The Sonore Signature Rendu seems to be "da bomb"

wisnon

wisnon

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Its a DLNA network streamer, no HDD support, no Streaming service support yet, but SoTA playback ability! RCA spdif and HDMI LVDS I2S (i.e I2S intended for longer than a millimeter).

See review here:
Computer Audiophile - Sonore Signature Series Rendu Review

See tech discussion by the whiz John Swenson here:
Mac Mini version of a CAPS music server - Step by Step - Page 10

Mac Mini version of a CAPS music server - Step by Step - Page 10

Article: Sonore Signature Series Rendu Review

Article: Sonore Signature Series Rendu Review - Page 2
 
I think Auralic wins on feature set, but gets taken to school on SQ.

However, the SSR while apparently great on SPDIF really stuns via HDMI i2s. Right now, the list of compatible (LVDS) i2s Dacs are:
PS Audio - PerfectWave DAC MKI/MKII
PS Audio - DirectStream DAC
Rockna -
Wavequest (pending verification)
Sonore - Signature Series DAC
K&K
Audio - RAKK DAC
Wadia - Intuition (pending verification)
Wyred4Sound -
DAC-2/DAC-2 DSDse


and Lampizator with PCM, with DSD compatibility in development.
 
Its a Streamer, not a Server. Works with NAS. Its an all out assault.
What was the used price you saw? Sure it was not the regular (non-sig) Rendu?
 
wisnon said:
I think Auralic wins on feature set, but gets taken to school on SQ.
Click to expand...
Why would you say that Norman? I think based on specs the Auralic, with the double Femto clocks and all has everything on board to be absolute top. I am not saying you are wrong but I haven't seen an indication for it so far.
 
Glareskin said:
Why would you say that Norman? I think based on specs the Auralic, with the double Femto clocks and all has everything on board to be absolute top. I am not saying you are wrong but I haven't seen an indication for it so far.
Click to expand...
Fair question.

First off, i have been watching the space. See the links I gave above, if you do a deep dive you will get "it".
Second, I know a couple people who have tried both and the whisper is that the Sig is the bomb.

Lastly , I will let Barrows (online poster and consultant for Sonore and PS Audio) explain below:


barrows - 01-07-2015, 11:18 PM



Hi folks, let me give some technical information about the differences between the Rendu and the Signature Rendu. The Signature Rendu uses a transformer which is ~4 times the price of the transformer in the Rendu. The Signature Rendu uses (2) oscillators (clock circuits) which ~10 times the price of the ones in the Rendu. The Signature Rendu comes in a beautiful custom chassis (made in USA) costing ~6 times more than the Rendu chassis.

OK, so above you can get an idea on some of the parts costs increases. Here are the technical details which make the Signature Rendu sound better: 1. transformer is high quality Plitron Toroid, and it is cased in a sub-enclosure to guard against EM leakage.
2. the power supply is more robust, uses special ultra fast/ultra soft diodes, has more smoothing capacitance, and uses premium quality parts in all positions. 3. The Signature Rendu adds an additional output-reclocking board. This board holds the oscillators, the isolators, and the re-clocking and SPDIF/I2S output circuitry. This board is the key to the performance increase over the regular Rendu. The output board is isolated from all noise generated on the Ethernet receive board (high speed processor noise). On the output board clean clock signals are generated without interference from the Ethernet board. All signals are re-clocked just before output from the clean clocks.

OK, so how much difference sonically??? That is for the user to decide, as in all things with high end audio, there are diminishing returns: higher performance comes at a exponentially higher price. The original Rendu is very good, the Signature is better. The Signature is for the person looking for the best SPDIF/I2S source for their DAC, without compromise. Many people might be happy with the original Rendu. But do not listen to the Signature if you want to get the original.

I consult for Simple Design/Sonore.​
 
John's seminal post:

Due to the large number of questions I'm not going to quote each one here, I hope I cover them all.

The isolation between computer and DAC was not a primary focus of what I am talking about now. Test I did seem to show this is not as big an issue as many previously supposed.

This post is primarily about the impact of the PDN on the generation of PS noise at sensitive chips in a DAC(main oscillator, DAC chip). In particular how a packetized data delivery (USB, Ethernet) significantly exacerbates this. Primarily because the packetized system produces current through the PDN with a much greater bandwidth than non-packetized systems (say I2S). Producing PDN to work well over this wide bandwidth is MUCH harder than for a non-packetized system.

On the question of WiFi: it is also a packetized system, and because of all the processing going on in WiFi, probably much worse than straight wired Ethernet.

On isolation, I have been including full isolation between digital sections and mixed signal sections for many many years. I do not use optical isolators, I do not like them at all, I prefer the GMR (Giant Magneto Resistive) isolators made by NVE. I think they work way better than opto isolators.

