USB (or Ethernet) to AES/EBU converter?

[JohnSwenson]

@Wakibaki: I don’t understand what you’re saying, either. :-) One thing seems to be clear from the comments above: My question is actually two separate questions.

 

1) How do I get a great USB -> AES/EBU converter, preferably with an all-digital preamp – that is volume control, source selector and at least one analogue input with an ADC?

 

2) How do I get a digital signal wirelessly from my laptop to this digital preamp? If this is at all possible without any audio degradation.

 

I had hoped that there’d be one all-in-one solution, but that seems to be an unobtainable dream.

 

There are some conceptual differences here, USB shows up as a "soundcard" on your computer, music playing programs (such as JRiver), know how to send their output to the "USB soundcard".

 

There is no such commonly available equivalent for Ethernet. You can't buy an "Ethernet DAC" that just shows up as a soundcard on your computer. The Ethernet enabled audio solutions are much more complicated "server client" systems such as upnp/dlna, squeezebox, sonos etc. In these systems you have a computer that runs a server, which reads files, sends the audio data out over the Ethernet system to a "player/renderer" which reads the audio data and converts it to the output format (analog audio, S/PDIF/ AES/EBU) whatever. These are full blown "systems" that send pictures of cover art, track, composer.artist names etc, give you tons of ways to search your library etc. All of these systems let you partition up the system in various different ways using either dedicated or general purpose hardware. You can have music stored on one piece of hardware, controlled from another piece of hardware, and final output on another piece of hardware. Or combine them in various ways.

 

With these systems you can have hardwired interfaces from the server to player and a WiFi connection to a laptop or tablet (or phone) running the control software so you can move it around where ever you want to be, but still send the actual audio data over the more reliable hard wired connection.

 

Looking at the speaker manual I see there is a AES/EBU in and output jack. Each monitor has a set of switches to select which channel it plays from (if both are on it sums the two channels). So you can run one AES/EBU wire to one speaker then daisy chain a cable to the other. This is probably easier than having to split the AES/EBU signal to go to both.

 

So to the OP, can you give us some more info on how you want to arrange and use this system, some important questions are:

 

1) Where will the music files be stored? On your laptop, a NAS, some other computer etc

 

2) How do you want to select what music to play? On your laptop, a tablet, phone, box in a "component rack"

 

3) How do you want to adjust the volume? Standard control on laptop, tablet, phone, actual knob on some box somewhere

 

4) You mention an analog input, what is this and where is it? Is it near where you will be sitting, is it near the speakers, somewhere else

 

5) What do you want to spend on this

 

Those are the ones I can come up with off the top of my head. I hope helps you think about what you are after so we can do a better job of coming up with a solution for you.

 

John S.