TOPIC:

I consider the SHD a very interesting product with great potential (especially to reduce box count) but to assess whether it would be an improvement over my current multi-room setup I have a couple of questions:

• Can the software on the streamer board be replaced? I.e. if a driver is needed to send audio to the DSP board, is that driver publicly available in the kernel tree or only included in the custom Volumio build for the SHD? I'm fine being on my own there so long as I don't have to write the driver myself.

• Can audio data from the DSP board be sent back to the streamer board so it can be streamed to the network? I'd like to send whatever input is chosen on the SHD (prior to any processing other than A/D) to the other network players in my apartment. The streamer hardware in the SHD would handle this with ease as I currently use a much lower end RPi.

Any information highly appreciated.

Cheers, Dieter

@Dieter

Glad to hear that you like the SHD. In answer to your question, if you go at building/modding the SHD firmware, you'd be on your own I'm afraid as you'd expect for such modifications (nothing different from any manufacturer). It's impossible for miniDSP to turn our engineers into tech support to start providing coding support to every customers out there... Instead of 40 products, we'd have 2 if it were the case..

As for the communication, it's indeed bidirectional (both I2S ports in/out there). One can indeed be creative..

DevTeam

@DevTeam

Thanks for the comment. The ability to stream audio to the network in addition to streaming it from the network would be a major asset. I gather that this is technically possible. If ALSA on the steaming board can "record" the audio from the current input on the SHD it is actually straight forward. The only remaining issue would then be the delay inherent in streaming. I guess I'll have to take a real close look at the streamer software when (and if) I can get my hands on an SHD.

Cheers, Dieter