The important question here is how come an isolator doesn't completely fix things, it seems at first glance that having completely isolated power networks for the digital side and the mixed signal side (I'm calling it mixed signal because there are digital signals (I2S data, clocks) AND analog signals (output from the DACchips) in the same power domain) should prevent PS noise from going between them. If the power domains were truly isolated they would, BUT the domains are NOT completely isolated, the data is going between them! This is the part that is usually forgotten in these types of discussions.

I hope I can convey what is happening here, let's follow a pulse through an isolator between domains and see what happens. Let's assume a real "dirty" digital side, a lot of ground plane noise and power supply noise, and noise riding on top of the digital signal. Lets look at the isolator, it has power and ground connections on the "dirty" side that run the driver that produces the whatever crosses the "barrier" (light, magnetic field, radio waves, whatever). The noise also modulates the "threshold" looking at the input signal. These and the noise and jitter in the signal all add up to a pretty large amount of variation in the field crossing the barrier.

On the other side of the barrier you have a much cleaner supply driving the receiver circuit, but the noisy field is going to cause a current in the receiver. Thus noise on the dirty side is going to cause current noise on the clean side as well. The isolator designers try and make them so the physical properties of the receivers have some form of thresholding so this transmitted noise is decreased, but a fair amount still gets through, and it is greater at the low frequency side. But that is not all, the data, the signal you WANT to cross the barrier, also causes current to flow through the PS pins of the clean side of the isolator, and that signal has a lot of jitter on it by now.

When the packet noise on the dirty side of the barrier is low, the current noise of the isolator will be lower, when the packet noise is high, the current noise of the isolator will be high. So even though the power supplies are completely separate, packet noise on the dirty side can still make it through an isolator and show up as current noise on the "clean side". If the PDN is very low impedance over a very wide bandwidth this current noise will produce very little voltage noise. If the PDN is not so great, there will be some significant voltage noise. It usually will be reduced from what it was on the dirty side, but still definitely there.

Yes putting a whole tracks worth of data in ram, shutting down the packet interface, and grabbing the data out of ram at the audio sample rate should help this, but this is frequently done by a processor and it's memory, that processor is usually producing it's own set of current noise which can cross the barrier. To be really effective it would take a system where the source (whatever it is) fills up the buffer then completely shuts down, nothing drawing power AT ALL from then on, the only thing drawing power is the counter walking through the ram and the ram itself. You definitely would want a simple ram structure, not something like a DDR3 DIMM which has all kinds of stuff going on all the time. The data from the RAM goes over the isolator and on to the DAC chip. This would probably be a very effective isolation scheme, but I don't think anybody has actually ever implemented this.

I have been doing some more experiments on this in the last week and have some results to share. I was working with the USB regen Alex mentioned, with the first version I was able to clearly see the packet noise on a scope. I made a new version with an improved PDN, this seemed to work, I could not see any packet noise any more, noise was still there but I could not discern any modulation due to the packet frequency. It sounded significantly better. Later I did some crude PDN analysis and discovered there was a raising in the impedance over a certain frequency range. I figured out I could fix this by adding a single capacitor in the right place. I soldered in that cap and started listening and was startled in the magnitude of the improvement in SQ. The noise looked identical with and without the capacitor, the sound significantly improved.

So I think I am on the right track, but it looks like I have already gone beyond what the simple measurements I was doing could detect. Next is to do these tests with the spectrum analyzer, it will probably be able to detect the packet noise buried in the over all noise floor.

I hope that answers some of the questions.

John S.
 
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Sonore Signature Rendu is up and running. I installed Bubble Server on my Synology 1812+ NAS (http://bubblesoftapps.com/bubbleupnpserver/) I'm using the Auralic's Lightning DS iPad app (but the Linn Kinsky app also works fine). I'm connected into the DirectStream via a good quality i2s cable - essentially an HDMI cable).





Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Mike, good to see that actual knowledge is based on first hand experience.
 
I have one coming. It's also going to be used with my lampi B7 with a hdmi configured i2s connection. So additional dacs are very possible for dac makers to add the input. I have few servers to compare to so it's going up against good stuff . But after talking with Jesus I feeling a product that saves a lot of grief in building and simple device to use with outstanding sound.
I also own a ps audio DS as well. Ted B feels it's the best so far for it. I also have a umt plus to campar it to. It will tough competition for it. But after conversation with him I feel it's going to be fine . The stuff they make is all quality and he is a respected person in audio .
I cannot wait to get mine .
More to come
Al
 
wisnon said:
You need to stop.
Click to expand...

bzr said:
Mike, good to see that actual knowledge is based on first hand experience.
Click to expand...

