PLC networking

[struts]

Hey All. Quick update. The replacement phantom premier 103dB arrived in good order. I have now set the pair up in stereo via optical direct mode. Have hard-wired Ethernet and toslink to both on the Tree stands. That’s a bit tricky to do but patience paid off. I acquired an optical toslink splitter which splits the signal to the left and the right channels. Everything works beautifully; no issues.

Next will be to test using Ethernet and wireless to see if dropouts occur. But in any event happy to have solved the dropouts by going optical direct. These phantoms sound fantastic. Everything I throw at them no matter how low, hard hitting or subtle, they handle everything with authority. Very balanced and sweet sounding. No bloat. I can imagine the Golds have a sweeter treble with their titanium tweeter, but then we’d just be nit picking.

I’ll be staying in tonight enjoying a wide variety of tunes.

Enjoy the music.

Hi @supaDean, So if I understand it correctly you have now been able to test as I suggested back here and found that in normal mode fed via Toslink you get dropouts, and in Direct Optical Mode with everything else exactly the same you don't.  Please confirm, because if this is the case I believe it constitutes very strong evidence that the dropouts are caused in some module of DOS that is disabled in Direct Optical Mode and it is unreasonable for Devialet to continue to point the finger of suspicion at the network.

Note that Direct Optical is just that, optical, so even though your Phantoms are connected via ethernet that connection is used for configuration only, the signal must be routed via the Toslink input.

And to answer one of your questions from another post, yes this does marginally increase the effective frequency range of the Phantoms at the top end.  DOS downsamples everything >48kS/s to 48kS/s which involves filtering out all signal above 24kHz. @streamy has tested both Phantom Premier (DOS 1 and 2) and Phantom I (DOS 2) in Direct Optical mode and found that this downsampling does not occur.   Since the tweeter in the 103dB is rated up to 25kHz and that in the 108dB up to 27kHz, the very top end of these ranges become available in Direct Optical mode.  These frequencies are of course inaudible to humans however the the brick-wall filtering at 24kHz causes phase shifts down in the audible frequency range and therefore removing that filtering restores phase integrity resulting in an audible improvement.

Delighted that you have solved your dropout issue and can finally start enjoying the music and really hoping that your test will help Devialet isolate and hopefully solve the root cause!