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[ppataki]

I would like to ask if it is possible to set up JRiver in a way that stereo DAC would output the two front channels and another stereo DAC would output the two rear channels
Thank you

[mwillems]

Depending on your application you can sort of do something like it using zone link, but it may or may not work correctly depending on the DACs you're using.  See this old thread for some thorough discussion on this topic: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=86438.0

To be clear the zone link technique won't work if you're trying to spread surround channels around, but may or may not work for an active crossover if your DACs can share a timing signal somehow.

[ppataki]

Thank you
Actually I would like to direct the surround rear channels to the other device so I guess it will not work then

[eve]

Short answer, no.

You won't be able to get them to sync correctly. It might not be *bad* but it really will not be ideal.

Long answer, yes you can chain / group D/A devices that have Word Lock (or use audio over IP standards, as those have timestamping) but you'll need studio gear.
Which sort of makes all of this a moot point since chances are, you'll end up with a unit that has more than enough D/A in itself.

Multichannel D/A has come a long way for consumers. MiniDSP has an 8 channel USB DAC but be warned, its performance leaves ALOT to be desired and you wont have volume control. I'm using a Topping DM7 which measures and functions really quite well. You can also grab older studio interfaces, sometimes for very cheap that may have excellent D/A sections. I grabbed a Studio Konnekt 48 for maybe $200 that was essentially, irreplaceable until I got the DM7. I kept buying newer studio units and none of them performed as well sonically. They had way better drivers, and way better control but just left something to be desired.

[kr4]

Don't shoot me if the answer is obvious but I know that MacOS offers aggregate device support (and, afaik, so does Asio4all), so is it possible for JRiver?  We can debate later whether or not it is an effective use of time and resources.

[JimH]

Do you have a link to any standards?

[eve]

Do you have a link to any standards?

For audio over IP? There's a discussion running on here about them that touches on the primary ones.

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,126581.0.html

AVB is much more proprietary but does work out of the box on MacOS. There's implementations for Linux as well. The thing is, it requires 'AVB' Compatible switching hardware and outside of MacOS, a specific intel PCI-E Ethernet card.

Dante and AES67 are the ones to pay attention to, as support is broader. You're even seeing high end Pre-Pros supporting Dante.

[eve]

Don't shoot me if the answer is obvious but I know that MacOS offers aggregate device support (and, afaik, so does Asio4all), so is it possible for JRiver?  We can debate later whether or not it is an effective use of time and resources.

Yeah, CoreAudio has supported aggregate devices for ages. I'm not running MacOS (hell the last time I used it, it was OSX), but I don't believe it's ever been taken out. I don't know why it wouldn't be possible to use said aggregated device in JRiver.

[kr4]

Yeah, CoreAudio has supported aggregate devices for ages. I'm not running MacOS (hell the last time I used it, it was OSX), but I don't believe it's ever been taken out. I don't know why it wouldn't be possible to use said aggregated device in JRiver.

I do not generally use  Macs (as may be apparent) but I have used it with JRiver to aggregate multiple USB DACs and it works fine.  Now, if Windows could do this I would not be asking for it.   As we move to "immersive audio" with more channels, this would seem to be useful.  I could make use of it today!

[eve]

I do not generally use  Macs (as may be apparent) but I have used it with JRiver to aggregate multiple USB DACs and it works fine.  Now, if Windows could do this I would not be asking for it.   As we move to "immersive audio" with more channels, this would seem to be useful.  I could make use of it today!

I've wondered if the way Windows handles audio / actually talking to audio devices makes Aggregate Device support difficult.

For Immersive Audio? MOTU 24AO. 24ch D/A for $995
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/24Ao--motu-24ao-usb-avb-ios-interface

Been eyeing that at some point to play around with.
You could get a full 5.4 setup going with up to 4 way active crossovers per channel.

[ppataki]

Short answer, no.

You won't be able to get them to sync correctly. It might not be *bad* but it really will not be ideal.

Long answer, yes you can chain / group D/A devices that have Word Lock (or use audio over IP standards, as those have timestamping) but you'll need studio gear.
Which sort of makes all of this a moot point since chances are, you'll end up with a unit that has more than enough D/A in itself.

