Hi All, sorry I have been away for a while again. Life has a way of enforcing priorites...

Hopefully the hive mind can assist with a conundrum:

My Sky+HD box has died cry and I am considering going for the Sky Stream replacement.

For domestic peace reasons, I need the TV/Sky combo to work without the Meridian stuff needed to be active.

The Meridian system is a pair of DSP7200.1s with a Bluenode connected to the SPDIF input - that's it. Currently I feed the Sky+HD optical output to a BlueNode and thence to the master speaker - works fine.

The Sky Stream puck appears to have one HDMI output and no SPDIF connector.

The TV is a Pioneer Kuro 50" which has a very low power optical output and, being ancient technology, does not have ARC.

I have a spare HD621 which could be incorporated.

My options seem to be:

- A HDMI 1-to-2 splitter feeding the TV and an HD621 - do such splitters exist?
- A HDMI/SPDIF splitter which extracts the digital audio and outputs it via optical SPDIF; a poor man's HD621 as it were - do such extractors exist?
- Use the TV optical output into the BlueNode - likely to be poor sound quality due to the low level output
- Run the Sky Stream into an HD621 which is always active and which is not connected to the Meridian comms circuit - can an HD621 run 24/7 without being stressed?

Anyone have experience, advice or other ideas on how I might proceed?

TIA

In the spirit of Spinaltap, I would like to confirm that I am not involved in the corrupt theft of a global sport.