This issue has been raised before but I’d like to bring it to the attention of dCS once more. It is the fact that the Vivaldi upsampler as a streamer is not able tot go to a next track via its own infrared remote.
I have owned a 3 box Vivaldi stack for, what, six or eight years now and every single time the soundquality of it amazes me. Without a single failure. In those eight or so years it also did not fail to amaze me that the pretty remote I got with it is just as pretty useless. I mean, what streamer can’t go to the next track with its own remote? Even the cheapest in the market can. Very annoying for such a top notch system. Yes you can do that with the app, and I do. But it is often much more convenient to just have some real buttons to push. And the thing that makes me angry (sorry) is that those buttons did come with the system!!
I feel that it would be decent of dCS to (finally) implement that possibility. And not as some very expensive upgrade because a streamer in this league should have been able to do such a thing from the moment I first bought it.
My fear on the other hand is that Vivaldi will be replaced by a successor trickled down from Varesse one of these days and that Vivaldi will be abandoned all together.
Yeah, I think it’s quite conceivable that the playback Transport controls on the dCS Remote could “automatically” switch to controlling network streaming playback when the DAC input is set for the Upsampler instead of the Transport.
So, when the DAC is on AES 3+4, the Remote’s Transport controls manages streaming playback, and when the DAC is on AES 1+2, the Remote’s Transport controls manages the dCS Transport.
Streaming is remote controlled by Mosaic sand not IR. The latter basically controls DAC, transport and upsampler switching in/out. That is what existed when Vivaldi was designed. There was no streaming. When this was added to upsampler it required a control point with a display, hence Mosaic. I expect that the reason that you haven’t realised that the IR controls are for the transport is because you do not have one.
I do not understand why you want the duplication of IR control for streaming when you have to use Mosaic to stream anyway. BTW, Mosaic also remote controls all of the other functions as well.
Of course there was Pete, from Day 1 the Vivaldi had UPnP Streaming (support for online streaming sources were not quite there yet of course).
As for whether it’s controlled by Mosaic or otherwise, the dCS Vivaldi command and control structure can be made to do whatever dCS choses it to do (albeit the Mosaic command & controls flow into the streaming board while the rest do not). The only real question is the development costs & returns associated with any feature request.
When one has a hard remote for the system, it’s not unreasonable that it should serve the platform fully.
I agree, and I don’t even own a plank (the first owner of my stack kept it along with the transport which, tbh, makes perfect sense). But I think it is quite reasonable to expect Play/Pause/Stop/Forward/Back to work for streamed sources. As Anup says, just a question of priorities.
Reality suggests hat dCS will not develop IR controls further. Note that for the newest platform, Varese,it as been reported that there may be a Bluetooth device instead.
Anyway I would not expect any new developments of this nature at this late stage of Vivaldi’s production cycle. Still, admittedly, dCS can spring surprises like Apex.
I bought the Vivaldi after attending a demonstration at my dealer here in the Netherlands conducted by someone of the dCS team. One of the arguments for Vivaldi to be so special specifically was that everything - hardware and software - was designed ‘in house’ and that therefore dCS had complete controle, making the system ‘future proof’. So I dear to spent a fortune on the stack trusting I would be safe for some years to come. Now I don’t expect future proof to last until the end of times off course, but since things have changed in between the few years of the development of Vivaldi and now - being streaming becoming more important - I would think that the promise of being future proof sort of applies. Even more, Vivaldi is still on sale.
A dCS device is not like something bought in a local hardware store at a bargain to be out of date in two years.
I guess the mundane technical reason would be that there is no way for the DAC to communicate with the Upsampler (as opposed to vice versa) unless this could somehow be implemented via the RS-232 connection.
Is receiving IR not a matter of interpreting a bunch of hexadecimal codes? I remember having a list of such codes for programming manually into my old Phillips pronto. Or doesn’t the upsampler have an ir-receiver of it self and receives codes from communications of the other devices (dac) in the stack?
Mosaic is communicating with the StreamUnlimited Audio Module for networking inside the Vivaldi. Apparently there is a technical reason why IR commands to the Upsampler are not communicating with this network board, and thus Mosaic.
Erno, the difference is that Mosaic sends commands via REST calls to the Streaming board, which then reinterprets them as necessary via the RS232 connections to the rest of the system.
Whereas the IR commands are received and interpreted by the DAC, and likewise sent across the RS232 connections to the rest of the system.
In fact it does. I believe, the RS232 command connection between the Upsampler, DAC, and Transport are fully bi-directional to all of them.
As a example, both the old and new dCS IR remotes have buttons to directly control the Upsampler’s input port and output rate (labeled “UPS Input” and “UPS Output”).
It’s possible there is some such limitation, but since the opposite is possible, it’s likely not a hard limit.
Eh? Of course there is. I use it regularly in combination with The Plank. Did you mean Upsampler? I think that there is one there too. IR codes for it are listed in the dCS code manual. However there are no track selection/control IR codes. The ones that exist are basically input selection, filter selection and sample rates in/out.
We do know though that the full set of controls does flow from the Upsampler out through the RS232 connections, including for the Transport, as Mosaic can be used to control everything.
Mosaic is a bit of a diversion though. This thread is about using the dCS Universal Remote and the streamer board for track selection.
The IR remote will control the current Transports but AFAIK Mosaic will only control Vivaldi Transport, not Rossini ( either of them). At least I do not remember any release notes adding the latter and my Rossini Transport is not recognised.
Not quite … Mosaic will control a Rossini Transport when used with a Rossini DAC and a Vivaldi Transport when used with a Vivaldi Upsampler and DAC but if you mix Rossini Transport and Vivaldi Upsampler / DAC or Vivaldi Transport and Rossini DAC then Mosaic can’t control the transport as the two transports use different RS232 commands and Mosaic works out which commands to use for the transport by which device it is connected to - either a Vivaldi Upsampler or a Rossini DAC.
Remember that the remote has no way of knowing what device is currently playing, it simply sends an IR command depending on what button is being pressed.
The IR remote sends the “Transport - Next Track” or “Transport - Previous Track” IR command on pressing the next and previous track buttons on the remote so it would be necessary for the Upsampler to act on the transport IR commands as well as the Transport so you’d end up with the same button controlling both devices.