Multichannel D/A has come a long way for consumers. MiniDSP has an 8 channel USB DAC but be warned, its performance leaves ALOT to be desired and you wont have volume control. I'm using a Topping DM7 which measures and functions really quite well. You can also grab older studio interfaces, sometimes for very cheap that may have excellent D/A sections. I grabbed a Studio Konnekt 48 for maybe $200 that was essentially, irreplaceable until I got the DM7. I kept buying newer studio units and none of them performed as well sonically. They had way better drivers, and way better control but just left something to be desired.

My aim here would be to use two FDAs (full digital amp - Sabaj A30A). One would drive the front channels, the other would drive the rear channels
Clearly JRiver will not be able to help here so I have tried fiddling around with VoiceMeeter Banana but I could not fix the ever shifting latency between the front and rear channels (it is very strange, it keeps drifting even if I change the delay manually.....)
So I think the ultimate solution is to order an RME DigiFace USB (I did that already) which will handle the task perfectly (I tried that 2 years ago just for fun using two stereo DACs and it worked like a charm)

[syndromeofadown]

Sabaj A30A has RCA inputs, so you can still use them as amps. You just need an 8 channel DAC to connect to them.
I use the following DACs / Soundcards and am happy with them:
Creative Labs PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series Sound Card
Asus XONAR U7 MKII External DAC

You can setup zones so your stereo music uses the Sabaj A30A DAC, and multichannel uses your surround DAC.

[eve]

My aim here would be to use two FDAs (full digital amp - Sabaj A30A). One would drive the front channels, the other would drive the rear channels
Clearly JRiver will not be able to help here so I have tried fiddling around with VoiceMeeter Banana but I could not fix the ever shifting latency between the front and rear channels (it is very strange, it keeps drifting even if I change the delay manually.....)
So I think the ultimate solution is to order an RME DigiFace USB (I did that already) which will handle the task perfectly (I tried that 2 years ago just for fun using two stereo DACs and it worked like a charm)

Yeah they're going to keep falling out of sync. It's so frustrating because initially you think 'If I just spend the time getting them perfectly aligned everything will be kosher' .
Sadly it doesn't really work that way.

RME's stuff is top notch. So you'll use 2 of the optical ports out of it to feed the 2 Sabaj units? I wonder how master/slave works when you're going out to a consumer DAC (or in your case the Sabaj) without a wordclock input? If it's worked before though you should be golden!

Cool setup by the way, the Sabaj is super interesting!! I assume you like them?

[ppataki]

Sabaj A30A has RCA inputs, so you can still use them as amps. You just need an 8 channel DAC to connect to them.
I use the following DACs / Soundcards and am happy with them:
Creative Labs PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series Sound Card
Asus XONAR U7 MKII External DAC

You can setup zones so your stereo music uses the Sabaj A30A DAC, and multichannel uses your surround DAC.

Using the analog inputs on an FDA is not a very good idea - these amps use PCM signal as input and directly convert that to PWM which is then amplified and finally converted to analog at the output stage using a low-pass filter. There is no DAC (DAC here means PCM to analog conversion) needed at all during the whole signal chain.
Their analog inputs are first converted to PCM so basically that defeats the whole idea
So one shall use the USB, optical or coax inputs accordingly

[ppataki]

Yeah they're going to keep falling out of sync. It's so frustrating because initially you think 'If I just spend the time getting them perfectly aligned everything will be kosher' .
Sadly it doesn't really work that way.

RME's stuff is top notch. So you'll use 2 of the optical ports out of it to feed the 2 Sabaj units? I wonder how master/slave works when you're going out to a consumer DAC (or in your case the Sabaj) without a wordclock input? If it's worked before though you should be golden!

Cool setup by the way, the Sabaj is super interesting!! I assume you like them?

