USB (or Ethernet) to AES/EBU converter?

[wakibaki]

Don't we normally use a computer? You need quite a few layers of the ISO OSI to pass bytes across Ethernet. Ethernet protocol stack, a MAC address, IP address. I guess you could use a RPi.

 

Is there any kind of synchronisation required? I'm having difficulty visualising how this system all fits together.

[wakibaki]

@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.

 

OK, I'll try to deal with this in reverse order.

 

If you want to send audio from your laptop wirelessly, then the way to do this is with a regular Wi-Fi system. It is possible to take analog audio out of the laptop, convert it to some digital form, transmit that by radio, or even output digital audio to a dedicated device and send that to a dedicated receiver, but there is no existing system to do this. You can't send raw digital data out of the Ethernet port. It has to be wrapped in a number of protocols that keep it separate from other data, ensure it gets to the right destination etc., because Ethernet is effectively a multi-drop system, where multiple users can share the same wire. I talk about Ethernet because Wi-Fi just repackages Ethernet and then unpacks it at the other end. You have an Ethernet port on each Wi-Fi device, although, on a laptop, it may be virtual.

 

For this reason any device that wants to pass audio over Ethernet requires most of the Gubbins we normally associate with a full-scale internet connection, IP address, there are a lot of things. Nowadays we would just use a small single-board computer for this section, and this keeps everything compatible with existing tech.

 

So if your laptop has wi-fi then you can make both it and the device members of the same workgroup or domain, then they become visible to each other, and the device can request a file on the laptop, as long as sharing is enabled.

 

A small computer like the Raspberry Pi would often be used, it has USB, but you might have to go to a fanless PC to get something that supports an AES/EBU card. I think you can control headless RPi systems from your phone, I don't know about Windoze.