Been reading messages on networking here and in Audiophilestyle in the last couple of months, to learn as much as I could before my next plunge into the rabbit hole.
I had first tasted how a quiet network improved the SQ tremendously when I purchased a Melco N1 music library with a filtered lan port to connect to the DAC. When S100 came to my shore last year I grabbed it and never looked back since. The sense of calmness in the music had me staying loyal to it until a couple of months ago when my Melco dealer called me on the availability of ADOT fiber kit.
Before I took the plunge I started to do my research and bought cheap kits from China, such as $5 media converter, $5 multimode transceiver, $2 fiber cable and $60 LPS to try out.
I learned along the way that for a fiber kit to sound good, power supply and transceivers are all keys. So I switched to single mode, starting with Finisar 1321 and 1324 and now 1471. Instead of cheap media converter, I bought Edgerouter as someone had strongly recommended. I also upgraded the fiber to Commscope (I was surprised that fiber cable made a huge difference - bigger soundstage in this case) and got myself Plixir Elite LPS.
Every change yielded a different sound. Whether it can be considered improvement is debatable because each configuration suits different kind of music. But the journey was very enjoyable. It’s a good distraction from the current pandemic situation.
Instead of getting rid of the multimode fiber kits from China, I used them to isolate my main router from the noisy household internet traffic and TV set top box, after turning off the wifi of my main Asus router as recommended by a poster in this thread.
So what’s next? While still having the strong momentum in improving the audio network, I finally decided to fork out many times more of what I had spent previously and took the plunge to order the M12 Gold. This will be the last leg of my journey and as we started to go back to work in office, the upgrade has to stop and listening to music will begin
Thanks for reading and below is my network diagram (M12 Gold is yet to be hooked up as I’m still waiting for the LPS). Any comments will be much appreciated.
View attachment 81163Yellow - fiber connection. Black - RJ45.