Review on SMAKN® CM6631 Coaxial Optical Convertor by John Surabhi

I bought it to get an accurate bitwise signal without too get jitter from my pc player to my DAC with 16/44.1 files and it does it perfectly. I didn't even realize I had multiple 24/96 and 16/48 MP3 files until I discovered they weren't playing through this unit at all. As for the debate about whether or not you need a driver, both answers are (sort of) true. Windows 10 comes with a "USB2.0 High-Speed True HD Audio" driver that is used when connecting this device. However, the big problem is that every time the computer wakes up from sleep or hibernation, or you temporarily disconnect the USB cable, and sometimes when booting from a completely turned off state, the device does not start. When this happens, restarting the computer with "reboot" (not shutdown) restarts it over and over again. So it's sort of plug and play, but this error was too annoying to live with, so I looked around for another driver. When I opened the device properties in Device Manager, clicked on "Replace Driver" and pointed to the "Schiit_USB_Gen3_W10_1_01" folder downloaded from schiit.com, I replaced the Microsoft driver (dated 2017) with the same named one from C-Media Inc (CM6631 -chip manufacturer, used in this box) dated 2015. Sounds the same and now I can go to sleep or unplug the cable. The device just keeps working as it should. But none of these drivers support sample rates other than 44.1. One of the other reviews said they played it by selecting the driver in foobar2000, but I suspect they didn't have the WASAPI component installed and still worked through the Windows mixer. In my copy of foobar2000 there are three ways to select this driver - DS, WASAPI(event) and WASAPI(push). The DS goes through the Windows mixer, which performs an on-the-fly sample rate and word length conversion to 16/44.1 format before sending it to the USB device. The quality of this conversion is not very good. I converted one of my 24/96 files to 16/44.1 with a good offline converter and compared the original file to 16-bit using the DS option via WASAPI (which passes it bit-perfect to the DAC). The 16-bit file sounds noticeably better. For 16/44.1 resolution files there isn't much of a difference anymore when you go through the mixer, but it's not entirely accurate. So if you want the best, don't use the Windows mixer. Once I found that the Schiit driver met my needs well, I stopped looking for one that would actually play higher sample rates, but I saw some pointers on what to do. This box claims to be an ASIO device and Windows drivers do not support ASIO. (If so, foobar2000 would have a line to select it, like my Edirol UA-5 driver). During my research, I discovered a free driver called ASIO4ALL that claims to use the ASIO interface to support a variety of devices. If you're buying this CM6631 to try and play high-sampling bit-perfect files for a DAC, I'd suggest starting there. If that doesn't work, there might be an ASIO driver somewhere that does.