I’m sure it can, but it’s how it intermodulates across all frequencies which is how we hear its impact.
I’m not sure I ever see discussions on hifi forums where one turntable enthusiast asks another to provide data to prove their cartridge sounds better. Yet hear we are.
I don’t get you wrong. And dCS is clearly premier league in this space.
This risk being patronising, even to yourself! It depends what you mean by bad thing. If a theory isn’t put to a practical test, it is unproven and we will each need to decide how much weight we place on such.
Good. There is no double blind in audio, not in the real world of audio. A lot of people demand it but I can’t remember the last time I saw an advocate of same say they’d actually experienced/participated in it, not with anything like the rigour they demand of others anyway. The closest I’ve seen it get is “amusing” gotcha stories about “and then we opened our eyes and he hadn’t changed the cables after all”; and that’s not close at all. This is just trotted out to support someone’s personal perspectives/prejudices.
And that’s a key consideration; does what was proven with a Vivaldi Upsampler - i.e. no impact from any incoming Ethernet noise right through to its AES/EBU output - also apply equally to the Rossini/Bartok/Lina?
The fact that the R/B/L line regularly receives firmware updates over Ethernet that reprograms sensitive output stage FPGAs which are in the music handling circuit path, without any detrimental effects whatsoever from Ethernet noise suggests the port Magnetics is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, and doing it well.
Quite the contrary, just taking it a bit easier on myself than I used to
Just to keep the argument’s side of things clean, the burden of proof is actually not with me. Placebo has been well proven to work in scientific studies (see the Basle example I linked above), even if the subject knows he is given a placebo. The burden of proof is with the parties who claim that the addition of an external streamer lowers noise, distortion (what else is there?) on the analogue outputs of a dCS device (or any other well constructed DAC), If that is proven, I am happy to change my view, and I am sure dCS will adjust their design so that this does not happen any more.
In the meantime, I enjoy listening to my Melco N1A2X H60 through my Rossini APEX. So no problems accepting that an external streamer sounds good.
I guess the only think we need to consider is what constitutes “proof”. For most people I know, graphs and numbers and stuff are all very well but it is their ears which have the final decision. To suggest that we should not rely on our infallible ears, suggestible minds etc and only decide based on the data is the territory of some online communities elsewhere on the interweb!
Easy, Nigel, I am not a troll and I am far from suggesting this.
I have fought several battles on audiosciencereview. A notable one re. a blind test we did over three weekends with four DACs. This led me to purchase my Rossini, as the differences were clearly audible. The folks over there did not like our findings at all, as to them all DACs sound the same and all DACS above 500 monetary units are a ripoff.
I’m just a bit sceptical when a theory about propagation of external HF within a well shielded device is presented without proof. I majored in EE almost 50 years ago on HF measurements in High Voltage systems, so I know HF is a very thorny subject.
The fact that no one (including the streamer manufacturers) has attempted the proof (which is way easier to conduct than a blind test) suggests to me that maybe other mechanisms may be at play than objective differences. There is room for that in science.
I am all for enjoying what sounds best to our ears, regardless of the reason why it does. Searching for objective truths to improve products is a completely different question. This thread shows the pitfalls of mixing the two.
That wasn’t aimed at you! I never had you down as a troll and my reply was not meant to suggest anything like this; apologies if it could have been interpreted as such.
After a few months of research, I asked my dealer for advice on an audiophile Roon core. His other customers had reached the conclusion that the Innuous Stream 3 was the ”sweet spot” for Roon servers. After a weekend loan I fell in love and ordered it. Yes, it sounds great, but I believe dCS could take it farther. First, working with Roon to get their background services running on a separate, isolated, CPU. Next, DSP. Not necessarily to take the place of room treatment, but to go the last mile with inter-channel phase correction; the metric being Inter-Aural Correlation Coefficient. One option might be to integrate Bacchus, as Dutch and Dutch has already done. I’ll bet dCS has some better ideas.
All, I started this thread. My question was should DCS enter the market for network servers, like the Innuos PhoenixNet, or Aurrender N20, or Silent Angel? An there are other. My point was a huge percentage of DCS users invest in this technology and so there is a market. I was NEVER making a case for whether these devices were effective. However, that seems to be were the conversation turned.
Here is my experience with effectiveness. I tries four of these systems with my Rossini dac and a fairly resolving system. The PhoenixNet and the Silent Angel F2-N8C-GC combo were audible an improvement in noise. I could hear it. everyone could.
However, I bought a new Rossini clock and a standard unshielded Belden ethernet cord ($18 from Blue Jeans) and performed another A/B. The benefit of the Silent Angel gear disappeared. Obviously, the clock had other benefits than pure noise reduction. I have $6k avoiding buying a server and all the cords that drag along with it.
The experiment demonstrated one thing to me: Follow DCS’s advice and you will get the best results.
I had never heard of this line so I looked at the Silent Angel literature and found this for one of their “audiophile” Ethernet switches:
“Built-in TCXO with Clock Selection Switch. Equipped with a high-precision internal TCXO oscillator and a physical switch for selecting between internal and external clock sources, the N8C ensures consistent timing accuracy, even without a master clock.”
Ethernet is asynchronous! You don’t clock an Ethernet signal, that’s the entire point.
Chord introduced the switch as “their own” however some sleuth digging by Naim forum members discovered it was simply a rebranded Silent Angel switch. This took place 3/4 years ago
Who is the original manufacturer of the Silent Angel switch? Many products are actually made by OEM suppliers. Did the Naim contributors find a whole Silent Angel switch inside the English Electric product or just common circuits ( the latter would help confirm that it’s OEM)?
With respect to the OP who recently popped back in to remind us of the topic, this has been covered more than adequately elsewhere and is not about music servers.
FWIW, using the same board as a basis is not necessarily of course the same as the “badge engineering” beloved of the motor industry from a few decades ago and continuing today; it depends on whether you tune that base circuitry/engine for performance or not (viz. AMG and Alpina).
The switch is made by a Chinese networking OEM who, in addition to OEM’ing it to other firms, also markets it themselves underneath their house brand Silent Angel.
The Chord is the exact switch with an English Electric label attached. All this information can be found on the Naim forum - there is an extensive thread and it is well known.
I seem to recall the Chord version only has 4 ethernet ports. Naim users needing more than 4 ports went on to purchase the Silent Angel version, one of which has 8 ports.
Actually @keiserrg whether ethernet itself is synchronous or asynchronous is not so back-and-white. Ethernet has a speed/bandwidth, which means it must be synchronous in some respect. It actually works in a similar way to S/PDIF signal inasmuch as timing information is embedded in the packet headers and is reconstructed by the receiver. We consider S/PDIF synchronous so I guess you could make the case that ethernet is no less synchronous.
But that is what is going on at the network layer. Audio over ethernet, which is what we are talking about here, but which in is in fact just one of hundreds of applications that use ethernet as an underlying transport, is asynchronous as you point out**.
The layered nature of communications protocols and the fact that a given connection can be synchronous at a certain level and asynchronous at another can and does cause real confusion for customers. Network jitter and audio jitter are not the same thing and the way we clock audio over asynchronous connections means that there is no possible causal relationship between the two. I have seen marketing for some network products that tries to relate or even equate the two.
** USB is similar, essentially synchronous at the network level, but typically asynchronous as far as the audio application sitting several layers further up the stack is concerned.
You don’t clock an Ethernet signal, that’s the entire point.