I already have one Sabaj A30A in my home office driving a Markaudio CHR120 based DIY system (published it on ASR: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/fullrange-speaker-project-based-on-markaudio-chr-120.31219/)
I really do love those amps!!
I believe that full digital amps are the future (I said that 10 years ago already but I hope this time I will be right)

Yes, I will use 2 of the optical outs and it did work flawlessly a few years ago when I tried that with two DACs
What I did is that I used the DigiFace device itself as the clock source (you can set that in the Options somewhere) and used TotalMix to do the channel mapping. The only trick is that the channel mapping for some reason gets changed when changing sample rate but once you set it up correctly it stays that way so no worries
That was it, pretty straightforward
I will post here my experience with the two Sabaj amps - they shall arrive this week; sadly I will need to wait approx. two more weeks for the DigiFace

[eve]

Huh, no way, another DM7 owner.
So you like the Hypex amps too? Did you build yours or?
Pretty sure I'm going the Hypex route for my multichannel setup.

I really like the look of the speakers you built for your desk btw, really quite nice.

[ppataki]

Huh, no way, another DM7 owner.
So you like the Hypex amps too? Did you build yours or?
Pretty sure I'm going the Hypex route for my multichannel setup.

I really like the look of the speakers you built for your desk btw, really quite nice.

Thank you very much, appreciate it!

I have sold my Topping DM7 (to be replaced with the Digiface) and my Hypex amps are still for sale
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/topping-dm7-hypex-nc250mp-based-amps-in-the-eu.39082/#post-1378468

I totally love them too but I would like to switch to the FDA concept hence I am replacing them with the A30As

[eve]

Man if you were in North America I probably would have been interested in the Audiophonics Hypex amps you've got.

Hopefully if you end up remembering to, you'll pop back on here and let us know how the Digiface + FDAs shakes out.

[ppataki]

Man if you were in North America I probably would have been interested in the Audiophonics Hypex amps you've got.

Hopefully if you end up remembering to, you'll pop back on here and let us know how the Digiface + FDAs shakes out.

I can still ship it to you, let me know

I will definitely report back with my findings!

[ppataki]

So here it is 
(attached)

The sound is crazy detailed, simply marvelous!
Digiface works like a charm, rock-solid ASIO driver
The only difficulty was to set the Channel Matrix in the right way. Digiface uses ADAT mapping even if you choose SPDIF output and even that keeps changing by changing the sampling rate - but once set correctly it stays that way so no worries

[eve]

So here it is 
(attached)

The sound is crazy detailed, simply marvelous!
Digiface works like a charm, rock-solid ASIO driver
The only difficulty was to set the Channel Matrix in the right way. Digiface uses ADAT mapping even if you choose SPDIF output and even that keeps changing by changing the sampling rate - but once set correctly it stays that way so no worries

That's RAD! I'm glad it all worked out.
RME's drivers are second to none. Their ASIO should be as close to 'rock solid' as can be.
Yeah, that's actually pretty common, you need to set the output for each sample rate. It doesn't make a 'ton' of sense to me why it would work that way (from a user perspective) but that's how it is, even with other interface companies (my Focusrite stuff did it too)

So like, if everything is staying in sync.... I guess the Digiface is a solid way to pool together more 'consumer' D/A, and in your case a FDA.

[eve]

So SPDIF requires some form of clock recovery at the D/A unless I'm mistaken.
The thing is, clock recovery implementations differ in quality right? I wonder if all this works because your Sabaj's internal D/A have a good implementation of clock recovery? Like... I would assume, two devices that 'know' nothing about each other could become slightly out of sync right?

I *think* it's working in comparison to other people who have tried this because what they end up doing (at least from what I've seen) is trying to use multiple devices for the digital out, like 2 sound cards for their Toslinks or multiple USB DACs. In your situation, the Digiface is the only device your computer needs to care about or talk to really.

I don't know if any of this really matters because, you're happy and very impressed.
I guess I'd be curious since this could be an interesting 'suggestion' for people in the future looking to setup a similar solution with multiple FDAs or stereo DACs.

[ppataki]

So SPDIF requires some form of clock recovery at the D/A unless I'm mistaken.
The thing is, clock recovery implementations differ in quality right? I wonder if all this works because your Sabaj's internal D/A have a good implementation of clock recovery? Like... I would assume, two devices that 'know' nothing about each other could become slightly out of sync right?

I *think* it's working in comparison to other people who have tried this because what they end up doing (at least from what I've seen) is trying to use multiple devices for the digital out, like 2 sound cards for their Toslinks or multiple USB DACs. In your situation, the Digiface is the only device your computer needs to care about or talk to really.

