Is the Phantom still bad for a home theater?

[Snoopy8]

For the moment I’m just trying to get anything working to understand it better.

As I understood it, I need a source - which can be a virtual sound card on a computer. Then I need an output to connect it to, like these AVIO things, and then I can connect it to my analogue speakers? I also need PoE injectors to power them.

For just getting eg a stereo output out of my Mac this should work fine. Right? What am I missing? I don’t need to decode AC3 yet.

Sorry, I thought you wanted to try multi channel from a standard Mac virtual sound card.  

To do what you want requires Dante Virtual Sound card and Controller from here

https://www.audinate.com/products/software

At the other end, need a converter like AVIO adaptor to convert Ethernet to an Analog signal before feeding that to an amplifier and then to the speakers. And yes, you will need a PoE injector or a switch with PoE.  There are adaptors which are dual powered using PoE or a DC power supply but they tend to be more expensive.