Developping a stereo system replacing spark + dialog

[BlackMamba]

@streamy was quicker than me!


Hi @BlackMamba, welcome here!
I've been through these thoughts some time ago. I did not buy Phantoms because, at the time, it was too complicated to make it work...

Here are a few points:
1 Dialog can use powerline, wifi or ethernet to talk to Phantoms - so it is not only wifi.

2 If you want to use the native volume control of Phantoms you can follow your own idea with two TOSLINK ports splitting L/R in the streamer.

3 I believe you can do a similar setup by pretending that LEFT is one room and RIGHT is the other. By controlling both 'rooms' with a Dialog you still have volume control and sending signal to each Phantom with TOSLINK bypasses Dialog.

4 By setting the Phantoms to 'Direct Optical Mode' as per Q 11 in this post https://devialetchat.com/Thread-Last-min...6#pid76696 you'll drive Phantoms directly from the TOSLINK inputs, but you'll have to do volume control in the digital domain before it enters Phantoms.

I was researching option 2. I did not find a device that could split and route L and R over separate TOSLINK ports. No vendors (apart from Vincent at Totaldac) where willing to create L and R TOSLINK.
For 3 I am not certain so I hope a Phantom owner can chime in and tell us if this is possible.
4 is actually an 'installer' mode meant for use with the 'Dante dongle' or a MCH movie system.

I do not think Dialog has bad sound quality as such, it's more with its functionality, but for Spark I'd agree it is quite bad.

Thanks Ogs

You all say that Dialog is working well which simplify the work.

In 1 you say that I can connect Dialog to Phantoms through internet. I then probably misunderstood. I thought the Dialog was organizing a separated network with the phantoms from the house intranet (acting as a router of this specific network). If it is the case, I cannot connect Phantom and Dialog as only one RJ45 is available on Dialog. If it use the house network then it's a lot better than wifi. The only negative point is that the stream is going to dialog and then to the two phantoms multiplying the bandwidth usage on the network.

2 & 4 are questioning the volume management. This is the one I am having problem with. I would need, as you mention, either to modify the signal    or to understand how to communicate with phantom to control it"s internal hardware volume management (better)

3, does it means that I will have to adjust the volume of each room separately in this case ?

Best regards