USB sucks
Not limited at all, Herman, except for direct DSD. A Rednet 3 in hifi terms is equivalent to a usb/spdif converter (and the reverse), except that the USB is replaced with ethernet. It's currently used with a Khadas Tone Board although I did try it briefly with a Holo DAC. In both cases Rednet made USB sound grainy to my ears. Yes, it's overkill in that only two of 32 channels on the device are being used! I'm sure your Antelope sounds wonderful :) |
Is there really an advantage to not using a combined Streamer / DAC? I have Roon Nucleus + (yes expensive but flawless in operation, don't ever even need to look at it, located by modem in my office) and two DACs, Auralic VEGA 2 and MOLA MOLA Tambaqui, both of course ROON endpoints. The Nucleus + has installed internal hard drive so there also is no separate network attached storage to fool with. This did replace my aging Mac Mini which gave me fits when it needed rebooted or whatever. Both DACs have network bridges and are trouble free. NO USB cables, no compatibility issues, less boxes. Both are hard wired vs wifi. I did need to update my switch and some ethernet cables, but this would benefit anyone. I am into audio, not computers. Ken |
Thanks for the info Furzy, looks interesting, I may try it to compare to USB as the Antelope has spdif and optical inputs. However, even though I doubt it would be significant, those inputs are limited to 192 and 96K respectively whereas I can feed it up to 384k upsampled in Roon from USB. On the other hand, a Raspberry Pi with digital card will do the ethernet to spdif for about $100 wonder if Roon would see the Rednet as an audio device like it does a Pi? |
Interesting, they're all worth a try if you can do so. There is actually a Dante device at least near the same price as the Raspberry Pi, the Audinate AVIO Dante 2x2 AES3/EBU Adapter. I think it only goes to 96K though. I have run Spotify through the Rednet 3, but couldn't listen to the loss in sound quality compared to uncompressed music. |
@rixthetrix Wow, a "technician" that doesn't know about detection level, encoding, checksumming and buffering... You are mixing things and ethernet category of cables have nothing to do with USB cables... Obviously, you don't know about high-speed differential pairs, linear feedback shift register, 8b/10b encoding, etc etc etc. And about transmission of digital signal being "analog", that's just plain talking for nothing... Of course, every electrical signal could be described as" analog" but that's not the point... We're talking digital communication and encoding, bit detection, etc... In a computer, this is the same principle, be it in gigahertz range... "There’s nothing in the cables passing little ones and zeros across the cable." Oh and what is digital transport then? And ethernet? And transmission lines in a computer? Incredible... And the top of the top:" excuse my rant, I am just trying to ensure people don't get misinformed and miss out on relatively cheap solutions that will significantly increase performance." Wow... That's exactly what you do... I can tell you didn't pass any degree, you should study a bit before trying to look that you know something, you just don't... Go get a good engineering book and read before throwing crap like you did... if you're up to understand something... Here is a free MIT book, try to read and understand it... http://www.mit.edu/~6.450/handouts/6.450book.pdf |
