Sonore Streamers

[Hifi_swlon]

I checked out the internals of the rendu the other night - it's very lean in there!

Its essentially a 'stock' im6 SoM daughter board (which is TINY!) which I'm pretty sure from the serial # is from SolidRun, mounted onto another board housing power, network, USB, and SD card sockets, and a handful of components. I was always under the impression the entire thing had been built from the ground-up but I guess designing and building a CPU/SoM board from scratch is beyond the realms of possibility for a few individuals manufacturing small quantities.

I was intrigued to look after a network scan picked up the rendu as a solid run component.

Since both the rendu and the sonicorbiterSE (Cubox) use they same OS and have presumably turned off many of the same redundant features, I wonder how much worse the Cubox performs. Anyone compared?

Audio aside what I was most amazed by is how small electronics has become. Those SoM boards are about $50 and could be used for loads of cool things. I wish I had the skills/equipment to make something with one.

Ordered a Paul Hynes SR3 today. To be honest I'm not expecting it to do much (I added a linear to the Regen when I had it and found no improvement with or without it so am just assuming the same) but curiosity got the better of me. It could well be the Devialets USB that's holding things back, and in reality I should wait for the Uptone LPS-1, but I got impatient and experimental. Paul says it can be adjusted 3-10v with an internal precision pot, so it will find a use somewhere if not (or be useful for resale). Plus he has a 45 day return, although I get the impression no one returns them so there would be pressure there for a one man band.

I almost bought a Singxer SU-1 but was out of stock at the time of order so am sitting on the fence for a bit.

I'm sure soon enough we'll all be flogging the rendus, LPS's, Curious USB cables, and LPS-1's, and moving to dCS network streamer anyway. The fact they're on the RoonReady partner list, and it has Ethernet to AES all in one box bodes pretty well. Well, OK let's not forget it won't be cheap as its dCS but it would be a very tidy solution.