Phantoms and home cinema

[Phs]

Because there is an additional synchronisation step needed between multiple phantoms (network speakers) that doesn't exist in a traditional AV setup with active/passive speakers.

For the record: how do you guys achieve home theater (=surround) with phantoms (stereo)? And how do you set phantoms as surroundspeakers from an optical (toslink) sending 5.1 (AV receiver) or 2.0 (TV) where, I suppose, phantoms only take the front signal?!

hdmi would be an important evolution as from then you will not need an AV receiver/ processor anymore for surround and you will be able to use the phantoms as stand alone option. + All modern sources are hdmi and all modern formats require hdmi + hdmi is more appropriate to achieve a correct AV sync.

I agree with you. The fact that you can input optical on one Phantom doesn't mean the signal goes as straight and fast to the speaker as it does with an AV receiver, because streaming to multiple Phantoms needs buffering to synchronize them together.
On top of this, Phantom uses a lot of DSP processing which also takes a bit of time (but less)

So IMO I hardly see how the situation could improve to perfect A/V sync ( I mean here one frame max = 40ms )

Our best options are :
- hope that Devialet code and buffer optimization reduces the delay
- compare different setups. What I mean here is to test for example if using ethernet between Dialog and Phantoms reduces the delay compared to using WIFI, and also test wether the delay is the same when using optical input on Phantom vs Dialog