Any news on RDG-1520 Digital Tuner?

[Swimmerbird123]

Wasn't the RDG-1520 Digital Gateway supposed to be out by now? Any news on it, (or the RCX-1500)?

Logitech recently released its Squeezebox Touch, which was also about six months overdue. It has good sound quality and a great interface (I have one). I'm curious as to how the Rotel will compare - it should be better, but I'm especially curious about how its user interface will be. They could do worse than find some way to OEM the Squeezebox interface. But maybe there are still better ways out there.

Swimmer

[Swimmerbird123]

Anyone know what the delay is?

My guess is that it is the user interface. The breakdown of the CD format is praised as a 'free your music" phenomenon, but it is a big headache for anyone making serious music products. Where the CD had just one format on a fixed medium that had to be decoded, the equivalent now is many formats of differing quality on many formats of disk drives with multiple ways of moving the bits from the drive to the DAC that converts it to analog for the speakers. Every manufacturer has to choose which data formats they want to support, which hard drive specifications, and which data transfer mechanisms. Standards simply aren't here yet.

Rotel has expertise in the DAC end of things, but almost none [not visible in products anyway] in the jungle of formats now around. Even the idea of using Rotel equipment to play MP3s is a huge overkill - MP3 is an audible step down from the .wav format used on CDs, yet MP3 seems to be taking over. If you don't use it, you have to choose which lossless formats to support, and will invariably frustrate users of the formats not chosen [like me whose entire library is in the open source .FLAC format].

The internet tuner is a problem too. Where there used to be a well-defined physical frequency to tune into, now you have an arbitrary URL address that can be and often is changed by the station (to protect their access to listeners for their advertisers), plus the radio stream can also be in various formats. It is unrealistic to expect users to type in these long URL addresses - at best you can cut and paste them if you are lucky enough to find them.

So either you say 'Not my problem - let someone else's software bridge the gap to the user' or you provide some more intuitive way. Logitech went the second way and pays people to select and maintain recommended lists of stations by country, locality, genre, etc. and lets the user dial through these while the URLS remain hidden. How is Rotel going to do this? I don't mean to shill for Logitech, but I have struggled along with them for two years now watching them try to solve these serious interface problems [and a glance at their forums show they still have lots of them] and only mention them as a way to illustrate the problems.

I love my Rotel equipment [for more than 15 years now] and am excited to see them jumping into the digital arena. I am intensely eager to see them live up to their reputation for quality and intensely curious to see how they do it.

Impatiently,
Swimmer

[hifiguymi]

You're correct that it's the user interface. Rotel is really working hard at getting it right. They know if the user interface is not easy to use the piece will fall flat. From what I understand that is the only thing left to refine, the rest of the unit is done.

Eric

[Swimmerbird123]

I see that the RDG-1520 has finally been added to the Rotel website:

http://www.rotel.com/NA/

Does that mean it is now shipping? If so, that is exciting news after such a long silence. Has anyone been able to play with it and have any reactions?

Swimmer

[Herky]

I'm awaiting this unit too. It will have an optical in in the back, hopefully it's like the RCD-1520 Wolfson's DAC and be nice sounding.

[Swimmerbird123]

I had the pleasure of trying out an RDG-1520 at home for a weekend recently, courtesy of my local Rotel dealer. I had mixed rections to it. On the one hand, it all worked fine and it has good sound. But it is an odd animal because it tries to do so many things, and it runs up against the dilemma of using high-quality audio equipment to play .mp3 music files, whose compression has already thrown out a noticeable amount of the audio resolution of the music.

The setup was straightforward and it connected with my router on the first try. The unit's wifi capability is provided by a large dongle with a USB plug that plugs into the back of the unit (and sticks out at least two inches from its fragile-seeming USB socket). It was easy to use the search function to find a couple of my favorite international internet radio stations and the sound was comparable to my Squeezebox Touch which was sitting beside it also connected to the router at the same time. The Rotel occasionally lost the connection and had to rebuffer while the Squeezebox played straight through.

The FM radio seems to have the same sound quality as my RT-1080, but it has no AM tuner and the FM station search functions are extremely basic compared to the options on the RT-1080.

I plugged my iPhone into the front of the unit and it worked fine - found the music files and let me search them in the usual itunes way. It also found the Windows Media Player on my computer once I set it up and could play the .mp3 files from there as well. And i could plug a USB thumb-drive into the front and the RDG-1520 would find the music files on it and let me search them. The screen is very small though, four lines of small black text on gray background, and it was hard to read if you weren't sitting close right in front of the unit.

One big problem for me is that my entire music library is in the .flac lossless format, and there is no way to feed those files directly into the RDG-1520 using any of the methods mentioned above. What does work, though, is to feed the digital output directly from the Squeezebox into the digital input on the back of the RDG-1520, and then feed the unit's output into my RC-1082 preamp. This bypasses the Squeezebox DAC and uses the RDG-1520's DAC instead. I did some A-B comparsions with this setup compared to feeding the Squeezbox DAC output directly into the preamp. I liked the RDG-1520's sound - it was fuller and richer somehow, although with some selections it was hard to tell much difference. But when I compared the Squeezebox playing .flac to the RDG-1520 playing the same music in .mp3 format, I liked the Squeezebox better.

If you play mostly .mp3 music (or music in one of the lossless formats native to the RDG-1520), i could see the RDG-1520 being a useful jack-of-all-trades tool. But for me personally, the only real use for it would be as a straight DAC. The sound is good enough that I would consider that, although I have not tried out any other DACs to compare with it. But it is a very large box (full-sized component and well-built) most of whose functionality I would not use - I never play .mp3 files at home, and many radio streams are not high quality to begin with, and I like the larger screen readout on the Squeezebox when searching for stations etc. So if I just want a DAC I'd probably choose a smaller unit.

I'd be interested in hearing other's impressions if they have tried the unit.

Swimmer

[Herky]

Thanks for the review, I'm on the fence for this one. Right now I have an Apogee Duet serving as a DAC and was wondering if the DAC in the Rotel will sound more "musical". Since I have a mac mini connected already, the streaming stuff is kinda redundant, but I would like FM radio...hmm....at $1K I'll have to think about it now.

[Herky]

I forgot to ask, does the radio mode have RDS Text info?

[cZwUV620]

If you play mostly .mp3 music (or music in one of the lossless formats native to the RDG-1520), i could see the RDG-1520 being a useful jack-of-all-trades tool. But for me personally, the only real use for it would be as a straight DAC. The sound is good enough that I would consider that, although I have not tried out any other DACs to compare with it. But it is a very large box (full-sized component and well-built) most of whose functionality I would not use - I never play .mp3 files at home, and many radio streams are not high quality to begin with, and I like the larger screen readout on the Squeezebox when searching for stations etc. So if I just want a DAC I'd probably choose a smaller unit.Swimmer

I'm also contemplating using this unit as a standalone DAC. Does anyone know how well it handles jitter? Also, is it safe to assume that this unit is sonically similar to the 1520 CD player?