Click to view our Accessibility Statement or contact us with accessibility-related questions
Iluvtoonz
24
Aug 30, 2019
Not the best deal on this. This is my favorite dac/amp though. I have these in closets and cabinets in every room in my house, rubber banded to AirPort Express units for optical connect AirPlay 2 capability. Volume control through my phone. Each unit can be controlled independently, and they all connect seamlessly to my NAS drive with a couple terabytes of ALAC music files. Some rooms have speakers on bookshelves, wife’s sewing room has inwalls, garage has a big pair of old JBL boxes, bathrooms have stereo pairs in the ceilings. Average cost per room was under $200 and the sound is really good. I have a friend in the neighborhood who came over for a barbecue and heard the sound coming out of my deck speakers and bed speakers and saw me playing with the volume and playlist on my phone. He asked me who my “installer” was. Turns out he spent almost $40k on a multiroom system in his house. It’s all hardwired so it’s hard to modify or expand, you can only play one song at a time and just punch in/out any room in the system using a control panel on a wall in his kitchen area. I said “Huh. I’ve got all 4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, a dining/kitchen room, a living room, and a full bar and game room in the basement, a garage and the backyard all wired in to my “system,” which didn’t cost me extra because it came with iOS. The equipment for each room is one of these little dac/amps, an AirPort Express, a TOSlink cable, some speaker wire, and whatever speakers I had lying around or bought on eBay or at a yard sale or Craigslist or whatever. He almost started crying when he found out the music he was hearing was transmitted via WiFi as lossless digital files and not decoded until it got to these little amps in each room. He realized he could have bought a new car for what he wasted on that system, that mine sounded better, was more flexible and easier and more convenient to use. By the time I showed him the towel closets in the bathrooms where the amps were stashed, he was asking me where I got all these AirPort Express units. Same places. eBay, Craigslist, etc. Average cost is $40. IOS can natively control up to 18 of them. I’m using 13 including my headphone rig on a mic stand by my favorite chair. It uses an SMSL dac/headphone amp and drives my HD650 very nicely. He is probably going to rip out the hardwired front end on his system and plug a bunch of AirPort Express units in, one for each room. He already has the hardwired Cat 6 switch in his closet for music from his network drive, so he can actually hardwire his AirPort Expresses all the way from Source drive to speakers in each room. But he gets cellphone control of each one, and from there he can expand his system to baths or garage just by getting another AirPort Express, a dac/amp like this one, and a pair of speakers that fits the room in question, and he’s in business. Wireless or hardwired, AirPlay 2 syncs up each node so if you want to, you can play the same music throughout your whole house without weird delays and rooms being out of sync with each other. This is a very useful product for more than just powering computer speakers on your desktop, even if you don’t usually use the Bluetooth radio in it.
(Edited)
Artamov
1
Jan 7, 2020
IluvtoonzDoes your set up allow for the following? 1) Play same song in all zones? 2) Play different music in different zones? 3) Control volume in each zone separately? 4) Stream Spotify to different zones? Thanks!
Iluvtoonz
24
Apr 12, 2020
ArtamovExcellent questions.
  1. yes. And you can choose which zones to leave silent or play.
  2. yes. As long as you are playing music from a local host, and your server and WiFi network have enough processing power and bandwidth for all you’re asking them to do, you can play a different tune in each room simultaneously.
  3. yes. The chooser includes a master volume slider and an individual volume slider for each zone. This is new in AirPlay 2.
  4. yes, with the caveat that streaming Spotify from one device means it will be the same song in every zone you stream it to. The good news is that Airplay 2 accurately syncs all zones playing the same tune so that although it can’t make Spotify play 2 different songs at once, at least your zones playing the same Spotify tune are in time with each other.
  5. HOWEVER, if you have a Spotify family account, every member of the family with their own Spotify login can stream a different tune from their personal device to the different zone or zones of their choice, and as long as your server and WiFi system has the bandwidth for it, they can all go simultaneously while you are streaming local music on another zone, and your guest is streaming from his separate Spotify account on yet another. The system is very flexible and that’s only audio. It does 4K video as well.
(Edited)
PRODUCTS YOU MAY LIKE
Trending Posts in Audiophile