Streaming alternatives to pricey kaleidoscope?

Kaleidoscape cheapskate.

According to Gtt Audio (Bill Parish ) , Apple TVX would be superior to Kaleidoscape.

And much cheaper .

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I highly recommend Zidoo, you need to rip your own movies and then its great!

Apple Tvx, I read the marketing material and it’s very deficient as to what is done to the Apple TV box.

It’s great you add a linear power supply and Great cabling to connect it but it’s very confusing what the heck you do with Apple TV box?

Further it doesn’t address the sound. That’s what’s important here. Yeah I can connect my Apple TV box with great power cords, HDMI, and etherNet and a good sound system but what are you guys bring to the equation???

@maxwave 

Thanks for posting the ATV hotrod, did you get one yet?

@kota1 

No , I have not bought one yet. I will wait , for more reviews.

By the way , I have been told by a Home Theater specialist that Apple TV is much better , on sound basis that NVidia Pro.

@jumia 

Why don’t you contact Bill Parish ( Gtt Audio ) and ask him anything about Apple TVX.  He is the distributer/dealer..  

At least , Kota1 wrote : Thanks !
My HT processor : Acurus AC4-20 . And I use , all the 20 channels : 9.5.6

@maxwave 

Very nice setup for your HT. What are your preferences for music? 2 CH, upmixing, etc? How do you engage your wide channels? Thanks

@maxwave 

Amazing that you use all 20 channels of your processor. Looked at your setup and see you have a lumin X-1, which I also have. See you have a Vinnie Rossi integrated, I looked at the Brama preamp they offer but went with something else due to delays in producing it.

Also see you use a grounding box and wondered how you like it and how you believe it has impacted your system and rationale for doing what it does.

@kota1 

For music : 2 channels  with my Vinnie Rossi Brama Integrated .     
This integrated has a Home Theater Bypass , which is used also for my Home Theater systeme.

With  the Acurus ACT4-20  the wide speakers ,  reproduce the surround speakers.     
Until , maybe a future firmware updates.  Same thing for the extra 4 subwoofers.
 

I am more 2 channels music  oriented than video .   
But I enjoy watching video  music shows  . The ACT4-20 sounds very good . Moreover , since I have their ASPEQT  kit  for speaker/room  calibration.

@jumia 

I am not much  technical .  
The CAD 1.1  ground box is connected to the Lumin X1  and the Brama Integrated The sound has a better defenition . It has a better musicality . 
 

You may also ask @hifihandyman  .  
we bought our CAD 1.1  togheter. 
And he knows better than me how to express sonic  impression and playback.

I hope , it helps

Pierre

I really like qwest tv which I watch through the plex app for concert videos:

@kota1 

Thanks , I will take a look !

@xymox 

Welcome to the forum, I see its your first post. The additional info is VERY helpful, especially about the sound. Have you any experience with playing back atmos content, both on music and movies? 

Did you show info is very helpful.

However, the added power supply to me is an ad on that maybe redundant/unnecessary for most people here.  I have a good power supply arrangement and my focus is the sound quality.

So to the extent the Apple TV box can be improved in this area that would be a huge plus and Worth pursuing.

Of course the final problematic concern is we're dealing with compressed signals and not sure how this can really be over come. 

kota1, Apple uses Dolby MAT to decode the Atmos and produce M.LPCM with Atmost meta data. Most modern surround processors display this correctly as Atmos. Some older units show M.LPCM even tho it is Atmos. Because most of the decoding is done in the ATV and sent over in PCM this allows all the tweaks to the AppleTV X CPU to do the decoding in a very dejittered way. But that is not the main source of improvement. The audio data on the HDMI is radically dejittered VS all other HDMI devices I have measured. So the Atmos that comes from the AppleTV sound remarkable VS other gear simply because the HDMI is extremely dejittered. Suddenly you gain a 3D soundstage, depth, delinatition of instruments, nuance, emotion, subtly. Its like going from a cheap Walmart stereo to a high end DAC. The musical scores of movies are so good they distract from the movie for me. I got lost just a few days ago listening to the orchesrta behind nearly every minute of the TV series Picard. There is a french horn or a flute or something in nearly every scene. The performance of each of these instruments was captivating. It defies my understanding how these wonderfully recorded soundtracks have been lost this whole time covered over by terrible HDMI. Blurred into a flat lifeless loss of all detail.

I have clients using local UPnP music servers. I have one guy who took the AppleTV X and put it into the Oppo input and used his modded Oppo to pick off the SPDIF and fed that to a WADEX. He set the appleTV to 2 channel. He said the sound was stunning. He also flipped to the stock AppleTV and said it was terrible.

Its wonderful for sound. The sound improvements are the biggest part of the improvements.

AppleTV does top out at 48/24 uncompressed. It can do 32 channels of that. While its not DSD or 192/24, 48/24 is still really good for most things.

That’s great, I am a fan of atmos music and the weakest link is you have to use HDMI out to my processor instead of my DAC. It sounds good but I realized there is only so much you can squeeze from HDMI no matter how much you spend on a HDMI cable. I was trying to find a workaround by upgrading ethernet cables too which helped a little, but fell short of what the SQ is vs USB in on my DAC. I am looking forward to getting an ATVX unit soon.

