I appreciate your kind words. I’ve been very fortunate to have friends locally with great ears and great systems. I had only just met
@keithc but it didn’t take long to conclude that he has a great set of ears and he can express well what he observed. Same goes for
@jeremya who has been over many times. We discussed our findings occasionally after listening and sometimes replayed a track so we could zoom in to confirm an observation. Having done this many times over the years in front of different and evolving systems definitely helps.
Thank you so much for having us over, Ken! It's always a good time, and I always learn something.
Meeting
@keithc was great. In fact, afterwards, we were able to connect some dots, realizing that we'd exchanged DMs / SMS messages before on another topic and I don't think either of connected the dots with our usernames. Always fun when your online friends become real-life friends and instead of shattering your impressions, it just goes to reinforce and deepen them. (That's how I feel, anyway. I certainly hope I didn't dash any of Keith's warm impressions of me
. Hah!).
One thing I have always appreciated about Ken's system across its many evolutions (a handful of which I've been privy to) is that his focus on timing and precision makes it an excellent lens to experience music through. When you plug something new into his system, it's very 'what you hear is what you get' -- not that it's perfect (no system is), but that the relative strengths of whatever gear or cabling you insert are evident in some form. In other words,
it doesn't take effort to hear a difference when there's a difference to be heard.
Tweaking things...
One thing that was perhaps
the most surprising to me pertains to the
UEF Network Enhancers my Synergistic dealer included in the Enternet Switch UEF package I purchased. Thus far, I have blindly always plugged them into empty sockets in the UEF switch and generally had a very positive impression of the difference the whole package (UEF Switch + Network Enhancers + Foundation 12 cable) made in my system relative to the UpTone etherREGEN + Farad super3 + Mytek REF10 SE120 + Sigma V2 Clock cable combo I had in my system for many moons. (Ken uses an Alpha v1 clock cable).
I expected these plugs to do some serious good. And perhaps in some systems they do. Maybe even in mine (I'm now convinced I need to re-evaluate them). However, we quickly discovered that in Ken's system they actually added to the thickness of the veil when inserted into the SR switch. (We didn't try them in any other switch; we had so many variables we made the decision to quickly pare things down to focus on just one ethernet cable and to try and use a consistent power cord across the line (and, yes, this didn't favor the PhoenixNET at all because of its internal high-precision clock)).
Ken had borrowed these plugs from me before and he didn't find that they made any tangible difference in the etherREGEN. Certainly not a $300/ea difference. (Two of them cost almost as much as the original eR!). At the time we figured that maybe they make a better benefit in Ted Denney's own kit and are less helpful in others. During our comparison yesterday, we wondered if two might be too many? Maybe it needs just one. It's not lost on me that SR's own product page shows two of them being used, so they clearly imply some benefit to multiplying them...
Tweaking out...
Unfortunately for these little guys (and for my curiosity), the day wasn't about evaluating ethernet
tweaks, it was about ethernet
switches. So,
we kept the main thing the main thing and moved onto A|B|C|D testing the switches we had in the roundup without the Enhancer plugs installed. That said, I'm going to be taking a more earnest listen to them in my system shortly -- especially now that the addition of a
finite elemente pagode signature (1st gen) rack
@Mike Lavigne graciously parted with (and the subsequent re-wiring of all the things). These have taken my system to an entirely new dimension and I'm still getting acquainted with it. Might as well see if these UEF Performance Enhancers really do
enhance things in my room, or if they have more of a suppressive effect as we witnessed in Ken's.
Switching back to switches...
It was pleasing to me (hello, bias) that my ~$2300
Synergistic Enternet Switch UEF, when powered with its own
Foundation SX 12 power cord, delivered to my ears ~85% of what the ~$4200
Network Acoustics Tempus switch did when it was powered with a Synergistic Venom cable.
But that last ~15% is the difference between "this sounds good" and "this sounds real". And it's the 15% we audiophiles chase incessantly. It almost always lives on the "other end" of the price/performance curve, after the knee, climbing that asymptote to the sky where exponentially more money is required to realize each little step along the path of sonic bliss...
