Atlona AT-HD570 breaks lossless audio out of its HDMI shell
By Steven Kim 
posted Jun 7th 2009 7:39PM
posted Jun 7th 2009 7:39PM
In its apparent quest to build up a product cutsheet on par with Gefen's, Atlona has added the audio-splitting AT-HD570 to its lineup. This gadget should be music (ahem) to those who want to hold on to their older receivers/processors, but are itching to get the new lossless audio codecs on Blu-ray discs. Send in a HDMI signal with audio in either LPCM or bitstream format (up to Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA), and this little box will break out the audio on SPDIF optical and 7.1-channel analog; those interested in the lossless codecs will want to grab those analog outputs. Meanwhile, the video signal stays on that HDMI cable, ready to go along its merry way to your video gear. The $219 price point might get you to consider picking up a Blu-ray deck with analog outputs instead, but definitely useful for cases where you're forced to deal with HDMI-less components.
This is a great device for people who use D-Box because it does not support HDMI.
Without bass management or speaker timing adjustments, this device is of limited usefulness in home theater applications. Very few AV receivers will make those adjustments for their multichannel analog inputs (because it would require redigitizing the signal in order to do so, an expensive proposition). And without those adjustments, you're feeding a full bandwidth signal to all of your speakers, a potentially damaging and almost certainly sound-degrading situation. So be careful before you buy this. (Not to mention: mini phone jacks? Meh.)
This device looks very familiair. Is it about the same as the Clux?
@rdclark:
A well designed BD-player incorparates B.M. and alignments (like the Pioneer 09), no need to do that again. When going forward with BD-live (profile 2.0 and beyond), decoding needs to be done in the player anyway with the PCM send to this box. An all digital version (7.1 s/pdif ouputs) would have been even nicer though, but that's impossible to license, I guess.
Gekke Henkie, if your Blu-ray player has bass management then it also already has analog multichannel outputs, and you wouldn't need this product. Potential buyers for this unit have players like PS3s with no analog outs (and therefore no bass management).
Yes, I knew it, here it is (available in the UK under the name Clux):
http://www.cypuk.com/index.php/Audience/V1.3-HDMI-to-HDMI-Repeater-with-Audio-Decoder/flypage.tpl.html
Nice find, Gekke. Not surprising that this hardware appears under multiple brands -- it's kind of a limited market to begin with.