The Sonore Signature Optical Rendu…and the Fidelizer EtherStream Network Switch The Sonore Signature Rendu SE is one of the few optically-equipped digital streamers that currently exists. Yes, Toslink is optical, but it has limited bandwidth, which limits its usefulness with uncompressed digital audio signals, and it’s widely considered, by those in the know, to be the very last choice for digital audio connections. Part of my lack of enthusiasm for optical conversion had to do with my perception of optical in general, which was mainly focused around the popular Toslink optical connection. At the point several years ago when my digital streaming experience had begun to step up to the next level, I still was pretty much oblivious to the need for outboard improvements. For me, that was initially the big selling point of ethernet to fiber conversion – lowering the noise floor. Home Ethernet equipment and cabling can easily introduce unacceptable levels of digital noise into your playback environment. That is, to implement complete protection of your Ethernet-connected equipment from network-related lightning damage, which can be an extremely vexing problem in any audio setup.
And although my previous goal for setting up an Ethernet to fiber conversion scheme was strictly to improve sound quality, that’s recently been augmented by another, previously unknown (to me, at least) rationale for this setup. I’d been reading about the ease of incorporating one for probably nearly four years now, but for whatever reason, my interest had never been taken to the next level, until just last week, when I caved and spent the $90 necessary to make it happen, at my local Micro Center. One of them involves my current subject, which is employing a Gigabit Ethernet media converter setup in combination with my digital streaming system. Trust me, I’ve been there, done that!Īnd along the way, some of the most useful hacks and hardware ancillaries intended to elevate the performance of digital music streaming have seemed to elude me, for whatever reason.
SONOS TARGETS AUDIOPHILES BY ADDING QOBUZ SOFTWARE
Dealing with the hardware configurations isn’t horrific, it’s mainly the buggy, mind-numbingly stressful DLNA or UPnP open source software implementations needed to create a working music server. At almost ten years into this voyage, my personal experience tells me that the DIY route is not for the faint-of-heart. But my initial involvement with digital audio was more as a tinkerer, and there’s a whole cottage industry of home-brew designs (mostly based on Intel NUC or Raspberry PI configurations) out there. Recently, I’ve had the good fortune to evaluate several exceptionally good turnkey streaming setups, including the Euphony Summus Server/endpoint system that is the cornerstone of my home system.
I’ve been involved in digital music streaming for around eight or nine years now, but have only truly taken a really deep dive in the last few years.
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