What am I missing? Must be something between you two.

Anyway, initial impressions are very good. I do agree that the i2s is the best connection, but the USB is no slouch.

There is a way to stream Tidal (steps below), but I don't have an Android device to test it.

I plan on testing JRiver/Jremote later today.....but that seems to defeat the purpose of banishing the computer from your listening room, but I will test it anyway.

I did a lot of comparisons to the similarly priced Lumin A1 last night and the Sonore Signature Rendu/DirectStream/i2s got a lot closer sonically, but I still felt the Lumin A1 had a bigger, fuller, more forward (as in sitting in the first row) presentation. But it's very, very close now. I would say the DirectStream has a slight (very slight) edge in overall smoothness and bass control/balance. More A/B testing is required.

I guess overall, I think about the multiple boxes, wonkiness of the setup, lack of airplay, and a few other things and truly appreciate the simplicity and overall sonic signature of the Lumin. But the Rendu truly did elevate the DirectStream to a good adversary for many similarly priced digital setups.

As a side note, I really love that Auralic Aries. With a good USB cable, it's very close to the Rendu and I love the built in Tidal.

What I would love to hear is the BDP2/BDP3 or Rendu/BDP3 via i2s. But Bryston not having it's own app is a real negative (sorry James, but you guys REALLY need a Bryston app), these Bryston players have been out forever now.

If you want to play Tidal on the Rendu follow these steps:

1. You need Bubble UPNP on an Android device.
2. You need a Tidal Account.
3. Go to Settings/Local Media Server/Tidal and enter your Tidal account info. Also, verify Audio Quality = FLAC
4. Go to Settings/Local Media Server and check off Use Proxy at the bottom.
5. Exit Settings
6. Under Renderer select the Rendu. It's something like Audio Renderer-3
7. Under Library select the Cloud. Then select Tidal.
8. Pick a title and play it.
 
Alrainbow said:
Is the nas being used a spinning drive or SS drive ??
Click to expand...

Spinning. I have 8, 3TB western digital red spec drives. I would have gone with SSD, but at the time, they didn't have the size of drives I needed and the cost was quite steep.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I have that 8 gang with 4 TB green though in raid 1.
I was told and read the green lasts longer and gives off less heat as well.
So far it's been about a year or more no fails. Also I have for music playback a dual 1 TB solid state. This is for music playback so no raid
honestly over my win ser setup I cannot tell if it's iver the nas on internal SS drives inside the server. Maybe it's my ears but it's fine either way. But I do hear changes in servers and min server setups very easily
 
Update: I tried JRiver/Jremote. Worked fine, but there was a significant difference in volume (lower). I checked the settings on JRiver on my Mac and it was full.

I think I'll stick with the Audionet app or the Auralic Aries app (Lightning DS).
 
Mike, its a pity you dont have an Android tablet, based on this post from CA:


I just set up the BubbleUPnP / Tidal / Rendu. Works great. For those wondering, I have a regular Rendu and it works just fine.

A couple of things:

You need Bubbleupnp v 2.3.1. It was sitting in my android queue waiting for update approval. Otherwise Tidal won’t show up.
You really need to set up the Tidal My Music stuff on the desktop Tidal App. I have been a Tidal customer since day one, so I already had that set up.

This is a very big deal for me. I was using Airport Express / Airplay / Toslink and now can stream to my DAC through the farsuperior I2S port.
BubbleUPnP is so far ahead of the pack. There is no DLNA android controller that can compare. And...the Auralic Aries has some competition since the Rendu is now functionally its equivalent.
 
The more I read about digital, the more I delay wanting to rush in as it feels like it's a constantly moving target with different implementations and set ups (never mind the different file formats: PCM vs DSD, and now MQA for streaming, etc...). I am waiting for the day when you get a single ripper/server/DAC where you house everything in one box and if you want to rip a CD from a physical library and store it it digitally it does it for you in bit-perfect fashion and does the storing and cataloging automatically or if you want to download/stream from an online music store you can do that too. The way things are right now, you need a freaking computer science degree to set up either a server with on-board storage or separate NAS storage linked up either to the DAC directly or via a streamer with multiple communication link formats. Too complicated and it's constantly changing! If you need a post-graduate degree to listen to your music, it's going to remain a very small niche market until it can get simplified down to a simplified one-box deal with a set-it and forget-it type functionality.
 
Mike said:
Sonore Signature Rendu is up and running. I installed Bubble Server on my Synology 1812+ NAS (BubbleUPnP Server)
Click to expand...

How do you instal this on Synology ? Do you need to do it manually ?

I have installed the Minim Server previously from the Synology 'Apps Store', but can't find the Bubble in there.
 
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