About IR codes again

Support
1

Dear dCS community, while I love my Vivaldi DAC, I am growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of options to control it - I am talking about compatibility with universal remote controls, iOT, home automation software etc which in this day and age are becoming ubiquitous.

I have a rather complex set up with the Vivaldi stack (upsampler, clock, DAC) playing both music and decoding the front channels for my home cinema. I would like to be able to automate the basic task of turning on the three units, switching them to the correct inputs etc.

I am aware Control 4 is an option but I do not need another high cost server in my rack which can only be managed by an installer at added cost.

I would like to be able to use my own hardware, specifically the Logitech Harmony Pro 2400 (the last product released by Logitech in the Harmony line with a PoE hub, multiple trigger output ports which can be programmed independently etc) or my new Unfolded Circle 3 remote.

And I find it hard to understand why Vivaldi codes have never been available in a usable format - Raw / Pronto - which is what most of these current remote controllers support. I am not aware of any remote accepting RC5 codes or software able to convert said codes in a compatible format. Moreover, while the Harmony database has had codes for Rossini and Scarlatti for a while, none exist for Vivaldi. Scarlatti does use similar codes but some basic functions are missing, inputs are not an exact match and some commands simply do not work with Vivaldi - for instance trying to trigger the Vivaldi clock with the Scarlatti IR clock codes available in the Harmony database only results in waking up the dac.

Home Assistant, a popular automation software, has no IP integration or IR codes available for Vivaldi. Harmony has no IR codes for Vivaldi - DAC, clock or upsampler. The original remote is unusable for the purpose of training a universal remote control because it seems to me that it sends multiple IR codes at the same time to control ALL components of the stack and the learning remote will inevitably pick up the first code so I was never able to teach my Harmony the power toggle command for the clock, to give an example.

The only other support file ever issued by dCS, apart from the RC5 IR codes, is an equally useless configuration file for a dinosaur - the Nevo Q50 universal remote control which was a thing about…20 years ago and nobody has heard of in at least a decade (I believe one still has to run 32bit Vista to be able to update these remotes, assuming they are not all extinct)?

I appreciate Vivaldi is fast becoming a legacy product which has not seen any meaningful software updates in nearly a decade, while its peers running on the same platform (Rossini, Bartok etc) have had various fixes and added functionality (crossfeed would be one which, it seems, will never be implemented on my Vivaldi Apex) but, keeping in mind that this is still a current product in your portfolio selling for 40K plus another 50K for clock and upsampler, could we at least get a configuration file for a remote control or for a automation platform other than Control4 which is current and usable? Rossini codes are available on all major platforms and I assume they are also compatible with the Bartok so why has only the Vivaldi stack, your most premium product until recently, been left out?

I am sorry if I sound too harsh but I have spent two weekends trying to force into IR submission your otherwise wonderful Vivaldi stack and I have failed miserably and I DO NOT want to fumble around, in the middle of watching a movie, looking for the massive (and unlit) dCS remote control or firing up the iPad with Mosaic to be able to control the stack.

For the tinkerers out there who like to play with iOT, automation servers etc, can dCS please make life easier with some up to date control information which does not rely on legacy hardware or IR codes in a largely unusable format?

Thank you

2

Is this useful to you? And if not, can you explain why?

dCS Remote Control Codes
User Manual
February 2016

https://dcsaudio.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/article_attachments/4404384740242

3

Most universal remote controls support either the raw or Pronto formats. You can’t load RC5 on a Harmony, a Philips Pronto, an Unfolded Circle remote, a Sofabaton etc.

I am not sure what platforms support RC5, apart from some DIY projects. I think there is a Arduino kit which can do RC5 and I suppose you could manually load the 100+ codes for the dac, clock and upsampler and use the Arduino kit with a blaster to teach a universal remote. But that requires building the kit and then wasting hours to train the remote on these codes, one by one.

Equally useless the original remote control because it blasts multiple codes for all different members of the stack at the same time. So you can’t use it to teach a universal remote.

20 years ago you could have probably bought a Nevo Q50 remote control which I assume was compatible with this format. Although obsolete, that is the only universal remote platform currently supported by dCS with a config file.

I would like to see a raw or pronto csv spreadsheet with the codes for each individual product in their current portofolio. That is something that can be used in 2025 and could be added to online repositories. GlobalCache for instance has codes only for Rossini and a handful of legacy products. And that’s it.

If you want exposure, young customers, if you want to appeal to a new generation, you have to think about the new ways your products can be integrated into this connected home concept where automation and IOT are a thing. I have a sizeable circle of audiophile friends and none of them uses Control 4 or has heard of Nevo Q50 but a lot of them use Harmony, Home Assistant etc.

4

Clear. Vivaldi is (getting) old, and Rossini and Bartok as well soon. Varèse has a much better Remote, and Lina.

I am calling the dCS cavalry by tagging them @Phil @AndrewS @James or alternatively you can contact dCS support at [email protected]

But the products are from another era.

5

Appreciate that. But they are still on sale for 40K a pop. And the remotes from that era are no longer available. They went through the trouble of releasing Apex, they might as well make an effort to bring them on the Home Assistant platform for instance.

