Macs have excellent sound built right in, musicians and filmmakers, both, commonly use Macs to practice their craft. My point is that the bar is set quite high. Conversely, when it first came out, TosLink wasn't all that great, about the only thing it could lay claim to was an absence of electromagnetic interference. Initially, the Sony-Phillips Digital Interface used copper in its specification and TosLink functioned on the basis of pulse-code modulation (PCM), fortunately, over time, things have changed. Initially, TosLink just did not sound good and being immune to electromagnetic interference across the spectrum was not enough. I can say that things certainly have changed in the intervening thirty plus years.Transistor amplifiers tend to make sound brighter and sharper and harsher, the entire move back to LPs is predicated on the more mellow sound, the richer and fuller sound, of an LP. This occurs even on a modern amplifier because the recording method, when analog, includes the even order harmonics and the faithful reproduction of the recording caused, in part, by RIAA equalization, allows these even order harmonics to come through the system such that, within the limitations of the system, the sound comes out richer, warmer, and fuller. An LP that is the product of a digital master and a digital recording will simply not sound as expected. On the other hand, a DVD-Audio with the much higher sampling rate and bit depth can capture some of the nuances that are missing on a CD without being an LP.This little DAC, and it is a surprisingly small device, is capable of sampling at 192 KHz and has a bit depth of 24 bit and sounds divine. It sounds divine because the added headroom is taking all the things that were recorded that you do not normally hear and bringing them out; the source material captured more than you can hear from a standard headphone jack. I am taking the output from the same digital source, a Mac Pro, and comparing the sound produced by the same inexpensive --surprisingly well built speakers-- speakers when routed through a 3.5 connector vs. when routed through the TosLink and the DAC and not only is there a difference, the difference is added warmth, depth, fullness, and nuance. Remember, the only thing that has changed is how the sound gets to the speakers, nothing else. In order to put the sound into perspective, the color bit depth in Windows 95 was 16 bit and 65,536 color variations could be produced which meant that under the correct light, a person could appear to be made from blotches of harshly varying colors. The color bit depth in Windows XP was 24 bit and that meant that well over 16 million colors could be shown which resulted in images that exceeded the resolution that was possible at the time. QED, this DAC is an extremely capable device that is worth the money merely on the TosLink connection and, for the price, it is an absolute steal.

I had hoped this would eliminate noise from a long cable run, but it adds just a little bit of it's own high pitch hissing to the signal. It's not enough to bother me, but I can hear it if I listen for it Overall, I can recommend it to convert spdif to 3.5mm, but you may notice the noise if you're sensitive to these things.

For starters, I'll say I haven't analyzed anything too closely, like waveform quality before and after, THD, noise, etc., but this does what I wanted it to do. I have an optical-out on my TV and two different sets of speakers with analog audio inputs. This having two analog outputs made it easy for me to "split" the signal into different systems. The output is reasonably noiseless.The two different systems naturally are slightly out of phase with each other, but I suspect that has nothing to do with this device and more to do with running analog audio into two different circuits and naturally having a slightly off-phase result.All that said, for the price of this device, it is does exactly as advertised and does it well. USB C power input is a plus to me as well.

Couldn't be easier. You plug in the power adapter and connect the digital cable to the back of the TV and now you have two analog ports on the unit ready to use. That's it. Unit is excellent.

I used this to run audio out of my tv. My old stereo receiver had no HDMI or digital inputs and this worked perfectly using the digital out on the tv to RCA inputs on the receiver. Now my Sherwood Newcastle receiver can keep on rocking into the future !

Worked on first try of plugging everything in. Only thing i dislike was it didn't include charging base. But overall works great because did not want to invest in a new updated surround system. Thanks.