@donavabdear , I know you are doing an upgrade, you might want to check this out as an upgrade to the source inpacts everything downstream.

I have an older Apple TV that I no longer use which has an optical port.  What are the implications of using an optical connection to alleviate issues arising from HDMI?   
 

With my existing Apple TV, I upgraded the power cord, the HDMI Cable, and the ethernet Cable as well as feeding all the power from a Transparent Power isolator. Even upgraded my power cord to the back of my processor. This has achieved great results as Long as the production quality of sound within the streamed source is done well.  Problem is the sound quality of many Streamed sources it's not that good and you can really hear the differences.  

Jumia, "What are the implications of using an optical connection to alleviate issues arising from HDMI?   "

Ooooo.. Its a older ATV. But. With the same mods I do, it could be really awesome. Again you have limitations of Optical SPDIF, and I do not know what the audio limitations are on the older ATV,, but that sounds fun :)  I think those older ATV have limitations on what apps they will run tho. They are way out of apple support.

So what nearly everyone has found with a AppleTV X is that using a really good power cable from a clean power source is really important. My linear with the R-Core will really love a good power cable and I feed it from a Torus system. A reviewer I know is using $30k in cables feeding the ATVX.

Yes, its STUNNING the difference in shows, apps and commercials.

Tonight I was watching Star Trek Strange New Worlds on Paramount, the sound was STUNNING.. The imaging and depth on the ohcestra was remarkable. Keep in mind my reference for SQ for digital music is a Taiko and either a Wadex or CH Precision C1.2 dual mono with X1 + T1.. So when I say the soundtrack of Strange New Worlds was stunning, I am not kidding around.

I think dejittering the entire platform really mattered. The Ethernet, CPU. RAM all really matter to bitstream decoding. The board is 2" sq. ALl the traces are REALLY short. So that makes for very little loss between chips. The super low phase noise chock chips I swap out also really matter. The high precision low drift voltage regulators make for really precision decoding of Ethernet and really precise encoding of HDMI.

Even af ter using the ATVX for over a year now, it STILL stuns me. I just never get over it. Something comes along in picture or sound and my brain goes "Impossible, OMG".. I love it. Its a pain for me to make them. I make my money in other ways and there is not much profit in it for me. I make them because they really are doing something beyond anything I would have thought possible.

I am not alone. Reviewers have covered the crazy cool experence. Owners have done reviews and ABs over on the Whats Best forum thread.

I have users doing all sorts of cool things to get even more performance. Cables. vibration isolation. Mass loading. Its just loads of fun to tweak and get more out of it.

Kota1.. Yes Ethernet cables seem to somehow matter. Technically I can't imagine how, but I have hear/seen it in a blind AB. I do a lot of blind AB doing development. I made a switch, its currently with my distributor. He is doing evaul. I applied all that i learned with HDMI to Ethernet and a switch. I need to do more testing with others to see what they think. I know people with all the current high end switches. People are doing ABs now. If it works out I will sell the Switch X. Its modular and can do 10Gbps. You can configure it for ethernet or optical in any form or as many ports as you want. It also has a special way to use it where it will isolate all the packets on some ports to ONLY those ports making a clean audio section of ports. I also have a modded cable modem. Both the Switch X and the Modem X use the same linear and sensing noise cancellation.

So I might soon have 3 products. The AppleTV X, the Switch X and the Modem X. But the switch and modem still need to be vetted by a bunch of my beta test group of users. WHo knows. Maybe not worth the effort. A SoTM switch is pretty good. Not sure a modem will make any difference.

@xymox , it is like audio alchemy, you found the ATV "philosophers stone" and now you are looking at the chain for applications, very interesting stuff. We have another member who is a professional, @cohsystms and he has developed proprietary tech that might be synergistic. I know he already has an ethernet switch, let’s see if he chimes in on this thread. His company is add-powr. His previous company, QRT, was acquired by nordost.

@kota1   Just to be clear, the company name is Coherence Systems. The brand name is ADD-Powr.™. In a nutshell, the Symphony I/O is a pass thru device that restores the harmonic integrity to the streaming network. It accepts ethernet or usb signals. There is an intensity switch that controls the degree of our harmonic field directly upon the interface.

I looked at this device for about $450. It appears to be a filter and not much else is really described on the website. It uses the word harmonics and it's description which is interesting but very empty comment.  It doesn’t have any impact on the HDMI cable which I think appears to be the real issue here.

Anybody ever use this thing?

I guess a follow-up question related to the symphony I/o pass through device for an ethernet cable hast to do with how the heck does it harmonically modify a stream of Data over an ethernet cable?? And if there's an intensity switch involved how the heck does this impact dataflow over the ethernet cable??

@xymox 

You may use Audiogon for selling the ATVX .    
It seems that your product has produce some interest  here.

@jumia 

I have been using QRT/Add-Powr products for 20 years. I like that it is only 1 thing to purchase but upgrades everything in your system. Here is a review of the ethernet switch: