My old receiver that I had prior to getting the McIntosh equipment had a built in RF demodulator for my laserdisc player. With Laserdiscs being a dead technology companies are no longer putting RF demodulators in their equipment. While I don’t use my laserdisc player nearly as much as I used to in the past it still gets some use and I wanted to be able to hear the movies in true Dolby Digital surround sound so I had to go looking for an RF demodulator.

After doing some searching around I found that eBay was the best place to find them these days. I watched the auctions over at ebay and eventually scored myself a Yamaha APD-1 RF demodulator. The APD-1 is a very simple device. It has a power cord, one button to turn it on and off and input to accept the AC-3 connection from you laserdisc player and two outputs. The two outputs are both digital outs giving you a choice of either coaxial or optical out.

Setting up the APD-1 couldn’t be easier. Plug it in for power, run a cable from the laserdisc player into the input and then run the output from the APD-1 to your receiver. I just leave mine on all the time and keep it behind some of the equipment on my rack, I never even see the thing any more.

The APD-1 works great though, not much I can really say about it. It does what it’s intended to do, doesn’t require any fiddling and I don’t notice any degradation in the sound quality. Overall I am very happy with it. If you are in the market for one you best bet is definitely eBay, they usually sell for around $100-$125, I got lucky with mine and got it for $75 with a buy it now.