I thought I should acknowledge Arvus just released a firmware update today for the H2-4D that fixes this entirely, as far as I can tell so far. They also announced they plan to release the H1-D in May, which is, notably and perhaps not coincidentally, when Nuprime-X goes to market with the H16-A. Arvus also gave a caveat that the global trade situation might affect the pricing of all their products at some point because they manufacture in China.
I'm willing to try this, but I'm not quite sure how to actually do it. Record a WAV of some output from an Apple TV over HDMI via Dante and then look at the bytes to see if the least significant one is always all zeros or not? Or is there some easier method?
I tried this with no success. Even when I was certain the content was 44.1kHz/16-bits, and with all Dante devices configured at 44.1kHz/24-bits, and with the Arvus H2-4D that was decoding the HDMI audio as the leader clock, and recording at 44.1kHz/24-bits, there was still non-zero information in every third byte of the samples. It was very frequently near zero, but definitely not always. I don't know which component in the chain is responsible for this. Without this "control", it doesn't really seem useful to compare to 24-bit sources.
Atleast it's finally coming, though I wonder if they are pricing themselves out considering the H16-A is a lot cheaper.
Sounds like a badly implemented digital volume control to me where it’s set to unity in the unit but isn’t always exactly unity.
All this is really useful, and its taking me a long time to digest.
Dante Controller is a piece of software for doing configuration, what you are asking is if the Arvus acts as the Dante Clock Leader at the rate configured by the software.
If you sync to HDMI, the Dante output is basically not going to work. You have to configure each Dante device to a static sample rate. If you sync to HDMI, it'll try to output at the input's sample rate, and you'll get a sample rate mismatch error, unless it happens to be same as the Dante sample rate.
It does set itself as the preferred clock leader, but that's of course configurable in Dante Controller. It definitely doesn't have the ability to sync the Dante clock "externally" to the HDMI clock. That could work, but you'd still have the problem of having to pick a static Dante sample rate and that rate not always matching the HDMI rate. That part seems like a fundamental limitation with Dante rather than the Arvus implementation in particular.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I mistook syncing to HDMI to mean syncing to Dante, but it only syncs with the other outputs.
No, it would just be nice if Dante could switch the sample rate for all devices quickly so it could transport the unaltered bitstream to the DAC, DSP, etc. It’s manual and rather tedious - you have to set it for each individual device. But Dante was really designed for situations where the sample rate isn’t going to be changing often or ever.
Yes, it upsamples/downsamples to the configured Dante rate. I have mine fixed on 96k but the Arvus can go up to 192k, yes.
I'm pleased to hear that the H24D can run Dante up to 192k (though 96k would be OK - just as long as it's not limited to 48k).
I also think the H1-D doesn't have SRC either (yet). If you click "Order" on their confusing website, you get taken to a questionnaire which says this:
I think all this casts the H2-4D in a better light (even though the expensive analogue outputs are a waste of time, effort and money, as AVRs are cheaper and better).
That's disappointing. I hope they add it. I actually pre-ordered one to see if might offer an experience closer to an AVR than the H2-4D in terms of "just working", but that seems unlikely without SRC.
It has some very nice features, but it's still ridiculously buggy for a piece of "pro" gear at that price point, to be honest. For example, I recently discovered that with a 9.1.4 speaker layout selected, it doesn't render DTS-HD MA 7.1 correctly with Neural:X turned on – you can't turn it off, by the way, another very bad bug. It sends the Ltf to Lw / Rtf to Rw and Ltr to Ltf / Rtr to Rtf. I.e., the higher output channels are incorrectly offset, probably since Lw and Rw are channels 9 and 10, but standard DTS Neural:X doesn't make use of wides. Works fine with a 7.1.x layout selected. Unfortunately, but not atypically, Arvus ignored me when I reported this to them. Hopefully the fix is in the allegedly upcoming firmware that includes some DTS work.
Can this be a typo and it's actually just poorly labeled as opposite?
