[patchbag]

This is setup is for my dad who would be happy listening to the old mp3 CDs I made him a long time ago on the Grado Alessandro MS-1 I bought for him a while back. I recently discovered that a couple easy changes were holding back my personal audio setup from being great and and while my dad won't be doing any A/B testing, I still want him to hear the best possible sound. I know the Marantz is overkill at the moment but I will be upgrading his source files and I plan on getting him another set of cans (HD650?) after this is setup. Also, I think he will appreciate the remote and $500 new seems like a really good price for what it is. I hope for this setup to provide countless hours of hifi enjoyment in his retirement cabin.

After doing an obsessive amount of research this past week, here's the best I have come up with and I am hoping someone can review and make sure I am not overlooking anything.

A Sony BDP-S6700 blu-ray player will be the transport for files on a USB flash drive or CD/DVDs. HDMI output to an HDMI audio de-embedder like the A-Neuvideo ANI-5.1CH4K. Digital coaxial/optical (I'm 99% sure it shouldn't matter which) from the de-embedder to a Marantz HD-DAC1. Then, obviously, the Grados or any future headphones will go into the 6.3mm headphone jack.

Also I hope to have the HDMI audio & video to pass through the de-embedder to an LG tv for movie watching and using the USB menu.

Thank you all, there is so much information here I started dreaming about it last night (that's how I know I've gone too far).

 

[megabigeye]

It looks like the BDP-S6700 has coax output, so why bother with the HDMI bit?

 

[patchbag]

The coax will only output 48kHz instead of 96 or 192. Something to do with copyright protection.

 

[megabigeye]

Is he going to be listening to something other than audio CDs or MP3s ripped from CDs? CDs are encoded at 44.1kHz. Even if he is going to be listening to SACDs or DVD-A or some other hi-res format, I wouldn't worry about the sample rates too much if he's not an audiophile and especially if he is coming from a relatively low end system.
Also, A-Neuvideo's website doesn't specify what sample rates the audio output is capable of. Are you sure it can handle anything above 44.1 or 48kHz? As far as I know, most S/PDIF devices are (arbitrarily, I guess) limited to 48kHz and since the extractor you're looking at doesn't specify I'd guess it's also limited to that, though maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, if it were up to me, I'd just skip it. Otherwise, I can't see what using the extractor would hurt.

 

[patchbag]

True, I can't find complete information on any of those cheap extractors so for now I will just use coax to the Marantz so he can at least be hooked up again. When I visit next I'll bring him a cheap laptop (maybe my old netbook) for .flac files and Tidal streaming output through USB to the Marantz.

Thank you!