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AppleTV to external DAC?

Is there more than one way to get a digital signal out of the AppleTV to an external DAC?

On the surface of things, it appears to only have the toslink and HDMI outputs (one could conceivably use an HDMI Y-adapter to output to both the TV and something else, but I wouldn't know how to get that to SPDIF other than using one of these electronic splitters (HDMI -> DVI+SPDIF)

I would love for there to be an easy, high-quality solution, but at the moment, I don't see one...

Does that mean I am stuck using toslink?
t_bone
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
T_bone - you can put locate the Pace-Car as far down the stream as you want. Right before the D/A is best.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
t_bone OP
1,182 posts
 
Thanks Steve, would feeding a (probably jittery) optical toslink-carried signal into a (probably jittery) signal path in a DD processor (like the Behringer) change the signal irretrievably because the two signals in series are without a common clock? or how does that work?
mbehner
9 posts
 
The USB out on the apple tv is inactive. However, there are several how to's on the net about how to hack and install the full version of osx on the apple tv. Has anyone tried this? I would imagine if you could install osx you would be able to set the audio to output via usb which you could then connect to the dac. The process to hack the unit isn't all that simple but might be worth the time if we could connect the dac via usb.

There is also a company that can increase the hard drive to 250gb. I'm about to try that as my first gen 30gb model is stuffed to capacity and holds about a quarter of my music. Streaming directly from itunes works well but the computer has to be on for this to function.

http://www.techrestore.com/xcart/product.php?productid=17964&cat=356&page=1
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