 a universal network bridge that uses a fiber optic network connection for optimal galvanic separation. Given the track record of Sonori this must be quite interesting. A Sonora micro-rendu was my first encounter with a network bridge and I was rather impressed. The optical rendu is clearly family as it is the ultra-rendu improved, which in turn is the micro-rendu improved. The latter two work with unshielded twisted pair cabling and as said the optical rendu uses fiber optic cabling. Let's see how to install all this. The Sonora devices that have their name ending on rendu are rather versatile. They can function as a network bridge or as a streamer. I expect most users will have it function as a network bridge, which essentially is nothing more than a USB output at distance. So instead of connecting your DAC to the computer, you are now connected to the network bridge. That is connected to the computer over the network. Although it seems too complex, and we don't like complex in audio, it gives designers the possibility to optimize that USB output for audio and keep it as separate as possible from the electric noise and phase noise that computers cause. These are the most likely explanations why digital devices like this can bring sound improvements. The micro-rendu has proven to do that successfully in the past. Since the optical rendu uses fiber optic cable, it offers 100% galvanic separation since fiber optic cables don't conduct electricity. The optical rendu has to be connected to your network over a fiber optic cable using an SFP media converter. If your network already has a router or switch with SFP port, you connect the optical rendu directly to it using an SFP media converter on each side. On the right you see the SFP media converter that is plugged into the optical rendu and the router. The fiber optic cable uses two strands. One strand in each direction, so it has to be used as a cross cable as you can see the yellow marked strand is on the left in one connector and on the right on the other. If your router doesn't support fiber optics, you need a converter box. This small box holds the SFP media converter and on the other side has an RJ45 port for a twisted pair cable. Unfortunately these chief boxes are not kind to digital audio signals since the phase noise can be rather high while the cheap switch mode power supply that comes with it is rather noisy too. So I will use a Sonora optical module as media converter. It does the same but only better. And use an audio grade switch mode power supply to power it. Also in the network there needs to be a computer or NAS holding the music and in most cases also the music player program. I'll get back to that later on. On the output side of the optical rendu a USB cable connects to a DAC that in turn is connected to the amplifier driving a set of speakers. Depending on the mode chosen music playback is controlled from the computer or using a tablet or smartphone. If you use an AV receiver or an amplifier with built in DAC and USB input the optical rendu is connected directly to it. The optical rendu is a small box that Sonora uses for many of their products. It measures 110 x 112 x 29 mm without the rubber feet. With the feet it is 37 mm tall. It weighs 0.26 kg without the power supply. The front holds no control and not even a power LED. The rear holds a 6 to 9 volts DC input, a USB-A port to connect to the DAC, the SFP port for the fiber transceiver, the power LED and the microSD card that holds the operating system. Sonora is somewhat secretive about the design, which by the way was done by John Swenson that also developed a fantastic upturn audio ether region I reviewed in February. What I see is that from the SFP media converter the signal goes to the microchip ethernet switch and from there to the burns ethernet transformers. Then it goes to the free scale ARM Cortex A7 processor that is mounted on a piggyback board and holds DDR3 RAM on the flip side. The signal continues to the USB hub chip and ends in the USB-A connector. Every individual function on the board has its own ultra-low noise LDO voltage regulators, like these two that seem to provide a general 5 volts DC. Then the regulator for the USB hub and the regulator for the crystal oscillators, that by the way are ultra-low phase noise crystack types. The ethernet switch module also has its own voltage regulator, as has the SFP cage. And there are even more of them, 11 in total. When we flip the board we see several ground planes in multilayer technology, all pointing in the direction of the art of proper digital audio design. Time for the soft side of the optical rendu. The optical rendu runs on the sonic orbiter operating system that supports many streaming standards and depending on the chosen standard the optical rendu will behave differently. All these emulations do true gapless playback. PCM up to 768 kHz and DSD up to DSD 512 using DSD over PCM or native DSD unless I say differently and provided that the DAC use supports these sampling frequencies and rates. SqueezeLight does squeezebox emulation. The Logitech media server needed for the squeezebox operation can run on the optical rendu or on a computer. It indexes the music and plays the music files on the optical rendu. SharePoint allows the use of Apple AirPlay streaming from Apple computers, iPads and iPhones. AirPlay is limited to sampling rates up to 48 kHz PCM and does no multi-room in this incarnation. NPD runs the Linux Music Player Demon. It plays music stored on a share on a computer or NAS. Here the optical rendu does the intelligent work and needs to be controlled from an NPD compatible app on a computer, tablet or smartphone. DNLA needs a DNLA or UPnP AV server program. That can be bubble UPnP running on the optical rendu or for instance MINIME server on a computer. It can be configured to work as open home renderer or work as renderer with Audivana, Tidal or Cobuse. Soundcast mode accepts streams from a computer running in Soundcast. This emulation is still in beta. HQ Player NAA lets the optical rendu work as a network audio adapter for a signalist HQ Player that has to run on a computer. HQ Player is a player that does impressive DSP work on audio signals, like upsampling and room correction. Room Ready makes it an endpoint in a room-based system. A separate computer running the room core is needed. It is controlled from that same computer, from a tablet or a smartphone. Spotify Connect lets you play music from Spotify using