AppleTV to external DAC?

First, let me say that I'm using the toslink and it sounds great. I I am using a Transparent Audio glass toslink cable,which may or may not help, but overall, you should try the toslink before dismissing it out of hand.

That being said, there are converters such as the Theta TLC that will convert from toslink to coax. If someone's tried using it, I'd love to hear their thoughts

You are right Darkj. It is cheap and I might get my eyes opened. After all, I am not trying to get it perfect yet.

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

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?

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