Glad you liked the spin. If you’re going to take a punt including a cut and paste of a popular board, I don’t feel a huge obligation to clarify for you.
I do however feel obliged to say “and your point is?”.Peace and love,
Nigel
Best audiophile switch
- Thread starter Frankie67
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I do however feel obliged to say “and your point is?”.Peace and love,
Nigel
Republicoftexas69
Well-Known Member
Sorry Nigel I did not cut and paste anything. My point is you dodged the question/implication completely that is all.Glad you liked the spin. If you’re going to take a punt including a cut and paste of a popular board, I don’t feel a huge obligation to clarify for you.
Peace and love,
Nigel
Now back to the question..... Oh it was answered never mind.
Sincere apologies, it was @audiobomber who unpicked the exploded render from my website and included a separate photo of a similar circuit board.
Anyway, here we are, talking about the "best audiophile switch" as per title. If we're talking about how various switches sound rather than what they may or may not have inside, I think we might be back on topic!
It “sounds” to me that if you want to make an attempt to regain any credibility wrt your marketing hyperbole that touts having (only) two Ethernet connections as a method to reduce noise I think many including myself would like to know what (if anything) was modified on your switch to mitigate noise from the (remaining) open ports.
It is at the very least very misleading!
Please be reassured that there is no basis in anything said here for being concerned about my personal or professional credibility or that of my products which speak (or perhaps don't speak!) for themselves. No hyperbole has been required in the process of developing, manufacturing, marketing or distributing the product in question.
There is much more going on than the reduction in the number of ports; my website will enlighten re the lack of LEDs, application of EMI absorber, copper lining, tightly engineered 5mm milled aluminium case, grounding option, etc etc.
If you wish to personally hear one please drop me a message and we can discuss.
Best wishes,
Nigel
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It has already been confirmed that there is no (actual) reduction of Ethernet ports.
There are only 2 available ports. We could argue about the meanings of the words reduction and actual, but I have rather more pressing calls on my time, as perhaps you do.
As I say, if you're genuinely considering purchasing a switch and would like the opportunity to hear one of mine before committing then please drop me a private message and I'll do my best to clarify any aspect of interest.
Thanks,
Nigel
A switch shootout will be taking place in my listening room tomorrow. My baseline is an EtherRegen powered by a Farad Super3 and provided with a reference clock from a REF10 SE120. The contenders will include the PhoenixNET, the Network Acoustics Tempus and the Synergistic Research UEF. It should be interesting.
The switch will be feeding an Antipodes K50 G4 via a Shunyata Sigma Ethernet cable.
I wish I could include the Ethernet Gen2 in the comparisons, but that will have to wait. I will likely buy one regardless of what I hear from these other switches as I suspect it will still deliver the best bang for the buck.
Your system as per your sig is very nice and I imagine very revealing of differences which might be more subtle in lesser setups. Nice one.
In your comparisons, it'd be interesting to use a plain ethernet cable to compare switches in addition to using the Shunyata Sigma. It could shed more light on what the switches themselves are doing.
My experience with the Shunyata Omega convinced me that its filtering negatively affects the sound on the vast majority of music I tested. It simply removed top end somehow. If one's network has some type of glaring noise problem I could see its use case but otherwise I tried it in 2 systems and came to the conclusion over a year or so that it dulled the sound.
I’m using the Taiko switch/router/server system. If I were not, I’d seriously look at the Switch X ( from Xymox here on WBF).
The CMode filters have proven themselves here. I have three cables that have them (Omega USB, Sigma Clock, Sigma Ethernet) and each of these were superior to filter-less cables that they were compared to. I observed synergy from combining them. Specifically, the Sigma Ethernet impressed me much more once I moved to a Shunyata USB cable. Their clock cable surprised me by how much of a positive impact it had over a Delta clock. The specs suggest that the only difference between the two is that the Sigma adds two CMode filters. There was no dulling of the sound - quite the opposite in fact. Of course Ethernet is different, but I’m inclined to leave it be as I want to keep what I normally use as the baseline and only change the switch.
^this.
There are some great ethernet cables in audiophileland as we know, but switch-to-streamer is a unique use case: see exchange here https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/ethernet-cables-to-and-from-your-switch.36882/
Ethernet packets of data being what they are, no ethernet cable does digital magic; if we rule out say poorly designed or poorly connected RJ45 plugs, the differences amongst cables are in the effectiveness of their shielding. However, the last thing we want between a switch and a streamer is a shielded cable in which the shield is grounded at both ends; such a shield acts as a conductor of noise and undoes much of the good work of the galvanic isolation in the switch.
All stock Cat8 cables and most leading brands of audiophile ethernet cables have the shield grounded at both ends; If you happen to have a multimeter, you can test this by setting it to resistance (ohms) and placing one probe on either metal plug housing. If it flicks to anything other than zero, there is circuit continuity and the shield is grounded at both ends.
In this particular use case, an unshielded Cat6 cable is perhaps the safest bet. Some expensive ethernet cables will sound different from this Cat6 but this is not a good thing. For the best of both worlds - the protection from environmental RFI offered by a shield but no shield continuity from switch to streamer - find (or make) a shielded cable which has the shield grounded only at one end. The Melco C100 is a reasonably priced example of this.
If I was comparing switches, I'd do so with a stock Cat6 cable. Once I'd settled on a preferred switch, I'd then explore the cable thing.
We are anxiously awaiting your results, hopefully today!
While I love my EtherREGEN at the other end of the house, circumstances have conspired for me to combine several several odd items I was experimenting with into a last, cascaded switch just before my main DIY endpoint (which is remote from ER) as described below. I bring this up because the best very low budget audiophile switch just might be a used, modified Cisco from eBay.
Can't you swap the cascaded bits and bobs to the front end and put the ER just before your endpoint? The closer to the endpoint you are, the bigger the difference switches/filters make as they can work on the maximum accumulated amount of noise.
My ISP FTTH feeds a Ubiquiti Edgerouter X SFP in a home theater which is at least 100 feet of in-wall CAT5e away from the living room where I installed the new speakers. For best overall sound in three main listening environments, including a library located half-way, my experiments have led me to connect the router to all audio devices via Finisar 1318s into the ER, which then serves a theater endpoint through "B" and connects the Audiolinux server, music NAS, library endpoint and the living room system through the four "A" ports. Swapping ER with the Meraki-Finisar combination doesn't sound as good when listening to the DSP9s, maybe because of the way they handle whatever is added by the long run of CAT5. I've also tried introducing different switches, FMCs, inline filters etc. along the way to see if those might help, but concluded that less is more...
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