I use an Exasound e28 with upgraded clock and mini XLR outputs and I can tell you it will beat the sound of anything mentioned so far.
I own Theta Casablanca and Meridian 861 with XLR outputs and my e28 totally destroys them soundstage wise in my theater. There is no comparison.
I demo'd MX151 and including Datasat in my home. I ended up sending back the Datasat and paying a demo fee on the MX151. All in all, the e28 beat them all, using my HTPC, JRiver 19 and Dirac Live software all running on the one HTPC. (just in case you ask, because I know you want to
, my Meridian 861 was the second place, beating out both the Datasat and Theta Casablanca). This is/was confirmed by my wife, friends and even the salesmen. They were nice enough to bow out graciously since we did a complete 1 to 1 showdown for a 5 week period (I ran each a week, mastered them, then brought in the other). So I had all of these in my home at the same time.
It took me a lot of time, aggravation and troubleshooting to get it all done and balanced but the results are nothing less than better than anything I have ever owned or used.
There are only a few issues I have with the system and had to just "move on" and get over it. I am not completely happy about it but I decided to stay with it because during movies and music the sound is so amazing.
1. 3D playback. Forget about it with this setup.
a. JRiver doesn't playback 3D movies natively. This causes issues that are simply just to complex for the average and well above average user.
b. You can use use something like TMT6 to play the 3D movie, and send sound through JRiver but the lip syncing is a pain in the ass to get right, and
not every movie would even sync up. Worst yet, if I would pause the movie, then hit play again the lip sync was all wrong again. This was
a nightmare.
c. George simply has no interest in writing a WDM driver for the e28 which would allow me to just watch the movies directly in TMT6 and bypass all
of these issues (TMT6 and PowerDVD will not use ASIO drivers).
2. No inputs. This setup does not give any type of input system. So my only current hopes of playing things through that DAC must come from my PC.
This is a big change coming from my Theta Casablanca and Meridian 861. You just don't consider this until you are hit with how inconvenient it is.
3. Limited channels of 8. I have a 7.2 system and want to upgrade to more of an 11.2 but that's not possible. George says that it's a bandwidth issue of
the USB ports as he is already using the maximum bandwidth of it. I said, why not write a driver to facilitate two e28's, using two separate USB
controllers? *crickets*
So all I can say is, the actual sound quality and video quality is better using JRiver and my e28 than any hardware processor that has ever been in my home (by the way, Datasat personally setup my unit so there's no saying I am a dumbshit and don't know what I am doing. Each rep setup their own equipment). I setup my own Dirac Live on the PC and it's simply astounding in my room. It's night and day.
Good luck with your choice and if someone has actually come out with a product that will fix any of my above issues I am listening.
Author
Topic: JRiver + HTPC + Multichannel DAC = AVR Replacement? (Read 50676 times)