre then get gear that can take that turd and do a good job of polishing it up I am guessing this Is why the recommendation for an AVP is there. Otherwise  +1 On the Monoprice Box Mentioned .

kstuart said:

  I don't understand.  Why not get an HDMI-to-Optical (Digital) converter instead?
 
Any device that converts digital audio to analog is a DAC (and the whole thread has many details about why that requires several hundred dollars of cost to get right).
 
So cheap converters should stay digital.

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Use case and being cheap. Its was for an Apple TV in our room used only for Netflix/ Streaming Tv and Airplay from an ipad. No need to for expensive gear because I fall asleep and the wife can catch up on all the shows that I can't bring my self to watch with her on our actual Tv. We are using Apple Tv with a 21 Inch screen. The speakers are Harmon Kardon orb space looking things with analog input only so an HDMI to Optical would not help. The Apple TV I have has an Optical Out And HDMI. I was using a Modi 2 U but I could not let it live out its days in such squalor. Mr. Modi Moved on up to the east side and now lives on my work desk with a Vali. I experimented with the HDMI to Analog converter,  It was bad at audio and the Video signal suffered too. In the end I stumbled across Little FIIO DAC which had an optical Input. Well made , the price was right and it works very well.

I wonder how an all discreet HDMI to SPDIF coax would sound..... 

kstuart said:

Is there a way to convert 96khz files to 44.1khz without approximations?
Clearly, if one was going instead from 96khz to 48khz, you just throw out every other sample.
But, to go to 44.1khz, there seems to be a lot of math involved.  Conceptually, it seems that it involves some points - for example - where the calculated sample is 12.37 and so you have to round down to 12 ("0000000000001100").
Or, am I missing some advanced math tricks that are involved ?

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Given sufficient horsepower, you can pretty much convert from any sample rate to any other with arbitrarily low losses but first some background.

When you convert sample rates, the first thing you have to do is low-pass filter the original signal to get rid of aliases before you convert to the higher rate. This usually means a digital filter that does a brick wall filter at half the original sample rate. This is what the megacomboburrito and any other upsampling or oversampling filter functionally does.

The upconversion then happens. The part of your question about tossing samples or imprecise sampling is about this part. If you had as much computing horsepower as you wanted, you can upsample at the product of the two sample rates (96*44.1 kHz in this case or their common factors if they're not relatively prime) and then downsample to the final rate and you would precisely have samples at each sample point.

Re. HDMI, doesn't the Smyth Realiser use HDMI? It can't be that hard if a tiny low-volume company like that can do it.

andreyew said:

Re. HDMI, doesn't the Smyth Realiser use HDMI? It can't be that hard if a tiny low-volume company like that can do it.

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Reading between the lines a little, I think the issue isn't that it is hard so much as that it is 1) a moving target that 2) charges licensing fees and 3) does the job poorly.  It seems that the tradeoff is that you spend time with bureaucratic paperwork and fitting a square peg in a round hole rather than chasing technical excellence.

frivolslistener said:

   
Reading between the lines a little, I think the issue isn't that it is hard so much as that it is 1) a moving target that 2) charges licensing fees and 3) does the job poorly.  It seems that the tradeoff is that you spend time with bureaucratic paperwork and fitting a square peg in a round hole rather than chasing technical excellence.

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I for one am a big fan of optical connections.  I use Toslink from my Macbook Pro into the GMB - very clean and reliable / no USB issues anymore.  We just purchased an OPPO 103D for our new DVD player, one reason was the OPPO has a digital optical output that we will connect into the GMB and listen to TV movies on the headphones.  

Is there any difference in Sound quality if the Gain Switch on the schiit amplifiers is set to low or high when using the pre amp outputs. Also is there a difference in the Voltage of the RCA Outputs when using the high or low gain mode.
 
Some quick experimenting i figured out the Volume level is higher with the Gain switch on high. It works in both modes, but is it just a difference on where my volume knob is or should I always flip the switch to High Gain when using the preamp outputs. I am curious about the differences as most standard components(meaning non headphone gear) do not have this feature.

bigro said:

  Is there any difference in Sound quality if the Gain Switch on the schiit amplifiers is set to low or high when using the pre amp outputs. Also is there a difference in the Voltage of the RCA Outputs when using the high or low gain mode.
 
Some quick experimenting i figured out the Volume level is higher with the Gain switch on high. It works in both modes, but is it just a difference on where my volume knob is or should I always flip the switch to High Gain when using the preamp outputs. I am curious about the differences as most standard components(meaning non headphone gear) do not have this feature.

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No, the only change is the volume.
 
Yes, the voltage output of the RCA outputs is a direct relation between the gain and the input signal attenuated by the volume control.
 
Use whichever setting nets you the most usable volume adjustment range.