Digital/Etherent Connectivity in the Audiophile World

I think you may be overthinking this.  The needs of pro and home audio can be quite different and what works for one doesn’t always translate to the other.  But, most importantly, if the guys making the the better streamers, etc. found that incorporating a certain protocol, etc. sounded meaningfully better you can bet they’d be using it.  Get a good separate streamer and DAC and just get started.  Streaming is like audiophile crack — once you start experiencing worlds of new music from the comfort of your chair, listening to the same stuff over and over seems a bit boring.  Just my $0.02 FWIW.

Old thread but I’ve been thinking about this topic also.  I saw somewhere that Storm Audio is incorporating Dante/ AES67 into their new Evo model.  The promise of a single cable carrying the digital signal and power is very attractive, especially when the channel count starts to creep up above 7 channels.  However, it is my impression that the audiophile community is reluctant to get into powered speakers because you loose the ability to play around with different equipment—this is a hobby to a lot of us after all.

JBL has Dante in their SDP 55/58, and Genelec has a few PoE Dante speakers.  That would be a slick way to build a home theater.  I did read somewhere that bit rate is fixed after set-up, a bit of an issue those that want bit perfect delivery to their DAC.

PoE is limited to 90 watts I think, so we’re not talking about driving huge speakers.  Crown makes an amplifier with Dante input however, so there’s lots of ways to approach the design.

Anybody else have thoughts on this topic?