A integration for HA or a IR data set that can be loaded on a universal remote control is doable and it is something that would add value to a line which hasn’t seen much love from the developer in the last decade. A hardware upgrade - Apex - and that’s it really.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my Vivaldi and, as I will never be able to afford a Varese, I am probably going to retire with this Vivaldi in my rack. For this reason I would like to be able to continue to use it in new ways and I don’t believe a spreadsheet with raw/ Pronto IR codes for the Vivaldi stack would require a lot of resources or man power from the company.

Now picture this: a integration for the Vivaldi Upsampler + DAC on the HA or Unfolded Circle platform, allowing IP control and displaying in real time, on the Unfolded Circle remote display, which is Roon compatible, media info, the progress bar etc. Unfolded Circle can do this and the Vivaldi upsampler can be IP controlled. So why not do it? Only because Vivaldi is a “almost” legacy product? For the combined retail value of 70.000£, DAC and upsampler, I think it is not unreasonable to expect some ongoing support from developers. I can well imagine their focus is on the new kids on the block - Vivaldi is at the end of the day stable - but does 70.000£ really only buys the promise of imminent obsolescence?

I am talking about something like this, by the way.

90ba4142cdf1ed4b990876aa3edaca6b8e6c6782
90ba4142cdf1ed4b990876aa3edaca6b8e6c67821360Ă—765 138 KB

6

If you like tinkering, then the following thread might be useful;

Actually, RC5 codes were directly editable onto Philips’ ProntoEdit

7

Thank you for both pieces of information.

Regarding ProntoEdit Pro, it is of course another example of an extinct platform from another age, which is likely only going to work properly on a legacy 32bit Windows computer. The pain and costs of running VMs aside, I think the installer is available on Remote Central, which has been down for a while.

I will look into your IP control solution but, while I assume that you can access the upsampler and DAC connected together with the RS232 cable this way, which is great, the master clock would still need a IR nudge to be woken / put to sleep. And that requires the raw/pronto IR codes because no current remote control platform that I know of works with RC5 codes. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Admittedly Harmony is also going the way of the dodo but it is still in use by many people and probably integrates the largest database of IR codes ever put together which makes it so valuable and hard to replace. Getting the Vivaldi stack on Harmony would allow me to teach the codes to any universal remote control which is still in development.

8

No idea, sorry. Phil or James may be able to help.

9

Actually, the RC5 format is extremely well documented, and practically every high-end Audio manufacturer uses RC5 for their IR Remotes.

I would imagine it’d be fairly trivial for any company developing a new Universal Remote to implement an RC5 interpreter - perhaps you should request Unfolded to support RC5 codes natively, especially given the Remote 3 seems to be an early work-in-progress.

10

Anup, UC is on the third generation of remotes and frankly I think they prioritise hardware over software. The few integrations available on their platform mainly come from enthusiasts who do voluntary work and, consequently, there are still plenty of issues and bugs to be ironed out. Also support for these third party integrations is not guaranteed. You might be able to reach out to a developer on Discord. Or you might not. They might abandon a project and refocus. And so on.

As for the “high end” remote control platforms can you name one which is not installer only?

Not everybody on this forum has bottomless pockets and, when the funds are limited, one has to prioritise. You could argue that a Varese owner wouldn’t blink at the cost of a Control 4 system but would a Bartok user afford that?

I could just about swallow the price of their hardware (although if you require multiple serial interface control points etc their severs become prohibitively expensive very quickly) but the hourly charge to set it up? The installer charge every time you want to replace a single component in your system?

I appreciate the know-how and the hustle free experience but, in this day and age, I would rather get a Pi for pennies on the C4 pound and set it up myself. The info is all out there and it might not be as sleek or as reliable a solution but it will work most of the time and I can divert funds to, say, upgrading my Lyngdorf to a Trinnov. Or whatever.

25 years ago yes, these installer managed services were the only options available. But then Harmony and Pi and Arduino and HA came along and now the savvy user does have plenty of low cost alternatives to choose from and they can fiddle with them with no hourly charges or prohibitive hardware upgrades every time C4 decides to release a new generation of controllers. The cost of a basic C4 setup runs in the thousands. A Pi is 75ÂŁ, if you want the top model. And HA does everything C4 does. If a company like dcs decides to support this.

11

I totally get not wanting to go down the Custom route with C4 or Crestron or any of those guys. So, no argument from me on that.

However, w.r.t Unfolded though, they’re building a “Universal” IR Remote in 2025, to not support RC5 codes seems rather strange, especially considering pretty much all of the high-end consumer Audio equipment which support IR are RC5 code based - Accuphase, Burmester, Linn, MSB, Naim, Wadax, etc etc., they all use RC5 coded IR remotes. So, if you were looking to integrated one of those brands with the Remote 3, you’d be in exactly the same position you’re in now.

I think your best bet is to find a way to convert the dCS RC5 codes to whatever format that Unfolded supports (Raw?) rather than expecting dCS to support something new natively. A quick Google search suggests there is (was?) a Windows App called “IR Code Doctor” which could convert RC5 to Raw.

