I consider it dead-on-arrival due to it being limited to HDMI 2.0a.
A product like this needs to be fully HDMI 2.1 compliant in order to be as future proof as possible and in order to include support for eARC (Enhanced audio return channel), so that sources with DTS-HD Master Audio, DTS:X, Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Atmos can be extracted.
The next step-up after that would be to include the following:
- Ability in the device to control the conversion parameters to PCM
- Ability to do custom down-mixing (e.g. 7.1 to 2.0, but including the LFE channel)
- Ability to specify a desired output delay (e.g. if you are separately splitting the HDMI video signal prior to the HDMI signal coming into this device for audio splitting)
I agree, but remember that this product already does something unobtainable. I am sure the developers know all of this, just had to choose to make it or not at all That is why most companies skip the HDMI ports on their otherwise very advanced DACs (look at All Chinese DAC manufacturers, miniDSP and many others).
But for the "next step-up" - those features may be available in the source or receiver. For example Genelec GLM could do many of those things. as can miniDSP DRC-88D.
I do wonder what are the recommended integrations for this device?
- It would make for a nice PC sound card, but much cheaper miniDSP UDIO-8 is probably perfectly good as well and does not suffer from the limited HDMI standard support.
- To be used with TV/Projector it needs to support eARC to be able to hear TV audio and it has only one HDMI input, so you would need to use HDMI switching in the TV (which is actually a good thing if you do not have >4 HDMI devices). Maybe eARC can be added by firmware update?
- You could connect external HDMI switcher (AVR, soundbar?) but again is this how it is intended?
- Help me out here?