Reactor - a Devialet first

[Marcello]

Since the Reactors have analogue inputs, can you just connect analogue left and right to get a stereo pair for movies?

I did that, it works but it's not that straight forward. To get the Reactors working as expected and with a reasonable sound quality I tried 2 options:

Option A- 1 mono cable for each (RCA to 3,5mm) + a mono to stereo female to male converter 3,5mm at the Reactor's input, since its input "expects" a stereo input signal and not only a mono one. That means the tip on the analog input at the Reactor should have 3 contacts (ground-right-left) and not the mono ones that would ground the "right channel" of each reactor. If you do so, they sound strange.

But...if you do that analog input you still end up with a considerably lower sound, good enough, but not as vivid and loud as when you provide a digital input.

Option B- RCA mono cable attached to an ADC (they are not so expensive but I recommend one with minimum 16bit 48khz conversion) and a Toslink to mini-Toslink cable connecting the ADC to the Reactor. You need one set of Mono cable + ADC + Optical cable for each reactor. Using a single ADC splitting the same signal to both Reactors won't give you stereo, just the same sound on both. Around 50EUR for everything.

I ended up using option B, I got a better sound quality and then the Reactors "reacted" as expected. They were really loud and the sound was more vivid in my opinion. I got a simple ADC, that has a digital output on "CD quality" standard and I didn't notice any delay caused by the ADC. I'd say it works as expected.

Remarks:
- The analog input doesn't sound very loud even when you provide a good stereo signal because part of the Phantom(s) loudness come of their DSP.
- With the analog input they do sound good, but with the digital one (even converted out of the analogue signal) it sounds considerably better.
- There are several ADCs on the market, from very cheap to expensive, I got a very simple one, that outputs digital equivalent to what would be a CD quality, and considering the original signal is analog, the sound quality is totally fine, however if you listen to higher-fi sources (blu-ray audio, FLAC, AIFF, etc.) then, a direct digital input either by cable or wireless (without the conversion from digital to analog and then to digital again) would sound better, since the ADC downgrades the quality in this case.

From my experiments with the 2 Reactors I learned they work fine in stereo with analog inputs (as long as you have 2 channels information on each) but in order to shine you need to provide digital input even if they come from an analog source.