I've been noticing that people in finance might be worse offenders than engineers. What happens is they do all this research for their day job (depending of course on what their specialty is) finding out what companies are up to and as a result they get exposed to a little bit of technology and what kind of options are out there. But not enough to actually know what they are doing or make informed decisions.

Paint the airport express black, tell them it's the new 2014 model.

Probably the only reason i can think of to use the apple tv as the audio source instead of a seperate airport express is ease of use since whatever is on the screen will come out of the speakers. Unless there is a way to permanently join 2 airplay zones to always play together wether the source is imac or iphone or the apple tv itself.

Next time this happens, pull this one out of your hat:

Integrator: "Wait, I have this number for Alex down at NASA. They are looking for someone to workout some problems they are having with a new ion engine design. I think your son would be the perfect person to talk to for them."
Customer: looks at you with a kind of insulted look.
Integrator: "What? not impressed?" "Nor was I with what your son is trying to rig together for you."

i've tried those in 2 installs and both failed.

care to elaborate?
 

I used them on a media pc to split out analog audio to a 2nd zone, and on a new Bose to send analog audio into an amp.  Both instances it wouldn't pass the hdmi signal through to the display/avr.  i tested them both on the bench and they wouldn't work with any sources.  i chalked them up to being DOA.  

I replaced them with a different Atlona Model that is meant to convert NTSC to PAL, but also gives you an analog audio connection.  And that worked fine for me.

[Link: atlona.com]

I use a D to A converter from VANCO. Been picking it up at 2 different distributors. I think these are around $50 give or take $20

I've noticed some basic DAC models will randomly produce a very loud static sound from the analog output instead of the expected converted audio signal.

I've generally stuck to the non-Dolby Gefen piece which doesn't seem to have this issue?

Anyone else experience this?

The sound you're hearing may be a digital audio setting in the device. I've experienced this on a Sony Blu Ray. I went to audio settings, selected another option other than the default (pcm - maybe?) and problem was solved.

Apple TV can have the same output issue - try changing the digital output format.