TOPIC:

Hi. New to the forum. Am awaiting the arrival of the SHD Studio. I'm trying to figure out the best method to integrate into my existing 2-channel system, and would be grateful for your advice.

I have a pair of DSP-based active speakers (Devialet Phantom Reactor 900's) with internal Dac. Digital inputs only include TOSLINK and WIFI. I am currently using an older MacPro tower as a music-only server running Audirvana. The Mac has a TOSLINK output and I hardwire to the active speakers using it. It provides hard-wired stability and 24/96. I've about 40000 music tracks on the server. Wi-FI is prone to dropouts in my house (lots of users), and so I'm strongly leaning toward keeping the hard wired setup.

Here are my setup thoughts:

1. Am I able to setup the SHD Studio as an external sound card for the Mac via USB, and still output to the active speakers using the Mac's TOSLINK output?

2. Ideally, I'd like to use just the SHD Studio and replace the Mac with a hard drive of music files plugged directly into the SHD Studio, but as far as I know I have no way to hard-wire to the Reactors directly from the SHD Studio as the SHD Studio doesn't have a TOSLINK output.

Anyway, your feedback and advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm really looking forward to setting up the SHD Studio. This sound system is my dream system, and the SHD Studio is the pretty much the final piece. Cheers and thanks a lot.

[Sorry disregard previous version of this post]

Your speakers only have optical in, the SHD Studio does not have optical out... you would need some sort of coax to optical adapter I think.... to be honest I would rethink this. Does the speaker have analog inputs?

Hi... thanks for your reply.

I'm keeping away from analog.

As far as I can see, I have three options:

1. Confirm that I can use the SHD Studio simply as an external sound card with the MacPro. I just don't know if the USB connection is two way and sends the audio signal back o the MacPro or not. I've contacted miniDSP several days ago but haven't yet received a reply.

2. Acquire a Coax SPDIF to Toslink adaptor. Thing is, I haven't found one that looks to be decent quality on the net. I did find one that says it won't downgrade audio signal, but it looks cheaply made. Perhaps I am wrong. Details here on Amazon Canada (I'm in Canada):
www.amazon.ca/dp/B07QTP7FX5/?coliid=I3M8...ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

3. Perhaps I can set up the SHD Studio as a subnet on the home router and get better traffic this way via a UPnP connection.

1. You can get the audio signal from the output of the SHD via the USB connection but you would have to route it to the optical output. It used to be possible (IIRC) with SoundFlower, I don't know what the current state of that is.

3. I don't understand what you mean here. You can send audio to the SHD Studio with DLNA/UPnP but it doesn't come back out again.

You could look into the software version of Dirac Live, assuming Audirvana still supports Au/VST plugins then it should work directly in it (I haven't tried it).

Thanks.

1. Soundflower. Visited the website. Mentions a more recent product called Loopback. Maybe this could be an easy solution.

3. The Phantom Reactors have WiFi so could receive audio via a home network, but my homework has a lot of traffic. But I was researching and a subnet could possibly be setup on the router so the audio for my sound system can have it's own direct path. Networking is not my forte so am just figuring all this out. It is not my first choice, and am not sure it would work.

Thought I'd post the solution.

I installed a Toslink / COAX SPDIF adapter. Harder to find a high quality one than I thought, but found one manufactured by SIIG which is excellent.

Connection is as follows, for those who are interested:

SDH-Studio COAX SPDIF output -> COAX SPDIF input of adapter -> TOSLINK SPDIF output of adapter -> TOSLINK input of the Reactors.

The adaptor needs power supplied via USB / power adaptor. I simply use a phone charger with the correct voltage output plugged into household current. The SPDIF adapter could also be plugged into a computer's USB port for power.

Cheers.