your computer or tablet that runs the Spotify app. Only 44.1 kHz lossy compressed PCM files are available on Spotify. So it might be clear that any way of playing music over the optical rendu is supported with the exception of the proprietary standards from Sonos and Blue Sound. The European Sonori representative, Metaway from Sweden, provided me with the optical rendu, a CI Audio VDC.7 MK2 linear power supply for the optical rendu, a Sonora optical module that converts twisted pair to fiber optics, two SFP media converters, an iFi iPower 5V 2.5 amp audio grade switch mode power supply to power the optical module and 5 meters of fiber optics cable. The total cost of this complete setup is just over 2000 USD. This all was installed as described earlier. I then opened the internet browser, looked up the Sonora.us site and clicked on the menu Find My Unit. Right away the optical rendu became visible and after clicking on the blue manage button the HTML control page popped up. Here I found the general info on the optical rendu. Clicking on the apps menu shows the apps that are installed. Selecting the audio app switcher lets you change from one protocol to another. Current MPD DNA is active. Going to the software manager lets you add or delete apps. Let's install SharePoint for Apple Airport by clicking on it, select install and confirm the installation. This takes some time so let's jump forward and show you it's now listed under the installed apps. Localization is easy too. Select settings and then localization. Here you set your location for time reference in your preferred language, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese or Spanish. Then you have to set the optical rendu as renderer or endpoint in the player software you use. I'll show you in Audivana. Just select the optical rendu in a network box in your set. To use it with Roon you first activate the Roon app on the optical rendu by going to the apps switcher and clicking on Roon Ready. Then go to Roon, go to the settings menu and select Audio. Find the optical rendu, give it a name and, if necessary, change some settings and then select the optical rendu as endpoint. Since all supported systems advertise their presence on the network, with other systems you will be able to select the optical rendu as output in a comparable way, provided the right app is activated on the optical rendu. By the way, this all works the same with the other rendu products that use the sonic orbiter operating system. It's always hard to tell to what extent the achieved sound quality is due to the galvanic separation by the fiber optic connection. Fact is that it can't all be due to it, since there is also phase noise and that must have been tackled quite well too as we have seen in the tech part. I have listened to the complete optical rendu setup using Roon and ORIVANA and couldn't hear a difference between the two software players using the optical rendu. In both cases there is a sound field that is characteristic for digital equipment of a higher class than the price suggests. It delivers a very deep but controlled low end with clear texture, a rather clean mid-range that produces voices that come close to real life and highs that have little problems with metal percussion like triangle and glockenspiel. The stereo image is about 85% of what I have heard in my setup one up till now. And there is a lovely black background that surprises people not familiar with this level of audio equipment. Instead of having the music coming from a mechanical device, it's suddenly there, out of nothing. In audiophile speak this is called the black background. For those that wonder how these qualities can be claimed to be the property of this device, for the signal remains digital and is not processed by DSP, I am working on a more in depth video on the subject, searching for a good mode to explain it to a broader public. Just give me some time. Let me compare the optical rendu with the two digital sources in my setup one. I have enjoyed the SOtMS-MS200 Ultra Neo with 12V DC SBoost BOTW PMP ECO MK2 power supply for a long time, but the optical rendu setup performs clearly better. Not just on a single detail but really overall. The soundstage is more open. Loads are better controlled and go deeper. Mid-range is more relaxed and highs are more rounded with sibilance is even better controlled. That doesn't make the SMS-200 Ultra Neo a bad network bridge. I could easily live for it for another few years. But given the price of the SOtM with power supply and the price of the Sonori setup as reviewed here being about equal, the Sonori setup would be my choice. The Auralic Aries G2 sound quality is not met by the optical rendu setup. I would say it's halfway between the SOtM and the Auralic, which is quite a feat if you realize that the price of the Auralic is more than double that of the complete optical rendu setup and is almost equal to the Sonori's top-of-the-line signature rendu SE optical. It was remarkable that where with the SOtM and the Auralic, the use of the Uptown Audio Ether-Region switch made a very clear difference compared to a normal domestic quality switch. The difference using the optical rendu was very small. I keep being surprised by the developments in digital audio. It's only four years ago I reviewed the Sonori micro-rendu and although I was very enthusiastic then, the optical rendu is not only about twice the price but offers perhaps four times the sound quality. And where then the micro-rendu was beaten in price and a tiny bit in sound quality by the original SOtM SMS-200, this time the optical rendu wins clearly from the about equally priced SMS-200 Ultra Neo with power supply. In four years playing audio files over the network has evolved from impressive for streaming to impressive full stop. The hardware is now fully up to speed with the software that since the Squeezebox days has evolved to easy to use players that do not deteriorate the sound quality. Which is a fine statement to end the video with. There will be a new video next week, if all goes well at Friday 5pm central European time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to this channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. Many thanks to those viewers that support the channel financially. It keeps me independent and thus trustworthy. If you like to support my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on Youtube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.