I don't know if any of this really matters because, you're happy and very impressed.
I guess I'd be curious since this could be an interesting 'suggestion' for people in the future looking to setup a similar solution with multiple FDAs or stereo DACs.

I am not an expert but AFAIK the Digiface is taking care of the clock (I can select itself as the clock source in the driver menu)
So I am pretty sure that clock drift is a non-issue here
But to be 100% sure I will perform measurements in a few days' time and will come back

I do believe that this option is the only (reliable) option when one wants to use multiple stereo DACs or stereo FDAs in a multichannel setup (at least until multichannel FDAs with USB input become a commodity  )

[eve]

I am not an expert but AFAIK the Digiface is taking care of the clock (I can select itself as the clock source in the driver menu)
So I am pretty sure that clock drift is a non-issue here
But to be 100% sure I will perform measurements in a few days' time and will come back

I do believe that this option is the only (reliable) option when one wants to use multiple stereo DACs or stereo FDAs in a multichannel setup (at least until multichannel FDAs with USB input become a commodity  )

Thank you so much for being thorough and doing measurements too just to confirm things! It's very much appreciated <3

Also don't like... get me all hot and bothered over the thought of a really good multichannel FDA.......

[ppataki]

So I went ahead and did some measurements: I have measured the delay between my front left speaker and my rear left speaker with REW using Acoustic Timing Reference
The value I got as a delay stayed (almost)* the same no matter how many times I have run the measurement
This was not the case with VoiceMeeter Banana - there the delay value got changed significantly each and every time
So I can confirm that there is no issue with synching between the channels - at least not from my perspective and for my use-case

* before DigiFace I had a Topping DM7, before that an Okto DAC8 Pro and before that an Apollo X4 and with all of them there was a slight difference in the measured delay value between measurements - I am sure that is because of REW and not because of these devices

[Manfred]

benchmark audio did something similar with JRiver MC:
https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/18614657-creating-a-high-resolution-5-1-music-server

[eve]

benchmark audio did something similar with JRiver MC:
https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/18614657-creating-a-high-resolution-5-1-music-server

That's pretty cool. Going out via AES > multiple Stereo D/A units is interesting. I've seen it done a few times in studios, but it's usually with D/A that has clock inputs.
I've always been hesitant to do it, and in one of those studios, ended up setting them up with an RME that had the required # of outs to replace the complex AES > multiple stereo D/As as they were hella dated anyways. It wasn't replaced because it didn't work, just inefficient.
Frankly, I think the real, kick in the butt, unfortunate answer I keep coming to is 'build a 16ch D/A your dang self to your personal specs'. I'm looking at some of the DIYINHK stuff as a base. It's all bog standard stuff you could cobble together with the XMOS dev boards. The thing that's different is they already have all the carrier PCBs for like the ES9038 chips you'll need to actually 'do' anything with those XMOS boards (the XMOS built in D/A isn't good and isn't worth your time in an audiophile situation, it's unbalanced IIRC and the converters aren't anything special)

[eve]

So I went ahead and did some measurements: I have measured the delay between my front left speaker and my rear left speaker with REW using Acoustic Timing Reference
The value I got as a delay stayed (almost)* the same no matter how many times I have run the measurement
This was not the case with VoiceMeeter Banana - there the delay value got changed significantly each and every time
So I can confirm that there is no issue with synching between the channels - at least not from my perspective and for my use-case

* before DigiFace I had a Topping DM7, before that an Okto DAC8 Pro and before that an Apollo X4 and with all of them there was a slight difference in the measured delay value between measurements - I am sure that is because of REW and not because of these devices

I'd agree and say this is more a consequence of REW than the units themselves *most likely*.
P.S I use VoiceMeeter Banana in my setup. I do not have delay issues (I use it to duplicate / shuffle around some channels for my quasi active L&R in the surround setup, in other words if there was an issue, L&R's highs and mids / lows would be very off sounding) despite it being used to feed my AoIP solution rather than a DAC connected to the machine it runs on. I have about 7ms-12ms latency between the PC and the AoIP solution, which is *good* enough for 120hz gaming.