TOPIC:

Hi,

I'm about to become the proud recipient of an SHD.

This post is me trying to figure out my new 2.2 setup.

My sources are Home Theatre, Roon & Turntable, I think I have Roon covered.

The meat of my post is around Home Theatre, I'm not bothering with a dedicated centre or surrounds, I just want stereo, so I will send down-mixed surround as 2ch on a digital output (probably do the down-mixing on PC), the 2ch should have all the low frequency information in there and so it will come into the SHD and come out as lovely 2.2, right, any gotchas with this, anyone doing this?

Turntable, I assume DIRAC is applied to all inputs, including the analogs?

And a bonus question... will the Microsoft Surface Dial control the volume on all of the inputs?

Thanks.
Richard

You will likely need a separate preamp for the turntable. Dirac is applied to whatever input is selected. SHD is great for 2.2.

entripy thanks for the DIRAC and SHD volume answer!

I'll keep this "open" as I would still love to know if the Surface Dial (specifically) will control the volume on all of the inputs, the DAC's volume, it looks like you setup the Surface Dial on Volumio (Volumio is just for streaming right?), does Volumio control the volume for all inputs or just streaming?

Obviously I would like to control my HT and TT volume as well.

This is from a while back (3 years) and suggests that volume should be performed on the DAC...the devteam...

"Volume control is to be done at the master volume at the DAC. Not before hand else you're throwing away dynamic range of the high end DAC. So as much as we'd love to give options, we prefer to lock something (in the short term) but no sacrifice audio quality by using a digital volume control inside the ARM Core. It's a limitation but it's for the good. Not because we're trying to become a pain.. Please trust us for a little while as in the future update, it will be done the right way when all the communication is actually taking place correct."

"The volume control API is already in the hands of the Volumio team"

So I guess the question is...

Does the Surface Dial control the SHD DAC's volume or is it "streaming" only.

The SHD volume controls the output volume and the ouput is of course from whatever input is selected, so yes, you can control the volume of all inputs, but only the one which is currently selected. Anything else I can't answer.

What you see in the front display of the SHD is the global output volume of all inputs (including analogue inputs), not just the streaming. You can adjust this global volume with the surface dial, with the remote controller and in the Volumio application.