SPDIF to USB converter???

The UA-1D appears to be discontinued, but there's a UA-1D on ebay with a Buy-It-Now at $50 and topdjgear.com appears to have them NOS for $90.
Disclosure: never tried one and I'm not the seller.

Even if the UA-1D can convert in the spdif to usb direction (which I'm not 100% certain of, after looking at its somewhat ambiguous description), I still don't think it would work for Karel's purposes.

In the computer interface application it would work by acting as a "guest" or "slave" of the computer's usb "host" controller. But the usb port of a usb-compatible dac is designed to also act as a guest (again with a computer or computer-like device providing the host controller function). So by connecting this converter to a dac via usb, no host controller would be present and the link would not work.

Regards,
-- Al

Much appreciate everyone's input, it confirms what I had feared. Anyway, I'll keep the UA-1D in mind; depending on whether I'll find a good price for a decent DAC, I may go for an experiment with it.

Thanks again, guys!
Karel

Al, our last two responses crossed. Seems like the UA-1D is out after all, then.

The USB input on the AMR CD77 is limmited to 16bit/48khz sampling. So, even if you set the Panasonic to output stereo PCM, the AMR CD77 is going to choke. In addition, USB2 is limited to 24/96 which means the only things your going to be able to spin on the Pany are CD's and DVD's unless you want to down sample Blu-rays. I understand that you want to take advantage of the better Dac's in the AMR CD77. It's kind of like using a used diaper to filter Louis XIV Brandy; everything's going to taste like crap in the end.

I have the Pany 55 blue-ray player and it's not bad. I have it output PCM when playing Blu-rays or DVD's. Then, I feed it into my Anthem Statement D2 using an HDMI cable. The Anthem them decodes the 5 streams of hi-res digital data and out comes surround sound. I've never used the Pany to spin CD's. These days, all my CD's get ripped to a hard drive hanging off of a music server. Then the lossless files get streamed to a highly modified Squeezebox.