I bought this item hopping to resolve an audio problem in the cheapest way possible, thing is that the device simply don’t work as I was expecting. it manage to give you stereo audio from a digital device(a WDTV HD in my case), that’s great, but it didn’t downmix digital sorces to stereo. let me explain myself, when I playback some mp3′s or stereo movies on my WDTV HD, I can have stereo audio coming from out using the optical cable attached to my device but if I playback something with digital audio, I don’t have any sound at all, and that sucks. I tried to contact gefen tv and I couldn’t get any contact with them. I hope this review can help anyone to not get fooled by a company that do not care for their costumers.
Rating: 1 / 5

I’ve always wanted to play high quality audio on my ‘pretty darn good’ stereo system from my PC. My PC to stereo connection was a 12 foot audio cable, 1/8″ jack from the PC to RCA jacks on the stereo. It worked fine. Recently I discovered I had a TOSLINK optical output jack on my PC. Didn’t know much about it until I researched what it was. I decided then that I wanted to try it. So I went hunting for devices to convert digital to audio and came across this GefenTV gizmo. I bought it and a 12 foot TOSLINK cable. Anyway, I hooked it up and I was amazed at how good my PC audio sounds through my stereo. I guess you can loose some audio clarity on a long, line level, analog audio cable. The way I’ve done it is to run the digital from my PC over the 12 foot optical cable into the GefenTV contraption next to my stereo. Then I ran the standard 12 inch audio RCA cable into my tape deck ‘input’ on the stereo. Really nice sound!
Rating: 5 / 5

The item arrived weeks later than promised, but it must have been the logjam at the Canadian customs, or otherwise influenced by the Christmas season. The glassy top surface of the decoder was a bit scratched, however it has no importance to me, I just connected it and tossed it behind the TV. The quality of the sound is excellent. I wish the decoder had the option to produce multi-channel (5.1) analog output in addition to stereo (2.0) analog output, since my TV has 5.1 sound in its optical digital output when available in the source. That would have been a different product, probably, and maybe more expensive. Overall, I am happy with the decoder, it does what it’s supposed to do and does it well. Other solutions that I contemplated for decoding the digital output of my TV into a signal suitable for my old analog amplifier were slightly more expensive and larger in size.
Rating: 4 / 5