STREAM Series Megapost

@Stephen Healy
If my Dac have soundwise equal inputs of SPDIF and USB which board would you recommend for the Stream1 ? SPDIF oder PhoenixUSB board? I guess the USB is the favorite from Innuos but please could you explain why?
 
There's just more quality potential with USB, can support higher resolutions and more formats, more bandwitch, two-way communication with separate timing/clock channels.
 
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Slightly annoyed actually as rushed with the order in hope to get my hands on it asap but it is now likely I can see and hear it after a longish summer hols
 
Slightly annoyed actually as rushed with the order in hope to get my hands on it asap but it is now likely I can see and hear it after a longish summer hols
Would you mind letting me know which dealer you have placed the order with? I can chase it on our end!
 
There's just more quality potential with USB, can support higher resolutions and more formats, more bandwitch, two-way communication with separate timing/clock channels.
Curious: most DACs use asynchronous USB (and other asynchronous inputs) which strip the timing/clock data from the incoming stream and reclock to the DACs internal clock.
How much more bandwidth do we need for audio, we are not likely to run out of transfer capacity.
 
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This one is a little less to do with sound and more to do with very fast transfer rates especially on NAS imports or NAS backups. Keep in mind, all your other network devices need to support 2.5gbe which at the moment is pretty rare at the moment. You would only have this if you specifically invested in it throughout your network, otherwise the ports on the STREAM series will only operate at the speed that it is linked to (which most of the time is going to be gigabit).

The PhoenixNET indeed has 100mb due to the simpler chip we are using - and part of the reason for using that cheap is its lower power consumption and the fact it can be powered by an external linear power rail which is actually very rare.
One idea we did have, and it would be interesting to gauge feedback on this, would be that on a software level we could add something in settings where you could actually set the operating speed of the Ethernet port. So, we could have 'audio mode' that throttles to 100mb, a 'speed mode' which enabled 2.5gbe, or a 'balanced mode' that runs at gigabit. You could change these on the fly depending on whether you doing data transfer, or doing critical listening etc.
Many routers have the possibility to set the maximum data speed. Would setting this to max 100mb on the router for the streaming device have the same effect?
 
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Many routers have the possibility to set the maximum data speed. Would setting this to max 100mb on the router for the streaming device have the same effect?
Additional remark; why not set the max speed on the Innuos unit itself? so you can revert it for like say backups? Would also like to hear the difference between different speeds as I fail to understand how it affects the sound quality, possibly for lack of understanding the technology behind it.
 
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Additional remark; why not set the max speed on the Innuos unit itself? so you can revert it for like say backups? Would also like to hear the difference between different speeds as I fail to understand how it affects the sound quality, possibly for lack of understanding the technology behind it.
That's what I mean. On my ASUS router I can chose to set maximum up/down speed (bandwidth on all connected devices. I'll try it out. I'm not sure though this is the same thing as i.e set the speed on the actual device to max 100mb to reduce CPU/noise. You will never get above few mb of data anyway when you stream music so limiting it to 100mb via the router should not make any changes?
 
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Additional remark; why not set the max speed on the Innuos unit itself? so you can revert it for like say backups? Would also like to hear the difference between different speeds as I fail to understand how it affects the sound quality, possibly for lack of understanding the technology behind it.
I can't recall which one, but i did raise the question on another thread if users would indeed be interested in this very feature; an ability in Sense to set the speed of the LAN port. In principle if set to 100mb mode, there would be less intensity on the chip of Ethernet stage so would reduce high frequency noise in turn. You could experiment forcing this on the router side and see if you can observe a difference.
 
I can't recall which one, but i did raise the question on another thread if users would indeed be interested in this very feature; an ability in Sense to set the speed of the LAN port. In principle if set to 100mb mode, there would be less intensity on the chip of Ethernet stage so would reduce high frequency noise in turn. You could experiment forcing this on the router side and see if you can observe a difference.
Took the time to look at this in the router provided by my internet provider but don't think such a function it's included. Can barely change any settings.