Well, I was speculating a fair bit above, but I do work in a somewhat similar field. One of the things my company does is aggregates and redistributes market data from stock exchanges in realtime. Our ticker plant stacks process 1 million + messages/second per server, and we have rolled our own in-house messaging/streaming protocols, both TCP and UDP based, that require packet loss correction, retransmission/buffering, and millisecond latency.
Audiophile level streaming audio has similar requirements in many ways. On the other hand, our clients only care that the data is timely, accurate, and complete - they donāt have to worry about nanosecond jitter, electrical interference, noise, magnetic poles and voodoo atomic particles affecting the results ā¦
Cool . To be fair, I did spend a few minutes talking to the fine folks @ the Roon booth.
I did not and wish I would have. Knowing ELAC the device probably sounds exceedingly nice for its price point. It is about 1/3 of the power and much smaller than something like the Mu-So so probably best for pretty small spaces, OTOH it may be dynamite in a stereo setup. Itās supposedly going to be $400.
Links? Iām trying to understand on what basis this is possible. Doing some cursory googling Iām having trouble finding arguments for this. I know when PS Audioās PerfectWave DAC + bridge came out one aspect to its appeal was the ability to stream wirelessly, electrically decoupling it from the source and this was hailed as a real leap forward for SQ, or at least that was my impression. Iām fairly new to the speaker game but Iāve been on Head-fi for about 15 years and canāt recall seeing an argument along these lines.
Iāll say my impression from what I heard at Cedia is itās more #1 w/ enhancements to overcome the shortcomingsā¦ at the very least it was implied there is some trickery involved to get gapless working properly.
OTOH, regarding #3, I did mention this ākinkā that is being worked on happened w/ my Tidal app as well, so much so that I stopped using in favor it going thru my ATV -> TV -> LS50 even though there is an audible degradation in SQ. That comment was met w/ some interest.
I was thinking some form of UPNP as well since the Kefs provide that and it seems like a path of least resistance but when I brought it up on another thread the Roon guys seemed to not like UPNP at all.
Ah, a quant. Years ago I had to fix some nasty issues in a proprietary protocol that resembled UDP for medical inventory tracking systems (if you saw Breaking Bad that scene where Gus and Mike visit the makeshift blood bank in the desert, those things carrying the blood were part of the product line).
It could be that theyāre not a fan of UPnP but w/ some secret sauce it provides a good enough user experience. Just speculating.
I think their money is easier to please. Those bigger returns make it easier to justify the kilobuck cables. A better digital to analog conversion, so to speak.
You can optically isolate the ethernet coming into the Kef from the rest of your ethernet set-up e.g. ethernet from network->fibre media converter->fibre patch cable->fibre media converter->ethernet to KEF.
I have this set-up feeding my microRendu (which in turn feeds my KEFās via. USB) and, once the Roon update comes out Iāll be using the same setup to feed my LS50Wās e.g.
ROCK->ethernet->TP-Link pro switch->ethernet->FMC->fibre->FMC->ethernet->LS50Ws
The ROCK, switch, and FMCās are all fed by linear power supplies. Probably overkill but Iām making full use of the various power rails available on the HD-Plex 200W LPSU.
If anyone is interested my ROCK is running on an Intel NUC in an Akasa fanless case (the Plato X - highly recommended) and being fed 15V, the switch is a TP-Link Smart switch with storeānāforward switching fed by 9V, both FMCās are TP-Link AC100ās being fed by 5V (I deliberately chose 10/100 ethernet rather than full-fat gigabit as the latter generate more electrical noise due to their higher frequency of operation).
Apparently, there is no such thing as overkill in the audio world
I donāt think Ethernet cables are as noisy as USB cables though, but let us know if your solution improves the sound over a vanilla Ethernet cable once you can test it.
The differences are, admittedly, marginal but they are there (to my ears anyway). Incidentally, my total outlay for optical isolation of ethernet costs about Ā£50 (not incl. the linear power supply) and so I see it as buying confidence that I have done what I can - sensibly - do to maximise the potential of the source feeding the KEFās.
In my previous Naim system I did, at one point, get a bit obsessive about cables, etc. (yes, I was one of those) but my thinking has matured somewhat and I do extensive research before committing funds to any system improvements. I am a definite believer in minimising noise in digital audio setups mainly because I have heard the differences first hand.
Thatās one of the things I love about these LS50Wās. KEF have done all the hard work of system/component matching, etc. with minimum signal path lengths to boot. The only thing I now have to worry about is minimising noise to the KEFs.
[quote=āRik_Carter, post:386, topic:15054, full:trueā]
Thatās one of the things I love about these LS50Wās. KEF have done all the hard work of system/component matching, etc. with minimum signal path lengths to boot. The only thing I now have to worry about is minimising noise to the KEFs.
[/quote]I donāt have the KEFs myself, currently I have a pair of Dynaudio Excite 14A (active version) + subwoofer, which sounds good but I am thinking about the KEFs. No more bother about DACs, cables, USB noise, etc, and they seem to get 5/5 on all reviews. They also have real bass management with adjustable crossover and sub-out.
Perhaps they finally integrated the Sonore Upnp bridge into the ROON server softwareā¦ I do gapless playback from Roon to my LS50W via UPnP from the beginning via the Sonore UPnP bridge. This runs as a seperate āappā besides the Roon serverā¦
. To be fair, I did spend a few minutes talking to the fine folks @ the Roon booth.
