Dave Zan
Active Member
Like a lot of people on this site, I am amazed that there is no really State Of The Art home theatre solution.
Even $17,000 AV processors perform far worse than a $100 DAC.
I would love to have some input on how could we do a SOTA HT.
For a stereo system it's not too hard - with AES outputs we can do all the equalisation and crossover before the DAC.
Plenty of nice DACs with >120 dB performance.
Active speakers and we're done.
For home theatre with active speakers we end up with a lot of channels if we have 7.1 or more system x 2 or 3 way.
But a harder problem is the source material, we seem more or less stuck with an AVR for all the licenses for the latest Dolby and DTS lossless CODECs.
And the onboard DAC implementation in even the most expensive is not SOTA.
And the license rules mean no accessible PCM streams we can send to be equalised, crossed-over and then DACed in a SOTA DAC.
So far the best approach seems to be to use the excellent @Weeb Labs videos to hack an AVR to extract the I2S streams, possibly convert to AES.
Once we have I2S or AES then what?
We need volume control, usually done in the AVR after the DAC AFAIK.
So a multichannel DAC with volume control, maybe the Okto 8 once it becomes re-available.
But for multi-way active speakers, can multiple units be tied to work in unison?
What about the DSP and crossover?
Does this sound like a project anyone else would be interested in?
David
Even $17,000 AV processors perform far worse than a $100 DAC.
I would love to have some input on how could we do a SOTA HT.
For a stereo system it's not too hard - with AES outputs we can do all the equalisation and crossover before the DAC.
Plenty of nice DACs with >120 dB performance.
Active speakers and we're done.
For home theatre with active speakers we end up with a lot of channels if we have 7.1 or more system x 2 or 3 way.
But a harder problem is the source material, we seem more or less stuck with an AVR for all the licenses for the latest Dolby and DTS lossless CODECs.
And the onboard DAC implementation in even the most expensive is not SOTA.
And the license rules mean no accessible PCM streams we can send to be equalised, crossed-over and then DACed in a SOTA DAC.
So far the best approach seems to be to use the excellent @Weeb Labs videos to hack an AVR to extract the I2S streams, possibly convert to AES.
Once we have I2S or AES then what?
We need volume control, usually done in the AVR after the DAC AFAIK.
So a multichannel DAC with volume control, maybe the Okto 8 once it becomes re-available.
But for multi-way active speakers, can multiple units be tied to work in unison?
What about the DSP and crossover?
Does this sound like a project anyone else would be interested in?
David