Seeking advice where to start for new C-bus project

Ah, now I understand what you are referring to.

Thanks for un-confusing me.

Cheers

Rohan

 

I'm with Rohan. Having a comms and electronics background I got a little confused when reading the threads. Most audio signals between devices are unbalanced, hence the need for shielded cables and relativley short runs. Balanced audio signals are line level signals usually ballanced 600-600 ohms requiring cable intended for balanced pair operation with matched impedance for the driving and receiving circuits. Cat5/6 signals are electrically very different however also happen to be balanced, hence the throughput and distances you can get. Other than Cat5/6 cables what type of balanced cable and associated equipment woud you get in a house ???
PS. typically unbalanced connections use RCA and balanced often use Canon/XLR as mentioned by Darpa.

 

I do know of people who are using audio-balanced cable with XLR and all of those variants. The simple reason being that Slim-Devices has a flagship LAN based MP3 player with balanced outputs.

There is a fusion between LAN / SERVER audio MP3 technology and balanced audio connections - but only at the top end.

This is one such audio device here. http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_transporter.html

It is the first of many. As slim-devices were the first on the market the audiophiles jumped onto the bandwagon and demanded something with a little more grunt. What they got was simply amazing.

The idea of an audio matrix is really becoming old fast. With a LAN based technology you can designate the functions with the type of device you place on the end of a LAN cable. One node may be songs only but another node can be songs / movies and the third node can be internet .... all running as one network.

A movie/photo/audio node: http://www.airlinktek.com/english/prod_mg350.htm

MP4 devices are anything but simple. They contain a lot of smarts and can natively attach to a server without a HDD loaded. So they act as dumb terminals to a server which must have a specific share folder called a specific name. This is also inclusive with "AV PnP" now seen in routers.

More and more servers like THECUS are inclusive of iTunes serving (including AppleTV terminals).

File server: http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=1&pid=1


When you combine that with a router you can terminate server sessions according to hours of the day like an automatic nanny. You can also expand functions to VPN to allow media exchange from a remote secure node.