Optical vs Ultra Rendu.

@high-amp I had to consult multiple resources before I figured out how to install optical. It sounds like you're still learning, so I recommend reading that article I linked to earlier in this thread for another take on the topic of getting started with optical. 

I forget what you said you use as your current streamer, but you might be interested in trying optical with your current system before committing to the OpticalRendu. And yes, the opticalrendu will eliminate the need for the second converter. 

I've been streaming with optical now for about a month (with a non-optical compatible streamer, so I have to convert to optical and back again). Although I felt the difference was big when I first installed it, I'll switch back to sanity check myself at some point and be able to articulate just how big the difference is. 

Great to see more people getting into optical. I recently tried optical after coming across Tom Gibbs’ article. There he invites the reader to try a $100 optical experiment to see how it affects their system. Because my streamer (iFi Zen Stream) doesn’t have optical-in, I converted the line from ethernet to optical and back immediately before the line enters the streamer. The difference with the optical line in place was very big, and I have a modest system. I went with a pair of media converters and transceivers from TPLink, and I went with a 1M optical cable from Monoprice. I big layer of grunge was removed from the sound.

I was recently chatting with an iFi rep, and the rep told me iFi was working on something optical. I think it’s just a matter of time before other streamer manufacturers figure out what Sonore’s already found.

@sns I didn’t realize that slowing down the signal to 100Mbps might be a good way to reduce noise further. That’s interesting. I’ve seen someone suggest that noise created by the extra energy required for SPF+ and single-mode are reasons that the lower standards of SPF and multi-mode might make them better for audio. Like you, I’m waiting for a company to put out a purpose built media converter for audio/video. I also want to see whether optical affects the HT picture.