Hifime UR23 SPDIF Optical to USB converter

This is a very handy little device that exactly met my needs. I was surprised at what a narrow niche this product seems to occupy. There are very few devices that are capable of filling this role, let alone at its price point. First – MAKE SURE TO CONFIGURE THE OUTPUT DEVICE AND THIS TO THE SAME bit AND Hz SETTINGS. My output and this defaulted to different bit and Hz settings in Windows 10, which resulted in background noise, intermittent performance, and the pitch of my voice being off. Was a little confusing until I corrected the setting. In hindsight it makes sense. In my setup, I’m running a USB mic to my personal computer, processing the input through OBS with a noise filter, then sending the audio voice signal out from the digital optical port on my motherboard. Then I’m using this device to receive the digital optical signal and and bring it in as an audio input on its own USB sound card (this) plugged into my work laptop. I’m able to select this devices input as the “microphone” input for Teams or Jabber etc without issue. It works very nicely. I was impressed with the improvement in audio quality when I switched to this instead of running analogue from my computer to my work laptop. It also seemed to have observably less lag than when running analogue, which was a welcome surprise to me. The other big hurdle I had to deal with when running analogue was circumventing a ground loop noise issue. I had to use a ground loop isolating transformer wired into my analogue connection to remove the ground loop interference. This digital optical solution completely circumvents that issue, not to mention avoiding degradation from digital-to-analogue plus analogue-to-digital conversions. I’ve only used this a couple days so far, but so far I’ve been completely satisfied. Notes: The optical Toslink cable included is 1 meter long.