[deeinc]

Do any of you guys have this device? If so, would you recommend it? My objective is to somehow convert mac minis analog audio output to digital to play on my home theater system. Any advice or input will be helpful, thanks in advance

[power142]

I have used the Theater and the regular Sonica in the past. Both connect to your Mac using USB and you need to use M-audio's driver. The Sonica has optical digital (toslink) output, whereas the Theater has multiple 1/8" sockets and a coaxial digital connector.

What do you intend to do with it? Both will allow you to pass through Dolby Digital and DTS signals to an AV receiver, when using Apple's DVD player or VLC. Besides that, I believe you won't get more than PCM stereo out of the digital connectors, but you should be able to get more channels out of the 1/8" jacks, but no Dolby decoding.

Hope that helps...

[deeinc]

Thanks for reply, basically i was going to use a mini as an digital hub, but noticed that they had analog audio outputs instead of digital. wanted to find a solution to this problem before i purchased one. i intend to play my music, watch movies, etc. with the mini connected to a theater system. does all of this sound feasible?

[power142]

For watching DVD's you're probably better off using a standalone DVD player as the picture quality will probably be better that way.

For music and other media, stereo analog output on the mini will probably be sufficient, although it's not strictly a line-level (line out) connection. The exceptions I can think of are the multi-channel movie trailers Apple has started pushing out, or any other type of media you have with more than just stereo sound, of course.

Not sure that helps you much, but good luck anyway!