Thread: Network switch, FMC, cable upgrades worthwhile when router can't be co-located?

Originally Posted by Mike

Interesting. Would you then have your modem close/in your listening room?

One other question: have you tried an Aurender ACS10? I find the dedicated network filter in the ACS10 to be excellent. Then you plug your N10 into the dedicated filter on the ACS10 via Ethernet.

I removed my GigaFoil once I got the ACS10. AND, it certainly sounds better than my NAS.

Yes, but still out of the music room, now instead of the modem being 45’ away, it’s now about 8/9’, the coaxial RG6 spans the distance, the Belkin while a good gap doesn’t compare against all AQ Diamonds, everything off the bat sounds better. One thing I am hearing is a lot more timbre around voices and instruments, will come back to qualify.

I’m gonna let things settle a bit while I start the next painting project as there are several new things that occurred this morning, a 1.5 hour project that took 5 hours


I will look at the AC10 and what it does.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Originally Posted by UltraFast69

My efforts with switches, power supplies and grounding resulted in a sound second to none, the die hard analog guys were one over, it was clearly evident to them.

I’m am with Mike relative to less is more but in my case it was opposite.

Before my weekend painting efforts I am about to move all my digital over to a new circuit on a new sub panel we put in (thanks KingRex, more on that later) and see if better circuit cabling, a shortened run, and removing the AQ Vox SE switch that is chassis grounded will improve sound quality - I think it will or I wouldn’t try doing it.

Note: Everything is well cabled with Linear Power Supplies, ethernet cables, and isolation and created a digital front end thread on here somewhere.

Currently:

Modem > AQ Diamond > AQVox SE > Belkin 45’ > etherREGEN > AQ Diamond > Gigafoil > AQ Diamond > Aurender

Proposed:

Running coaxial in place of Belkin to move closer to Audio Room.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Ed, Have you considered running Fiber the 45' between your switches instead of coax? I've replaced my 100' of ethernet with Fiber between two Startech fmc's. I may try the Sonore Optical Module fmc's instead of the Startech also.

Originally Posted by Mike

That leaves out streaming though. That being said, streaming (Tidal, etc.) is like the buffet at The Golden Corral. Plenty to eat, but I wouldn’t call it good. Your ripped CD’s will sound better and a CD playing through the same DAC, better yet again. I would say:

CD = 10/10
Ripped CD = 8-9/10
Streaming = 7/10

I have to quibble and nitpick here. Sorry.

The only way a CD player will sound better than the Lumin X1 is if the CD player has a better DAC. While I am sure some do, I suspect the Lumin DAC beats most CD players.

Bud

I suspect he's talking about using the CD player as a transport only with the possible exception of the TOTL Luxman, Gryphon or T+A units.

Originally Posted by Jack

Bud

I suspect he's talking about using the CD player as a transport only with the possible exception of the TOTL Luxman, Gryphon or T+A units.

If so then I don’t think that is much of a comparison. Why buy a Lumin X1 to just output digital files to a DAC. A cheap CD player will do the same thing.

I was speaking of a CD player with digital inputs or something like a great DAC + Transport. That’s the only way to compare apples to apples.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by nicoff

In my experience, I would reverse that.

1. Streaming/ripped
2. CD players

A dedicated DAC does a much better job than a CD player with a built-in DAC.

IME, a streamed/ripped file actually sounds better than a CD because I can do upsampling/converting and apply filtering that I cannot do when using a CD Player or a transport.

Different, not better IMO. Upsampled/filters is not native. It can sound different. But when you compare 16/44 ripped CD to the CD, using the same DAC, you can hear the superiority of the CD, but only slight. The big improvement comes with the CD Vs Streaming.

No doubt the ripped CD’s/SACD’s provide amazing convenience. That’s what I do with all mine!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by Willco

Ed, Have you considered running Fiber the 45' between your switches instead of coax? I've replaced my 100' of ethernet with Fiber between two Startech fmc's. I may try the Sonore Optical Module fmc's instead of the Startech also.

I was thinking about that, but we recently did a complete overhaul to the power foundation - it is off the charts good, no joke (will post this).

