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Best way to setup my system

rthorntn

Member
Joined
Feb 15, 2022
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Location
Sydney
Happy New Year!

I'd really appreciate this forums advice as I'm a bit overwhelmed with all this atm.

Let me start by saying that my hardware budget is USD$700.

My current living room setup:

Sony A95K TV
Sony UBP-X700 bluray
NUC running Roon ROCK (doing volume levelling)
Clearaudio Concept TT
MiniDSP SHD
2 x Valvet A1r monoblock power amps
Mapletree Ultra 4A SE phono amp
SMSL SH-9
Salk Songtowers
2 x SVS 3000 subs

So the SHD is effectively my preamp, its doing main/sub crossover, volume and room correction. Before the SHD I really liked the sound when I upsampled to DSD, so I wouldn't mind getting DSD back for music.

I'd like to play about with more complex DSP (HQPlayer, CamillaDSP...), digital crossover and room correction that works across sources and headphones, so I think that rules out doing it in Roon.

For AV I'm just using the TV's sound (the TV often struggles with movie dialogue), the only thing I'll say is that I'd like to use the Songtowers and subs for movies, perhaps by using my TV speakers as the centre...I can see the A95K has a pair of +/- connections (labelled CENTER SPEAKER) to connect an amp. I would need the "default" setup of the TV to just use its own speakers (to keep the family happy when they're watching TV with all of the other gear powered off), I'm happy to power everything up and change TV settings when I want to "immerse" in a great movie.

I'd like to be able to stream vinyl, (if possible) using DSD (DS-DAC-10R?).

I wouldn't mind multichannel audio in my study (SACD, BLURAY and DVDA rips).

I'm planning to get Plex running again.

Some of the potentially relevant items in my "spares" bin:

SHARC V2
Emotiva UMC-200
Korg DS-DAC-10R
Schiit Saga
MiniDSP U-DAC8
Atlona AT-HD-M2C
Soundblaster SB1240
Behringer UM2
Behringer UMC204HD
Focusrite Scarlett Solo
Umik-1

I'm an "IT guy" and so I have lots of servers, workstations, SBC's and peripherals up the yazoo, so no worries there. I'm very happy in Linux and I have no problem with SMT soldering. I also have various old amps and speakers.

So what would you do?

Thanks.
Richard
 
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