Converting a Byte array into a string - Powershell

Hello,

I'm trying to make a powershell function to read a .gz file and turn it into a string.  I want to avoid being required to write the unzipped file to disk and so I'm trying to use a system.io.memorystream object to hold the decompressed file.  Things seem to be going fairly well but when I actually go to convert my byte array into an ascii, or UTF-8, string the text isn't formatted appropriately. Let me post some code before this get's too abstract:

$file = New-Object System.IO.FileStream "C:\Temp\Entries.log.gz", ([IO.FileMode]::Open), ([IO.FileAccess]::Read), ([IO.FileShare]::Read)
$type = [System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode]::Decompress
$stream = new-object -TypeName System.IO.MemoryStream
$GZipStream = New-object -TypeName System.IO.Compression.GZipStream -ArgumentList $file, $type
$buffer = New-Object byte[](1024)
$count = 0
do
    {
        $count = $gzipstream.Read($buffer, 0, 1024)
        if ($count -gt 0)
            {
                $Stream.Write($buffer, 0, $count)
            }
    }
While ($count -gt 0)
$array = $stream.ToArray()
$GZipStream.Close()
$stream.Close()
$file.Close()

After running the above code I get $array filled with a Byte[] array. in oreder to convert the byte array to a string I do the following:

$enc = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII
$enc.GetString($array)

This seems to be close to what I want as the text then becomes readable, unfortunately the formatting is off. It seems to be adding an extra space between every character:

1 1 : 3 3 : 3 5 . 6 6 0   T r c   2 4 3 0 8   M e s s a g e
instead of:
11:33:35.660 Trc 24308 Message

Hope that helps! Jason