Review on 🔊 Vantec NBA-200U USB External 7.1 Channel Audio Adapter (Black) - Enhanced Sound Experience with USB Convenience by Shane Sanchez

This unit works exactly as advertised. If you know what you're doing. The key here is that this device is NOT a Dolby Digital/DTS decoder. You need a device with an optical connection that can decode an uncompressed PCM stream. My use case was simple. I needed to stream optical digital PCM to my Logictech Z906 system to watch movies and listen to Dolby 5.1 and DTS 5.1 music. That's the problem. For this to work you just have to a) enable the Vantec software for PCM - the rest of the settings relate to analog and mean nothing in this case - then Windows 10 will only see the device as a digital output via USB - nothing to do there. b) You need to set up every client you use, ie. VLC, PLEX to NOT transcode the sound but to transmit it. This is a super important step. If you don't, you end up with what sounds like a weird stereo/surround hybrid that sounds awful - remember SPDIF is just two channels of audio - but if you're carrying PCM it's assumed that's what it's supposed to be connected device can decode PCM. Stream - in this case Dolby, DTS, etc. If you have changed these settings in your client, the next step is to make sure that the movie or music file being played is actually encoded for the expected format - playing a two-channel AC3 movie or Stereo MP3s don't sound the way you expect - remember that anything you send to the SDPIF output needs to be decoded by the connected device. In short, all you have to do is make sure your computer is outputting PCM (PCM is uncompressed data) and you'll love your little Vantec unit. Note. I haven't used the analog outputs so can't comment on the sound quality but I suspect they will be fine, although I suspect the sub-30 A/D converters would be sub-par in a DAC. Much luck!