Thanks. We are going to give it a go. I just bought two Songs systems and gave them to our engineering staff to take home and play with. Sonos, as you suggest, doesn’t have good sound nor do they care about it. But they’re setup is easy and we want to emulate that ease of setup. I am not big on their GUI either, but it’s at least instructive.
I think Aurender does a pretty great job with their products and I’m sure PS Audio will as well. Think it goes well beyond a Kernal upgrade or win SW upgrades within a PC(e.g. noisy power supply - the addition of a memory buffer etc…)
We use Sonos in Toronto and Florida. Precisely for the reasons Paul states. It’s easy to setup and use. We have four generations of family accessing Sonos and it’s very good. Sonos spent their funds on Mobile GUI development. The desktop/Notebook app looks dreadful and so 1999. I have hopes for Octave. My year of Roon is almost up.
Go for it! Just a few tips (hey it’s the 'net, and I am an eggspert!)… Resist the temptation to require any of your tech at the end to work, such as a your DACs or amps. If it were me, I would focus on the infrastructure (server, server software, end point technologies, and user control software. Further, it would be great if that server could be mapped to other stores of music files such as what aleady exists in another NAS on the network. In other words, don;t make a user change their already installed infrastructure for this to work. (Think Comcast Xfinity’s latest tech… one big hub and little satellite end points for additional TVs.)
It would be great for someone who streams from their PC to whomever’s DAC via USB to just drop in your infrastructure and then they could “light up their house”. Then, they would consider you other equipment as secondary.
When things get too proprietary, many shun it. Optionally, you could offer speaker/amp/Dac combo (table radio) type of end points for non-critical listening environments such as the kitchen.
Peace
Bruce in Philly
Hi all,
I have been the owner of a dsj for about 4 months now and during that time I tried various ways with Ethernet connections to the bridge from my nas, and until very recently i was becoming increasingly frustrated trying to get it to work consistently and reliably, also the sound quality varied from reasonable to decidedly lackluster and I started thinking thoughts like “omg! what have I bought here”? Even the mconnect didn’t work very well, I couldn’t browse the albums at all as the app always crashed out. Gap less playback wouldn’t work no matter how I messed with the settings and there was always a delay before a track started to play.
I was browsing the web one evening, checking out various forums searching for info, tips/tricks, anything really that would give me a clue as to what would improve my situation - and I came across a web site called Audio Dandy - how quaint! I thought.
http://modelpromo.nl/Audio-Dandy_streamer_Daphile.htm
Not sure if any of you have seen or heard of it but it has a very interesting write up about high resolution audio and the use of usb via a very small PC called a NUC running a free audio streaming software called Daphile.
I was intrigued by what I was reading and up to this point I had never considered usb as a source as it seemed to be portrayed as inferior sq wise to the bridge. Any way I thought I would give usb a try. So I bought myself a NUC from Amazon and downloaded and installed the Daphile. Setup was quite straight forward using the instructions from the daphile web site, the Ethernet connection was unplugged from the dsj and plugged into the NUC and then a standard usb connection from the NUC to the dsj, and that was it. Daphile too uses a control app on your smartphone or tablet much like mconnect and the like (I used ‘Squeezer’ from the andriod app store - free!)
Now I have to say - upon first listen - I was speechless. Just WOW! - I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the music I was hearing. I can honestly say that I have never heard anything like it, and all my doubts about the dsj soon faded. I spent the rest of that afternoon and evening just sitting and listening to my music with a grin on my face, and it all played flawlessly, no glitches jumps or delays, everything just worked. My total outlay for this was about £150 for the NUC with a 120G SSD and and 8G memory stick, that’s it, and I found the setup reasonably easy by following the instructions.
Needless to say - I’m sticking with usb now and I would encourage anyone to try this especially if you’re having issues like i had. Honestly, everything is now rock solid, snappy and trouble free. and now sounding wonderfully musical and detailed.
I love my dsj.
Just my two-penneth folks.
Cheers Roy.
PS Just so you know - I am NOT in anyway affiliated to or have anything to do with the aforementioned website or companies.
Just curious, why didn’t you try hooking your computer directly to the DAC via USB? I and many do this. It just works.
Peace
Bruce in Philly
Hi Bruce,
My PC is located in a different room from my music system and would require a very long usb cable to connec to my dsj, but in any case I dont have any music stored on my PC - its all stored on my nas which is located in the attic space of my house. My PC talks to the nas via Ethernet and so does the NUC. The NUC is the only PC in my music room and sits beside my dsj. It is very small, quiet and not at all intrusive.
Hope this helps
Regards
Roy.