Downside of the Kanex Pro.... the "manual" isnt very clear.... maybe they assume a certain level of understanding from the end user.
Upside is it one of the few that have RCA SPDIF... most only have optical (unless you want to spend a large sum of money)
As noted, I have set my HDMI output at the universal player end to output PCM... I have done this as I assume the player is a better place to do this (ie less stress on the Kanex Pro as it just has to do the stripping and no conversion from bitstream to PCM)
So my experience with the Kanex Pro is:
- for DVD-V's, do NOT press the "2.0" button. While most of my music DVD-V's have a 2.0 LPCM audio option (ie the pressing the "2.0" button will have no affect), for those that only have a 5.1 sound track, pressing the "2.0" button losses most channels. In this case the Kanex Pro will be doing down mixing from the 5.1 input.
- for DVD-A, you must press the "2.0" button . This is the only way you will see say a 96k signal. Leaving it in 5.1 means the Kanex Pro will receive a 5.1 signal and due to bandwidth limits with DVD-A, a full 5.1 selection may only have 48k on each of the channels
- I have yet to test hi-res DTS encoded music discs... but would assume they work the same as DVD-V's with DTS
The upside of a HDMI de-embedder is that you get past any 48K SPDIF output restriction. So my ultimate goal can now be reached... I am ripping my hi res music DVD-A/DTS/SACD silver disks as 96/24 "2.0" files for replay over my music server.
Once this done, I can set the Kannex pro to its 5.1 setting which covers playback of my ripped music DVD-V's via my DLNA enabled universal player and all my redbook and hi-res music via my music server.
Redbook ripping/music server playback is simple.... just one format.... but any other silver disk is a pain... so many formats to deal with.
Peter