hi srkbear-
i’ve been using a kanex haecoax with my bdp-103 and apple tv3 since jan.‘17, mostly for movie watching.
and feeding either an auralic vega or lavry da11 from its coax out.
it’s a solid little unit, and with >5yrs of almost daily use, pretty reliable.
in 5.1 mode, and watching/listening to surround-sound movies thru it, you only hear the left and right channels- no center/dialog sound.
you have to switch it to 2.0 mode, which converts surround (e.g., dolby, dts, hd-ma, etc.) to two channel (limited to no higher than 48khz), and is how i watch/listen to most movies with it.
though some, especially concerts (e.g., david gilmour-remember that night), will offer a 2-channel LPCM option in addition to surround, and the 5.1 kanex option will allow the full hi-res 2-channel sound to come thru.
some good kanex info in this article…
This review explains the merits of the KanexPro HAECOAX, an HDMI audio de-embedder, which extracts the PCM datastream from your players HDMI output and feeds the datastream to an S/PDIF output at the disc’s full resolution. Gary Galo discovered the device some time ago, enabling him to extract...
audioxpress.com
…including this bit…
“John Siau at Benchmark Media Systems notes that his measurements show the unit to be bit-transparent in the 5.1-channel mode. One “undocumented” feature is that 16-bit sources are re-mapped to 24-bit, as indicated by the front-panel display on my Benchmark DAC2 DX”.
cheers
PS re: your Big Star avatar- i caught them live at their show at the crystal ballroom, portland in the ‘00’s.
and their “Nothing can hurt me” documentary is in my itunes collection.