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I am considering to purchase 2 Phantoms (perhaps Silver) for a stereo-setup in a new appartment. Source will be a Mac Mini running Roon.
What will be the correct way of connecting the three parts of the system:
Mac
Dialog
2 Phantoms
I do have an ethernet port close by. If I want to have all parts including the Phantoms connected by wire, I probably need to use a switch?
Thanks
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I have my Phantoms and Dialog all plugged into a 4-way mains extension block so that they communicate over the over line. This has worked faultlessly for over 18 months. In the past I tried linking them by ethernet using a dumb switch: it worked, but gave no advantage over PL. When I did this I sometimes found that one Phantom was communicating by ethernet and the other by power-line, which I did not think was a good idea. It did show that the transmission by PL was about the same strength as by ethernet.
Suggest you try a cheap extension power block and just have one ethernet connection to your Dialog. I also found an optical cable to a Phantom worked faultlessly - I had a little interference problem when I connected it to the Dialog.
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26-Jul-2017, 16:25
(This post was last modified: 26-Jul-2017, 16:28 by streamy.)
The Phantoms and Dialog are not (yet??) RAAT devices. So, either you connect the optical out of the MacMini to one of the Phantoms or you buy a Raspberry Pi and a hifiberry Digi (or any copy boards) to connect to one of the Phantoms. The optical input of Dialog is still not 100% reliable and also only accepts up to 24/96k and not 24/192k like the Optical input of the Phantoms. In case your power line is not too much contaminated with neighboring PLC's and the Phantoms and Dialog are on the same power net the internal PLC works perfect. In this case there is no need to connect the Phantoms through a switch to Ethernet. The Dialog needs Ethernet connection to your router to be able to directly stream services like Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer or Spotify (using Spotify Connect). When you run the Spark app on the MacMini you can access through Spark any local or NAS drive to play local files. Of course Roon is much better organized than Spark. But unfortunately streaming is very limited to Tidal in Roon and also internet Radio access is much better in Spark than in Roon. So, I use both Roon and Spark in parallel and have best from both worlds.
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26-Jul-2017, 17:29
(This post was last modified: 26-Jul-2017, 17:30 by Mohmm.)
Thanks all for your helpful replies.
#Powerline: I am deeply suspicious of sending computer data through the powerline. That's not so much because the data may spread outside of your confines, but also because it is a strong polluter of mains networks in the HF domain. At least this HF noise will affect power quality in the neighbourhood. That's the reason why some of us need strong power conditioning.
#Spark: I was not aware that Spark is also a music player that can be used in place of e.g. Roon or iTunes. I am not streaming very much, though.
