Home Network Streaming for Dummies?

[skeptic Mike]

(12-03-2021 20:01)nickc Wrote:  ..... I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good (online) guide that covers the essentials, especially the interaction between servers, controllers and renderers, without proseletyzing unduly for a particular brand or ecosystem and providing enough technical explanation to make sense of the underpinning processes without getting bogged down in the minutiae.

I suggest Jean-Francois Dockes documentation. He wrote Upmpdcli which is the key component for most Raspberry Pi based renderers. see:
http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/pages/homenet-audio.html
and
https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/upmpdcli/...anual.html

(12-03-2021 20:01)nickc Wrote:  That leads me to a more specific supplementary question which I probably wouldn't need to ask if I had read such a guide: is it possible to / how does one get a rendering device with both ethernet and HDMI inputs to render the signal from the latter rather than the former? Eg In one setup I have MinimServer on a QNAP NAS sending to Volumio on a RPi with a Hifiberry DAC, the latter connected to an old Arcam amplifier. On another setup MinimServer sends to an Arcam AV receiver (SR250) via an ethernet cable and the Arcam's internal network streaming capability. But what if I wanted to connect the RPi directly to the SR250 by HDMI, bypassing the Hifiberry DAC and utilising the Arcam's (superior??) onboard DAC? I use BubbleUPnP, btw, as my controller of choice.

[Edited]

An audio renderer will be connected through to an amplifier and loudspeakers or headphones. There will be a DAC in the chain, this may be part of the renderer which will then have an analog output, or part of the amplifier (if that has digital inputs) or a standalone device between the renderer and the amplifier. In these forums you'll see examples of all these arrangements.

If you are connecting your Raspberry Pi to your receiver via HDMI, then the Pi is the renderer, This is what you would have to use if you were streaming both Video and Audio and your receiver didn't support the format. (As it is audio only, you couldn't be using MinimServer to do that.)

HDMI supports both video and audio so I think that it's possible to send audio in this way, although there would have to be a video signal as well. I can't see any point in doing that if you can use the receiver as a renderer in the conventional way.

I assume you are wondering if this might produce a "better" sound, but in each case, you're using the same DAC in the Arcam receiver. I wouldn't expect you to notice any difference if you took the audio output from your Pi with the HiFiBerry DAC and sent that into the analog inputs on your Arcam receiver.

All competently implemented renderers should produce exactly the same digital information for the DAC. It's a straightforward programming task. I'd also expect all competently implemented DACs to sound the same; the key component in all your devices will be a single chip Sigma-Delta DAC. Their design and operation is well understood.

(Audio sent over HDMI is sent in data packets interleaved with the video and other data packets, so it has to be reassembled into a digital stream for the DAC.)

Even if you are in a position to play the same music through different renderers and DACs to the same speakers, it's difficult to demonstrate this to yourself, as you need to be able to balance the output levels very accurately, and not know to which one you are listening.

Mike