Just got myself a DMP-A6 now that it supports streaming via from LMS using Squeeze Connect, so I am just learning my way around it. I want to use the analogue outputs to drive a headphone amplifier (which works great), and use the digital coax SPDIF output to drive a pair of active speakers which have their own DACs. This seems to work and I can get music to play on the speakers, but the volume control of the digital coax doesn’t seem to work very well at all. Instead of having a range of -100dB to 0dB as on the analogue outputs, it has just 16 steps from 0 to 15. The lowest volume setting of ‘1’ ('0' is effectively mute) is very loud and it just gets louder as it goes up to 15. My ~15 year old Squeezebox Touch (which this will hopefully replace) has a much more usable digital volume control that behaves just like an analogue one, starting off very quietly as you would expect and is much more graduated across its range to 100%. Are there any settings on the DMP-A6 that I am missing here? Why isn’t the digital volume control the same as the analogue volume control with a range of -100dB to 0dB, and can this be improved as it is unusable at the moment? Cheers!
I have active, wireless speakers that have an external hub with remote. I set digital out to volume 15 and then control the volume of the hub/ speakers with the remote. In your setup, do you have to feed one speaker with optical directly? (And one speaker then ‘talks’ to the other without a remote for volume control?
I use the SPDIF coax (not optical) out into the AES/EBU XLR input of one of the speakers, and then this gets passed into the other speaker via an AES/EBU XLR cable. I do have a network 'hub' for the speakers that I use to set them up, but this needs a PC connected to use it and it doesn't have a remote control, so I use it for setup only. I would like to be able to use the volume control on the DMP-A6 to control the coax SPDIF (this should be doable as it seems to be on other streaming devices like my old Squeezebox Touch), but it just seems unusable at the moment as even the minimum volume is very loud, and there are few steps between minimum and maximum volume.
It should be absolutely fine as the AES/EBU (AES3) and SPDIF standards are mostly interchangeable. I am using a 110 ohm cable as per the spec, but even a 75 ohm cable should be fine for short cable runs (below 5 or 6 metres). The speaker manufacturer also states that this can be done. As noted this does work on the A6, it connects and I can play music, but the digital volume control on the A6 seems to be very poor as described above. It has also worked perfectly well on previous streamers that I have had, and they have managed to implement digital volume control well.
In this case, I would use XLR out to an ‘XLR switch’ (I believe such a thing exists) and then run XLR to headphone amp and speakers. Wouldn’t that work better for you?
The A6 doesn't have an AES/EBU XLR output, it would be great if it did! I want to send analogue to the headphone amp using the DAC in the A6 (which works great), and send digital to the speakers. I can send analogue to the speakers, but they digitise their analogue inputs in order to manage their crossovers and do room correction in the digital domain before converting this back to analogue, so I just want a pure digital signal all the way to them. The easiest way to do this is use the coax SPDIF output of the A6, no switches required, but the digital volume control seems currently unusable. It should be able to do this and my current assumption is that this is a bug as something odd is going on here, as every other streamer I have had was capable correct digital volume control.
Ok. My Buchardt speakers are the same. They digitize to do DSP and then back to analog. Room correction is stored in the hub. So, even if you wanted, you couldn’t do XLR left to left speaker and XLR right to right speaker?
One AES/EBU in, one AES EBU out. You tell them what speaker they are in software, and they extract out the correct channel from the SPDIF signal. Correct. To be clear, my current setup with the A6 feeding the speaker from its digital coax works, it does play music correctly, it is just very loud with poor volume control!
Allright. And you have their sensitivity / input gain at UNITY, right? I find it extremely weird that the volume is absurdly high, as this implies a digital attenuation of the signal, that wastes bit-perfectness to begin with, but also refinement, and possibly introduce detail loss at lower levels... Maybe a <anything digital, like USB, coax, optical> to AES/EBU could help? I don't think they're expensive. Other than this I have no idea... it's a digital stream, its max value is always the max value of the bit-depth...