One thing that isn't lost on me is the relative cost of realizing these gains. The base etherREGEN was $680. The Farad super3 another $600. The Mutek is $5500. A Sigma v2 Clock cable ($2450) or an Alpha Clock cable at ~$1600.
That's an astounding $8,380 (w/ Alpha) to $9,230 (w/ Sigma) for a souped up eR at list prices.
I can hear you protesting already: the Mutec REF10 SE120 has
8 outputs, so we should consider slicing its price by the number of components driven and only ascribing that amortized price when reckoning the total cost of ownership, right? Personally, I think that would be unfair to it, as it provides the
same performance lift to every component it touches
in parallel. So, reckoning the full price into consideration for every component it touches feels more right to me.
That said, I would (subjectively) rank the performance relatively this way:
4.5 - Network Acoustics Tempus Switch ($4200) + SR Foundation SX 12 Power Cord ($600) + Denali S/6000 v1 ($3,995)
4.0 - Network Acoustics Tempus Switch ($4200) + Venom Power Cord (~$300) [isolated circuit]
3.8 - Synergistic Research Ethernet Switch UEF ($2300) + SR Foundation SX 12 Power Cord (included w/ switch) + Denali S/6000 v1 ($3,995)
3.5 - Synergistic Research Ethernet Switch UEF ($2300) + Venom Power Cord (~$300) [isolated circuit]
3.0 - UpTone etherREGEN + Farad + Mytek + Alpha v1 Clock cable (~$8,380) + Denali S/6000 v1 ($3,995)
1.0 - UpTone etherREGEN ($680) [baseline]
(I'm not including the Innuos PhoenixNET in my ranking because it wasn't given the proper settling time for its clock (24h). We listened to it around the 1.5 to 2 hour mark into our session, which hardly painted it in its best light).
Final thoughts....
What we only tried once -- and was pretty surprising -- was how good the 6m QSA-Lanedri Gamma Infinity Ethernet cable (~$6000) sounded
without any switch at all. At the end of our session we ran it directly into the Antipodes K50 and while it didn't have the ease and clarity imparted by adding Tempus into the mix, it was still pretty eye opening. We all agreed that there was clearly more noise there and perhaps the most vital function of the switches was to filter out the noise. The degree to which they filter it out, and the adeptness with which they refrain from imparting their own, seems to be the characteristic difference between each of the boxes we tested. They all have their charms.
Keith remarked that the Tempus seems very sensitive to power delivery. We all bore witness to this in that it sounded great with a ~$300 Shunyata power cord and even better with a $600 Synergistic power cord. I suspect it will scale even further and faster when a superlative cord (such as a higher grade Shunyata or QSA Lanedri cord) is applied. It sports a user-serviceable fuse box, so upgrading the stock fuse would be a logical step as well. I'd probably slam a SR Pink fuse in there and see where that takes it, should I find myself in possession of one.
I'll land this plane by saying that I, like Ken, was very happy with my 'hot rodded' etherREGEN combo but for two things. First, it only supports 100Mbit, but with the May DAC, my music files are (rediculously) bigger all the time (thanks, PGGB!). Having a switch that supports Gigabit ethernet (or better) would be a huge boon when I want to stage files for playback on my music server / streamer. Second, I have been growing tired of tip-toeing around all the "cable spaghetti". Outboard clocks need power cords and clock cables and of their own, each with added cost, and none of it trivial (at least not on my budget).
"Trimming the fat" meant I could recoup much of my investment and put that money into upgrades that don't need or want external clocks to sound their best. That's what I wound up doing, and I find I'm happier for it. It doesn't mean, however, that I'm immune to craving the next best thing.
The Tempus is clearly a stellar product and priced well relative to its performance.
The questions that remain for me are:
a) how well will it hold to the Taiko Switch (which is SFP+ only, has only 2 ports, making it more of an inline filter and less of an actual
switch)?
b) how long can I resist the temptation to trade up to one?
