Model:SH-AU02A

I'm thrilled with this. I had had an all-digital pathway into my amp, that stopped working for mysterious software reasons, since which time I haven't been able to listen to my music properly. Now I can again and it makes me happy. Based on the reviews, I thought this gizmo was worth trying, but I didn't really expect it to work. In facct, contrary to some other reviewers, I've not had a single glitch; it has worked flawlessly. My planned use was USB digital-in to optical digital-out. In that use, in my understanding, this should be a simple, lossless, perfect "pipe", and it seems to be. Probably there is the possibility of it dropping samples, but it doesn't seem to; it sounds perfect. Maybe there is timing that could be better or worse, that fussier audiophiles could worry about, but I'm not convinced that that's even a thing in this part of the chain, let alone whether I could hear the difference even if it is. I have one small reservation. As advertised, this plays 96 KHz 24-bit files, as well as the usual 44.1 and 48 KHz ones. However, I tripped across an 88.2 KHz FLAC file, and it wouldn't play that (nor a 64 KHz one I then made as a test). But I have very few of those, they seem generally rare, and I can live with transcoding them. When I bought this I hadn't even noticed that it has a headphone jack. It does. That of course means there's a digital to audio converter, and DACs (unlike digital-to-digital pipes) _will_ vary in quality. This one is good: good enough for me, and incomparably better than the one in my laptop. It's too early to judge longevity, but the device stays cool in use, which is promising. One external nut was loose, but I simply tightented it, and otherwise the quality seems good. I'm thrilled to be able to hear my music again properly, and delighted with this small and cheap gadget.

Here's my setup: Win11 desktop PC > external USB hub > supplied USB cable > DSD SH-AU02A > toslink/optical cable > Denon RCD-M41DAB. It just worked, zero faff and no driver installation required. Audio quality is better than previous analog via RCA cable and there are no dropouts at all. Volume can be controlled from PC no bother. The unit is fairy compact/discrete and tucked under my desk although it's a pretty red colour and wouldn't look ridiculous sitting out. Early days but highly recommended for now if you need a relatively cheap and cheerful sound upgrade for your system.

I use this with a RPi running RoPieee and it runs flawlessly into my Denon PMA800NE. It is used as a Plex endpoint with the RPi and I am about to buy a second as I am that pleased with it. Never had any drop outs and I stream 16/44.1 Redbook FLAC rips from my UGREEN DXP 4800+ running Plex

with digital output to speakers or amplifier. I already had the earlier version of this device, but it lacked the 3.5mm analogue audio socket. Good sound quality from that analogue output, so it's a useful DAC device as well..

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.

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.

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.