So with that I pulled the dedicated circuit from the original sub panel and added it to the new panel and relocated the digital foundation (mode, etherREGEN, LPS and ADD POWR pieces 45’ closer but still in the other room.

Instantly you could hear things more open, dynamic and amazing sense of presence. After 6 hours I shut things down, paused 4/5 hours and just started up the system.

I have given up saying things can’t get better, this is off the charts after 30 minutes.

The AQVox SE has been pulled from 2 channel duty, and repurposed into home. I simply reversed the no longer needed Ghent 45’ Belkin cable coming out etherREGEN to the AQVox SE.

All these changes by better reconfigurement I ended up with another Audioquest Vodka Ethernet, Stillpoints Ultra SS, and a Ghent DC Oyaide Cable proving less is more - but in all fairness I had a head start with the addition of the panel.

Originally Posted by Mike

That leaves out streaming though. That being said, streaming (Tidal, etc.) is like the buffet at The Golden Corral. Plenty to eat, but I wouldn’t call it good. Your ripped CD’s will sound better and a CD playing through the same DAC, better yet again. I would say:

CD = 10/10
Ripped CD = 8-9/10
Streaming = 7/10

There are quite a few people using the widely acknowledged sota Taiko Extreme server who report that files from it's Pcie drives to be of higher sq than sota cd transports. But this is not first hand experience on my part as I don't own or plan to own a cd player.

Qobuz/Tidal streaming on the Extreme may be a different story, but I can say streaming sounds very good to me-- depending on the source. And here is what, in my opinion, makes the disc/streaming debate somewhat irrelevant to me: the recording, how it was mastered and everything else it's gone through before it's turned into a cd or streamed into your system far outweighs the delivery system be it lp, cd, hard drive or stream. A poorly sourced cd is going to sound like crap and a well sourced stream is going to sound very, very good. I put my energy in "collecting" on Roon well sourced streams and given the vast amount of music available to me, it is not difficult to put together a large collection of excellent streamed music.

The next step for me is to explore the comparison between the streamed files and the same files downloaded or ripped to the Extreme's hard drive.

Given the quality of the server I already have and the likely future tech improvements that will come to that server, spending a lot of money on a high end cd player just doesn't make sense to me.

Originally Posted by Willco

There are quite a few people using the widely acknowledged sota Taiko Extreme server who report that files from it's Pcie drives to be of higher sq than sota cd transports. But this is not first hand experience on my part as I don't own or plan to own a cd player.

Qobuz/Tidal streaming on the Extreme may be a different story, but I can say streaming sounds very good to me-- depending on the source. And here is what, in my opinion, makes the disc/streaming debate somewhat irrelevant to me: the recording, how it was mastered and everything else it's gone through before it's turned into a cd or streamed into your system far outweighs the delivery system be it lp, cd, hard drive or stream. A poorly sourced cd is going to sound like crap and a well sourced stream is going to sound very, very good. I put my energy in "collecting" on Roon well sourced streams and given the vast amount of music available to me, it is not difficult to put together a large collection of excellent streamed music.

The next step for me is to explore the comparison between the streamed files and the same files downloaded or ripped to the Extreme's hard drive.

Given the quality of the server I already have and the likely future tech improvements that will come to that server, spending a lot of money on a high end cd player just doesn't make sense to me.

Not to put too fine a point on things, but we can assume that the streaming services either got their files from ripping the CD’s (maybe early on?) or the digital file from the record company. This is the same digital file used to make the CD, so it’s essentially the same. The difference is that the CD electronic stream isn’t traveling thousands of miles beneath the ocean.

Don’t get my wrong, I like the streaming services and I rip all my music. But if someone is looking for the absolute digital best from an album, my exhaustive findings has been that the CD beats the rip (barely), but definitely beats the stream.

THAT BEING SAID, we are seeing so much high res now being streamed and this puts the CD and a huge disadvantage. In that case, it comes down to high res download Vs stream.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by UltraFast69

I was thinking about that, but we recently did a complete overhaul to the power foundation - it is off the charts good, no joke (will post this).

So with that I pulled the dedicated circuit from the original sub panel and added it to the new panel and relocated the digital foundation (mode, etherREGEN, LPS and ADD POWR pieces 45’ closer but still in the other room.

