Phantom II Custom 5.0 surround system experience and suggestions

[mcallega]

Thanks for this very informative post! The Custom is indeed an interesting model. I didn't know that latency is zero on the Custom. Most interesting! I have seriously looked at getting a pair of black Customs (I'm not into MCH). I'd use AES/EBU for signal transfer, possibly driven by a Mutec MC-3 +USB. Dante is of course an option, but as a Roon user a virtual sound card might not be the best.
Does the Custom have any "quirks" (other than the signal level setting you describe) worth mentioning?


Hello and thanks for the reply.

The latency on the Phantom II Custom is not reported that is why I said it is basically 0 as, if you think about them they are self amplified speakers with an internal DAC as this model was stripped out of all the wireless connectivity. There is a reasons this system was advertises as surround and featured in few outlets. These speakers are also marketed to hotels and other venues and that is when you want to use Dante because at that point you will be able to remotely control each one of them and this is awesome.

For the record, I did speak with Dante and got an excellent customer support from them. Dante Avios's latency can go as low as 1ms so basically negligible. Given you need to wire lan cables anyway, at that point I thought adding the dongles + the ethernet POE switch was not appropriate for my small home setup.
In other circumstances I would consider Dante as they are used for professional installations all over the word.

Then to answer you main question: Re: "quirks", this is one of the main reason I did write this post because if you follow my setup you not only save a lot of time, but you avoid headaches. Granted that these speakers are sold directly to professional installers, I was not able to find any extra instructions beyond the instruction manual PDF I linked on the post.