I am re-posting the following here in the hopes of getting some more advice. Thanks for your patience guys.
I have been testing a new Atlona De-embedder today with mixed and sometimes great and sometimes rather strange results.
This device has two HDMI inputs, one HMDI output, both optical and coax digital outputs, and can be used as an HDMI source switch among other functions.
However, its real purpose is to strip out the digital audio signal from the source material and in theory, provide high bit rate audio for downstream use.
Using it in combination with my Oppo blu-ray player, I am happy to report that it does at least some of what I had hoped. The connection is with the Oppo as the source transport, coming out its HDMI port, into an Atlona HDMI input, and then feeding the digital output from the Atlona (either coax or optical) into my Vision EC DAC and on to the rest of the system.
I can get digital output from both DVD Audio and SACD Audio discs using this setup and the musical results are excellent with my system. I have been informed that the OPPO downsamples high bit rate DVD Audio down to normal Redbook at its digital audio outputs, and of course digital output from SACD is forbidden. Since my blue ray player tells me it is playing in SACD mode, I am assuming that finally I am getting SACD audio out with the use of the Atlona in the chain. Nice. With DVD Audio, the digital output of the Atlona is great too, but then again so was direct Redbook digital output from the OPPO and I am not at all sure that there is any audible musical improvement with the high bit output from the Atlona, assuming that this is actually happening, I have no good way in house to measure this.
However, we probably will bring along the Oppo and Atlona to the RMAF to calm down those unhappy with our normal use of my 20 year old HK CD player as a transport.
Now comes from the strange stuff.
First of all, I had hoped that I could de-embed the digital audio from my Comcast Motorola cable box. Its digital output is dolby multi-channel only and it does not put out a digital signal my audio DAC can use. So I connected the whole setup back into my two channel AV system.
Unfortunately, the Atlona seems to be unhappy with the HDMI output from my Comcast box. I get no audio output at all, and unfortunately no video output either from the HDMI connection from the Atlona on to the Sony TV HDMI input.
More strange is what happens with the Oppo blu-ray player with the audio portion of its HDMI output with DVDs or blu ray discs. The video picture with the Atlona in circuit is just fine, but I completely loose the vocal audio tracks!
Very very nice background sounds from the movie, but speach has gone silent.
User pedal mis-application big time happening here? If so I could certainly use some advice as to how to make this setup work.
Regards,
Frank Van Alstine
