SPDIF to USB converter???

There are several out there. One is here.
Disclaimer: never heard one, don't own one.

Thanks, I have seen some of these but I'm searching for something that converts the other way round, i.e. SPDIF IN and USB OUT

T-Bone, he wants to convert in the other direction, from spdif to usb.

Karel, I did some brief searching and couldn't find anything either. What is it that you want to accomplish? If your purpose is to get a spdif signal into a computer, perhaps you could add a sound card to the computer that has a spdif input.

Regards,
-- Al

Thanks Al, I'm actually on the verge of buying an inexpensive bluray player, likely Panasonic DMP-BD60 which appears to be an overachiever in terms of picture but (unavoidably) has a mediocre sound. I would integrate this in my purely 2ch system that contains the AMR CD77. Now, the CD77 has digital IN but quite unusually only USB. I could of course buy a DAC such as a used MF V-DAC to upgrade the bluray, but before I spend half the price of the bluray on that, I'm exploring possibilities to go through the DAC in the CD77 after all.
Karel

Hi Karel,

Unfortunately, the short answer appears to be "no." You'll find a couple of good explanations in this thread:

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f46/spdif-usb-381903/

Regards,
-- Al

My most profound apologies. I managed to get that the other way round.

They exist in the pro audio world, but they are not necessarily audiophile quality. Try the Edirol brand (made by Roland). They used to have a really cheap cable product called the Edirol UA1D, with a little D/D converter which did SPDIF I/O for both Toslink and coax, and plugged into your USB port at the other end (I think it was OK in all directions - like a universal digital adapter of sorts but it was meant to plug SPDIF output things into your PC. They probably make a new version now but most of recent audio interface tools tend to have toslink-in, not coax. The UA1D can probably be found used. Otherwise, if you really want to have coax-in USB-out, you might try one of the $200-300 range converters (which tend to have more bells and whistles), or you could go real low-tech and do a SPDIF coax --> MIDI converter, and then add a MIDI-->USB converter cable to the back end... not pretty but...

The USB input is 16/48 only which defeats the purpose of feeding it hi-res formats.

The UA-1D appears to be discontinued, but there's a UA-1D on ebay with a Buy-It-Now at $50 and topdjgear.com appears to have them NOS for $90.
Disclosure: never tried one and I'm not the seller.

Even if the UA-1D can convert in the spdif to usb direction (which I'm not 100% certain of, after looking at its somewhat ambiguous description), I still don't think it would work for Karel's purposes.

In the computer interface application it would work by acting as a "guest" or "slave" of the computer's usb "host" controller. But the usb port of a usb-compatible dac is designed to also act as a guest (again with a computer or computer-like device providing the host controller function). So by connecting this converter to a dac via usb, no host controller would be present and the link would not work.

Regards,
-- Al

Much appreciate everyone's input, it confirms what I had feared. Anyway, I'll keep the UA-1D in mind; depending on whether I'll find a good price for a decent DAC, I may go for an experiment with it.

Thanks again, guys!
Karel

Al, our last two responses crossed. Seems like the UA-1D is out after all, then.

The USB input on the AMR CD77 is limmited to 16bit/48khz sampling. So, even if you set the Panasonic to output stereo PCM, the AMR CD77 is going to choke. In addition, USB2 is limited to 24/96 which means the only things your going to be able to spin on the Pany are CD's and DVD's unless you want to down sample Blu-rays. I understand that you want to take advantage of the better Dac's in the AMR CD77. It's kind of like using a used diaper to filter Louis XIV Brandy; everything's going to taste like crap in the end.

I have the Pany 55 blue-ray player and it's not bad. I have it output PCM when playing Blu-rays or DVD's. Then, I feed it into my Anthem Statement D2 using an HDMI cable. The Anthem them decodes the 5 streams of hi-res digital data and out comes surround sound. I've never used the Pany to spin CD's. These days, all my CD's get ripped to a hard drive hanging off of a music server. Then the lossless files get streamed to a highly modified Squeezebox.

Well, that sounds pretty final. I won't use the player with CDs, just DVD and Bluray. I'll purchase a player in the next few days, and then I'll take it from there.
Thanks all.
Karel