Instantly you could hear things more open, dynamic and amazing sense of presence. After 6 hours I shut things down, paused 4/5 hours and just started up the system.

I have given up saying things can’t get better, this is off the charts after 30 minutes.

The AQVox SE has been pulled from 2 channel duty, and repurposed into home. I simply reversed the no longer needed Ghent 45’ Belkin cable coming out etherREGEN to the AQVox SE.

All these changes by better reconfigurement I ended up with another Audioquest Vodka Ethernet, Stillpoints Ultra SS, and a Ghent DC Oyaide Cable proving less is more - but in all fairness I had a head start with the addition of the panel.

Great to hear and that was my point: less is more. I brought this all up because so many of my, shall we say, experienced in life but less experienced in technology clients get themselves all turned up in knots with what they read online (think: computer audio site, which by the way, do those guys ever listen to music or do they just play with their dingleberries? LOL). But I digress...Many end up calling me thinking they need six boxes or “digital dingleberries” between their router and their digital transport or DAC. I literally have to talk them off the ledge. LOL.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Qobuz uses AWS content servers in the US.

Originally Posted by W9TR

Love or hate ASR as you like, this following quote from the Uptone review is technically correct.

“Perhaps the biggest issue with claims of audio improvement is that your DAC is so far removed from Ethernet that little you can do upstream can impact it. Ethernet has a clock but that is used for communication on the wire. Once a packet (chunk) of data arrives, it is put in memory in the operating system. At that point, it no longer has any timing information much less a clock. It is the responsibility of the application to associate timing with it. And such software notion either works, or doesn't. If it doesn't your music will stop or drop out. None of that timing has any relationship whatsoever with the clock that the DAC eventually uses to play data sent to it. It is the audio application together with the DAC (and or Operating System) which determine timing.”

What really matters is keeping any noise away from your ultra-quiet analog electronics. Lots of ways to do that in renderers, streamers or add-ons. If you use Isochronous Asynchronous USB the only clock that matters is the one in your DAC. If you are using S/PDIF or AES/EBU then the source clock jitter does matter, although many DAC designers have optimized the input circuitry to make this a second level issue. My streamer is battery operated but does use WiFi, so i’ve focused on reducing transmit power to a bare minimum and making the 5 GHz path very high impedance with ferrite chokes.

This would not apply, of course, to DACs with streaming built in, like my Cary DMS-600 or a Lumin T2 or MSB DAC with a renderer module installed.

Digital gives people the ability to take a network that should be fairly simple and turn it into a complex kludge of digital dingleberries. It’s beginning to take on the feeling of a competition to see who has the most complex network measured by how many unnecessary digital dingleberries you have in your network.

Maybe we could set some rules for judging the contestants in the Rube Goldberg version of a network used for digital audio:

1. How many conversions do you perform from Ethernet to your DAC? Ethernet to fiber, fiber to coax, etc.

2. How many routers and switches do you have?

3. How many LPS do you have in your network?

Originally Posted by drunkenspyder

Well, “should be” is an interesting standard. How simple should a network be in a large home, with a 5-person family, with multiple listening and watching locations? With multiple computers and printers? I mean, you can make fun of folks with unnecessarily complicated rigs all you want, but until you know what their use case is, it seems a tad presumptuous. Of course one could make a simple audio-only network with one router and just enough ports for a server/streamer and a DAC. Or even forget the network and attach a drive. Yuck.

In my case, except for the fiber between switches, and the GigaFoil at the DAC, I have added no network complexities because of audio. All my network complexities are otherwise a function of the demands of our home. The fine-tuning of the audio portion of the network is all about “protecting it” from all the other stuff in our home.

I’m only addressing the portion of the network used for audio. For me, that starts with the Ethernet jack on my wall next to my digital rack. I don’t care what goes on with the network downstairs.

It's not clear what he's using as a server for his ripped cd's or how his streaming is set up? A comparison only tells us something if you know what's compared.

Fwiw, I've also read comparisons of the Taiko Extreme server PCIE files out performing the highest end Kalista transport.