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James,I'm not really sure what you are trying to do.The DUET will take a signal from your computer and output SP/DIF. You will have to run SqueezeServer on your computer to use the DUET. With this system your computer does not need to be in the same room.You can also use a laptop or desktop with a USB converter to get SP/DIF out of the computer. It that case the computer will have to be near you system and it's switching power supplies may cause EMI that your system can pick up. You would still need to run some music player program on your computer to listen to your files.There are many options at many price points to do these things. Are you looking for improved sound quality, ease of operation, minimal amount of gear or ?
Quote from: cloudbaseracer on 15 Oct 2009, 04:53 pmIsn't the speaker plug on a laptop a compromise as well? The "speaker plug" on the Mac Mini, MacBook, Airport Express and ~50% of the PC laptops available, is a combination headphone and optical jack. It has an optical digital transmitter built into the jack, and you would connect to it with a cable that has a "Mini-Toslink" connector one end and a standard Toslink optical connector on the other end. As both the Toslink optical and coaxial digital both use the S/PDIF format, when you say your receiver requires S/PDIF, I'm not sure if you mean it has both types of inputs or just one of them. As far as quality, most would rate the coaxial S/PDIF better than the optical connection. And you can get a coaxial digital output out of a converter connected to either a USB or Firewire port. I use the optical digital out from the Airport Express in my bedroom system, but that is less critical listening than my main system. Steve
Isn't the speaker plug on a laptop a compromise as well?
JonL, if you don't use the Lynx breakout cables, did you make your own? How do you get the signal out of the D connector? I want to get several stereo digital streams out of the PC for active amping. I was looking at the Lynx AES16 into 2 Buffalo DACs per speaker. aa The Lynx is the only thing I found that can do it well, short of $1000. I think the streams need to be timed identically, so multiple sound cards wouldn't work. cloudbaseracer, the sound may vary among your solutions due to jitter. Each different sound card and connection interface and cable makes its own contribution to the overall jitter. Likely your receiver doesn't do anything to remove jitter, so you can probably hear the differences. For consumer gear, more expensive doesn't always mean better. Your lowest jitter solution might be a good firewire or USB DAC connected via analog into the receiver. Or just don't worry about the jitter and connect your laptop spdif to the Receiver and have fun. That's what I would try first, see how good it is compared to what you're used to. There is no black box ethernet to SPDIF adapter that I have ever seen. It would need a microprocessor running application to convert network packets into audio stream. Squeezebox/Duet/Sonos and others of that ilk do what you're looking for, replacing the PC as the controller. But SB/Duet still needs the PC as server. Maybe a PCMCIA (aka PC Card) soundcard with SDIF out might give you a nice stream with a good clock. Soundblaster, etc.Rich
Lots of ways to accomplish this. This looks like a new, and very interesting solution if you're ok with Foobar-only at this point:http://www.m2tech.biz/I'm using an EMU-0404 USB and it works well and is capable of 24/192. Less than $200, easy...-Jim