The website seems defunct, but WaybackMachine has it; https://web.archive.org/web/20130923130806/http://ir-toolkit.com/IRCodeDoctor_Inst.exe

Interesting. And yet they appear to have basic problems such as WiFi connectivity stability? :thinking:

12

Hi reven6be. I see that you are a new member so I hope this may help you with what you are hoping dCS may be able to do.

What you may be looking for is a change to the software ( or coding) in order to expand IR remote control options ( as briefly as I can put it - if I understand correctly). The way to do this here is to make a request to dCS. You do this by posting in the dCS Products category and then selecting the subcategory Feature Requests.

Requests are considered by dCS. This does not guarantee they will be accepted. Resources, costs and benefits will be considered. However there may be other ideas for features competing. Bear in mind that dCS is a small company.

Software feature or firmware changes are provided free of charge to customers and these happen fairly regularly. For example support for Qobuz Connect was added only a few weeks ago. Charges are, however, made for hardware upgrades ( the cost includes the parts, labour and tax etc.).

However another way of looking at this is to wonder if the issue lies not with dCS but with third parties?

13

My UC 3 has been very stable until I installed the Oppo integration. Some of these integrations pull information from the player and update the remote control on certain parameters, for instance the progress bar of a media file playback which the remote control displays on the screen. This requires a continuous stream of info to and from the remote which updates the status of the bar every second or so.

Once I installed this particular integration my remote became unstable and started disconnecting continuously from my WiFi network. Disabling this feedback function stabilised the WiFi connection. So I think this is mostly a third party code issue rather than an inherent hardware / firmware problem. I have however had random disconnection errors with the docks which I use as IR blasters, hardwired to my PoE Cisco switch.

14

Pete, many thanks for the info above.

I have had a Rossini and clock for about 3 years and, when the time came to make a choice between paying for the Apex upgrade or part exchanging the two units for a new Vivaldi Apex, I went for Vivaldi. And this is when the pain started - Rossini IR codes were available on all platforms, including Harmony. The DAC connected through the RS232 interface to the clock would wake up the clock as well at the same time. The kind of experience you would expect from the kit plus a sound to die for.

Along came Vivaldi - no IR codes for Harmony. I assumed the upsampler would fix this but I was first made an offer I couldn’t refuse on a new master clock. Fast forward 3 years, I finally got the upsampler as well and I found out the hard way that the RS232 cable would not connect to the clock, only to the DAC and the upsampler would not automatically wake the whole stack up. No documentation suggested it would, I simply hadn’t done my homework and, knowing the Rossini was essentially a Vivaldi in two boxes and having the experience with my Rossini, I assumed it would which was a mistake on my part.

In all these years I have been reading various topics of interest on the forum but I have not posted because there are plenty of more experienced people here than myself and I would rather learn from long time users than give opinions on matters I am not really familiar with.

I will contact dCS Support as you suggested. I will request RC5 support from UC as well, as per Anup’s suggestion. Who knows, something might come out of this and it might benefit other people as well. I will keep this thread updated.

2 Likes
15

Anup, thank you for finding IR Code Doctor but it doesn’t accept the dCS codes. Invalid integer.

16

That’s a pity. Fortunately, we live in the age of AI :grin: Just use your favourite AI Chatbot and enter the following prompt;

Produce a Python program to convert Philips Pronto RC5 6 octet hex string input into Philips Pronto RAW format output

I just tried it with Claude.ai, seems to do a bang up job;

RC5Hex2RAW
RC5Hex2RAW1280Ă—771 149 KB

That test string “5000 0000 0000 0001 001C 000C” in my terminal image above (at the very bottom in the screenshot) is the RC5 code for the Vivaldi Clock Power Toggle.

If you can’t run Python scripts, just ask the AI to generate a Microsoft Excel Macro and use Excel to convert.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

3 Likes
17

This gets my vote for best use of AI on the forum so far.

11/10 :heart:

3 Likes
18

I don’t understand the whole thing. Turn the Vivaldi stack on manually and never off, only when really necessary. I have been using the Vivaldi DAC with a Harmony remote on the setting of the Rossini for years, they use the same codes. You then only need select input and volume. Recently added the Aurender N50 which is also not found by the Harmony but using their remote you can program all the functions into it. Surely you control the streamer with the ipad or if you use Roon you can do that with display on the TV with an Apple TV(also with the Harmony remote). Keep it simple and listen to the music. “Only the music.”

19

Ruud, the point is not to control the Vivaldi manually.

Imagine a home theatre where every time you want to watch something you have to start in sequence a multichannel preamplifier, Blu-ray player, video processor, projector, lower a screen, start the dCS stack, your amplifiers, switch everything above to the correct inputs.

Let’s say on top of all this you want to adjust lights, blinds, air con because your projector runs quite hot which is not ideal in summer and so on.

Do you still want to manually control some of these components? Or would you rather just let a home automation server do all of the above for you by simply selecting an activity (Blu-ray playback for instance) on a screen?

20

Awesome Anup, thank you very much, I will look into it this weekend.