I’m an Audiolense XO user so Dirac is probably not for me either. Nice with everything in one box though, if you don’t have speakers (or amp) with built in DSP.
EDIT: I should add digital input speakers like Devialet Phantoms (or the active Dynaudios for example) that does have DSP, but little or no user controls.
Seems like an AES hat for a raspberry pi is about $150 and the raspberry pi kit itself is ~$100 then I have to put it all together. The minidsp may not be such a bad deal after all.
How would you describe the improvement? I guess the improvement depends on how much noise you have in your mains at the speakers. So you will not know what improvement you’ll experience until you buy it.
Great question !
I dont buy power conditioners to improve the SQ … I do that with DSP and Convolution filters. What i noticed with the IFI powerstation + two ifi ipurifiers was the "background noise " being reduced. I mainly buy power conditioners to feed the electronics with electricity with less noise.
But for 600 euros , the ifi powerstation is IMO the best conditioner you can get for the money . Its a no brainer , even if it doesent improve SQ .
Ever considered the Niagara 1200?
I’m in doubt between te iFi and the 1200.
B.
Where does the background noise that is reduced come from? Genuine question, because you will know that the D&Ds use Class D amps with switching power supplies onboard (as do the Kii3s), so the incoming mains must be horrifically noisy to be worse than what those switching supplies generate in the first place?
I don’t own the D&D but I do have a NCore NC500 class D amplifier. And from my testing class D is even more sensitive to quality power than class AB and a lot more sensitive than class A. I have also read that from others, but I don’t know enough about class D power handling to know why that is.
But its not audible noise that is the problem, class D is very silent even without power conditioning. But the sound quality goes up with better power (better dynamics, increased clarity, etc).
I’ve tried the D & D with multiple power conditioners (PS Audio, Torus, Audioquest) and I haven’t really noticed much of anything. My hearing is fairly good and I listen to a lot of music with wide dynamics so I think I would notice. I live in a place with a fairly crappy US power grid. I do have the D & Ds on a separate line though so that may be making the difference.
I ordered everything to build a NUC to run ROCK today. I am considering a matrix audio x-spdif 2 and connect it directly to the NUC using a USB cable. If I connect the 8cs to it via AES will the digital volume control work in Roon?
Yes. That is what I use currently.
I have found that controlling volume through lanspeaker sounds a lot better than by an Auralic Aries G1 from Roon. Only issue is RSI of the thumb when making big volume adjustments.
I wonder if we’ll get a volume slider on Monday?:
http://dutchdutch.com/update/
Still no sign of Roon, but at least the release notes for the new version explains why. Perfectly synchronizing two speakers over a network was never going to be easy. I wonder if they’ll have to abandon that strategy and link the speakers. Or they could just give everyone a a PI2AES and get their devs into more useful things.
That was their original plan back in 2018 according to Martijn Mensink. Stream stereo RAAT to one speaker and link the other with AES/EBU. The pair Kal reviewed for Stereophile had this arrangement in a beta firmware.
Then they decided to link L/R via ethernet and now there is (still) no RAAT because of that…
It seems like Release 1.4.57 is actually out: Read more
As of the 27th of July 2020 we released the new 8c firmware of the 1.4.xx family .
The biggest improvements are:
the all new Release Management System (RMS) which gives you control over firmware installations and back-ups.
Active Room Matching made better by integration with Room EQ Wizard . This will make it easier to acoustically integrate the 8c’s into any room, in less time. Now all of you can set up the 8c’s properly and make the room disappear.
I wonder what changed between 1.4.55 (that we were expecting) and 1.4.57.
I look forward to hearing the feedback from current owners! Thanks @GraemeM for alerting us to the upcoming release.
Mine have not updated yet to show the new release. I’ll check again after work.
Mine updated to 1.4.57 about an hour ago - didn’t need to do anything with Auto update switched on - the REW changes work really well. Will have to have a listen tonight
Mine also updated this morning… will give the changes a test run this week.
Maybe a stupid question but what does dutch&dutch mean by „ connect the 8c’s to the internet and turn them on, then leave them on for 24 hours“
Is it enough to turn them on by the hard switch on the back of the speaker or also turn them on in the Lanspeaker App?
The plan from the beginning was to sync over the ethernet. At some point when we had another setback with audio synchronization, we did consider going the AES route, but in the end we decided not to. It would have been a lot quicker for sure. Kal Rubinson had a beta version that worked over ethernet. It was still quite buggy at the time. The latest builds are robust. There’s still the occasional small bug, but we’re close. However, it’s not enough for Roon to work, it has to fit within our software infrastructure. That will take some more time. - Martijn
Turn them on with the switch on the back, then leave them on in lanspeaker, don’t enable sleep mode.
Please check support.dutchdutch com (add a dot in between; I’m allowed to only include two links).
Here you’ll find two relevant articles:
Martijn