It was a fun time with
@jeremya and
@keithc and a bunch of switches. I think we all agreed we could be happy with any of them, but there were some important differences between them.
It took us a bit of effort to land on the approach. The cable feeding the switches made very obvious difference. The Tempus lost quite a bit when fed with a Cable Matters CAT6a - even to the point where it lost ground relative to the ER fed with optical. Moving fiber over to the Tempus brought a big improvement but since the two other switches don’t have optical inputs, we wanted to avoid using optical. Fortunately Jeremy brought along a QSA Lanedri Ethernet cable. This was a big step up from optical - so much so I think we each said “wow” and laughed about it. So from that point on the QSA-L was used into the switch and the Sigma Ethernet was used out of it.
I would encourage everyone to take my observations with a grain of salt as we were pretty casual about the process. We limited the time spent listening to tracks and really only listened to a couple of them. The three contenders (PhoenixNET, Synergistic, Tempus) were each plugged initially into the wall (a spare dedicated circuit) using a Shunyata Venom V14 power cord. The ER was given an advantage initially as it was plugged into my Denali v1 using a Shunyata V14 Digital power cord. We later moved that cord over to our two favorites to see how much difference it would make. The ER used the reference clock from the REF10 SE 120 the entire time to keep things more equal in terms of retail price.
The PhoenixNET was eliminated early as it was easily bested by the Tempus with the Phoenix sounded veiled in comparison. Part of the reason also is that four switches was just one too many as far as being able to do fair comparisons. We started losing track of things. Reducing down to three helped. Also, there PhoenixNET might have been put at a disadvantage because its clock apparently needs at least 24 hours to settle back in.
The Tempus was definitely my favorite. I was sitting in the center seat when the guys switched over to the Tempus.We were listening to Diana Krall singing A Case of You from her live album. The piano sounded so much more real and beautiful that I started to tear up. I then gasped when she started singing as her voice became so clear an present.
The Synergistic switch came in second. It was still veiled relative to the Tempus, but not as badly so as the Phoenix.
Powering the Synergistic and Tempus switches off the Denali brought a nice improvement. We also had on hand the Synergistic Foundation power cord that came with their switch. This when plugged into the Denali improved the sound of both the Synergistic and Tempus switches but it improved the Tempus even more. The distance between them grew as a result.
The ER came in third. I thought it was closer to the Synergistic than the Synergistic was to the Tempus but the others might not agree. Hopefully they will post their impressions here as well.
I think the biggest surprise to me was how much difference the cable feeding the Tempus made. That Cable Matters copper cable harmed the rise times and it wasn’t subtle. I should point out that this cable had only three days of use as I purchased it at Amazon specifically for this comparison. That just reminded me of our final comparison. We tried the QSA-L directly into the K50 from the wall. It brought all its positives with it but it didn’t obviate the need for a switch to reduce network noise.
Well I think that about covers it. I think my one takeaway is that I will need to purchase a QSA-L Ethernet cable at some point. I believe that might have made as big of a difference as the switches themselves.
