Coaxial S/Pdif from USB

[officerM]

Hi - I have a laptop, and I want to hook it up to my AC3 receiver - the receiver only has a coax digital input, not an optical - and obviously the laptop only natively supports 2-ch output - so I was hoping to find some device that outputs the raw AC3 data through the USB port to the receiver.

The closest I've found so far is a Creative external USB sound blaster, but apart from being pricey, they only output optical - which isn't a huge problem, except then I've got to buy an optical-to-coax converter as well!

BTW, the receiver doesn't have individual channel inputs, so it has to be a coax digital output from the laptop.

Ideally, the device doesn't need to do any decoding or A/D or D/A - just convert the data sent from DVD player software through the USB to a properly formatted SPDIF stream with coax output.

[muskgrave]

you can get this if you hurry!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=3701&item=4128304721&rd=1

dlv

[officerM]

Thanks, but what I ended up doing was getting a Sound Blaster USB - the cheapo one - here in New Zealand its called Digital Music USB - but I think in the states its marketed as MP3+ USB.

Then I voided the warranty on it and did some soldering to convert the optical connector to a coaxial one. works fine, but you really need a decent digital coax cable - the audio ones cause interefences with the TV signal.