I’m setting up a home theater in a small room (3x3m = 10x10ft). For audio I prefer going with a very good pair of stereo speakers (which I’ll use for both music and movies) than a multi-speaker system (5.1, 7.1,…).
A friend who I trust told me about the 8351A monitors. I haven’t bought them (yet), but I read quite a lot about them and I must say I’m salivating and it’s now difficult to look away. Really impressive reviews, awesome look and they also seem to perform well in small rooms like mine.
Ideally, because I won’t have a multi-speaker system, I’d like to avoid adding a big AV Receiver to the setup. I rather plan to go with a good HDMI matrix (6x2, 4K, HDCP 2.2) that does optical audio de-embedding, decodes Dolby TrueHD, DD+, DTS-HD and can output the 2-channel LPCM (or DD/DTS if needed) over Toslink.
Normally I would need a DAC between the HDMI matrix and the 8351A monitors (Toslink to analog XLRs), but I’ve just learned about AES/EBU (I’m a total newbie here because I’ve never owned any speaker or audio equipment with AES3), so here are a couple of questions:
Is there a way I can hook up the two 8351s to my setup without going through an external DAC? And are there any drawbacks of doing that?
By reading a bit about AES/EBU, it looks like it is possible to convert S/PDIF Toslink to AES/EBU (either directly with something like this
http://hosatech.com/product/odl-312/ or by converting to S/PDIF coax first and then using an impedance converter like the ones by Neutrik), but can I trust those interfaces/adapters? And most importantly, can the AES/EBU input on one 8351 get the digital stereo signal (2-channel LPCM) and then “pass” it to the other monitor and handle the L/R separation, or do I need to somewhat separate the signal before going into the 8351 AES/EBU input (no idea how I would do that btw)?
Many thanks in advance for your help, and sorry if I ended up asking 4 questions instead of a straight one.
