Ethernet switch

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@BillK You misunderstand entirely! Sorry, I should have used lashings of tongue-in-cheek emojis as I think we agree on much. I’d suggest you see my earlier posts but that would be inviting you to do all the work.
I basically think I could have written your post myself.
I was merely trying to head off in one post many of the criticisms and challenges levelled, when anyone says they hear a difference, by the “you’re fooling yourself” brigade.

Now where’s a peace and love emoji? Ah yes

[BillK]

Not a concern, I know all too well sarcasm doesn’t always work well on the Internet.

[PaleRider (Greg)]

@TheFlash

I was merely trying to head off in one post many of the criticisms and challenges levelled, when anyone says they hear a difference, by the “you’re fooling yourself” brigade.

There is a difference between “fooling yourself” and “refusing to test yourself.” There’s nothing wrong with making a subjective sighted assessment. And there is also nothing wrong with testing that subjective assessment by then following a blind A/B/X process. If one chooses not to do that, that’s fine, too, but it means one is left with a purely subjective assessment. Neither good nor bad, it just is what it is.

I do subjective assessments all the time. Who doesn’t? Very rarely have I attempted to do blind comparisons. Few dealers are set up for them. And, at least in my experience, few partners are inclined to indulge the audiophile obsessiveness. And for me, they suck a lot of the fun out of the listening. But they are the only way to test one’s subjective assessment free of bias.

We can’t “train” ourselves out of cognitive and motivational biases. That notion suggests a misunderstanding about cognitive and motivational biases. We’re human; we can’t train ourselves not to be human. But we can build processes to minimize the effects. Sighted listening is not such a process.

P.S. Referring to other people’s views here as “garbage” strikes me as not being within the spirit of this community.

[BillK]

@PaleRider

P.S. Referring to other people’s views here as “garbage” strikes me as not being within the spirit of this community.

You’re correct.

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@BillK I prefer to think of it as irony but same risk on t’internet!

Enjoy your weekend

[BillK]

The same to you!

[keiserrg]

@BillK

As I’ve stated numerous times before, if expectation bias worked the way everyone says it should I should have purchased the hundreds of thousands of dollars of Stereophile Class “A”/“A+” Recommended Components (or those from TAS) I’ve borrowed from dealers over the years rather than returning them because they either made no difference or sounded worse than what I already had.

Just respectfully clarifying one point here (I don’t own an Ethernet switch and have never experimented with them):

Expectation bias doesn’t necessarily mean thinking "more expensive is better.’ It simply means a bias based on some expectation. Let’s say I believe, rightly or wrongly, that The Absolute Sound reviews are $#@$ because of their full throttle endorsement of MQA, a technology I do not support. Others may view my position as unreasonable, but it is My expectation bias. I may retain this expectation bias when I review any other stereo component that TAS has recommended, and–Regardless of price or quality–be inclined not to like it. That’s how expectation bias works.

In the scientific literature expectation bias is a tricky thing to insulate one’s self from, hence the idea behind blind/double blind testing.

Cheers!
R

[Anupc (Anup)]

@TheFlash

Streamer was an Antipodes expensive thing into a Chord DAVE

Ahh, you mean Ethernet changes upstream to the Antipodes since Dave doesn’t have an Ethernet port. So, it’s either USB or one of the Antipodes’ synchronous interfaces to Dave.

I’m very familiar with the Chord Dave as I owned one in my headphone system (prior to switching to the Bartok when launched). It was coupled (via dual AES) to a dCS Network Bridge which doesn’t suffer from any such sensitivity to Ethernet cable or Switch changes.

So I can only guess it’s the Antipodes which is sensitive? I’m not familiar with it at all to judge one way or another.

@TheFlash

however on this particular comparison of two different connections on same switch, anyone could have clearly heard the difference and I suspect most if not all would have clearly preferred the copper over the ethernet.

Did you mean preferred Ethernet over copper cables instead of over fibre?

If so, I don’t mean to sound insensitive (pun unintended), but that seems a rather convenient outcome given your commercial interests?

Superswitch Master
…
Using fibreoptic? Theoretically superior to ethernet cables, in practice optical often disappoints as the optical-electrical media converters can be noisy themselves. Adding a Superswitch Master between the final converter and your streamer will ensure the latter receives the cleanest possible signal.

[jandersonhill (Jeremy)]

I found the same thing when I had my Antipodes CX going into a Chord TT2 via USB (also for my headphone setup). Putting a filter on the ethernet cable changed the sound, IMO significantly for the better.

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@Anupc

Did you mean preferred Ethernet over copper cables instead of over fibre?

If so, I don’t mean to sound insensitive (pun unintended), but that seems a rather convenient outcome given your commercial interests?

I’m disappointed in this cheap jibe. My commercial interests had nothing to do with it; I was listening, at someone else’s invitation, to a competitor switch.

My commercial interests have existed for a few months. My interest in hifi has existed for several decades. I am not on this forum because of my commercial interests, I’m here because I am a dCS fanboy and owner. Please desist. I could equally call out your non- or anti-trade stance and dismiss or devalue everything you say because of this… but I don’t. There is no point in my contributing to any thread here if everything I write is going to be viewed so cynically.

[Anupc (Anup)]

I have no reason to doubt what you say, but it does seems an almost classic case of expectation bias. Your experience of copper being better than fibre is contrary to majority of user experience (which is what piqued my interest to explore your commercial site in the first place). So, is it any surprise that that’s what you heard?

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

That’s good to know.
So how do you suggest I do such comparisons in future, you know, with expectation bias being a thing?
What I had previously reported was not my own experience, it was the collated reported experiences of others. I can now add my own experience to that evidence.
I can’t imagine how you yourself could ever objectively compare copper and optics because of your own similar bias. We’re both human and subject to the same strengths and weaknesses of humanness!
I believe your faith in the general as-a-principle rule-of-thumb technical superiority of optical is misplaced. Let’s both carry on enjoying our music, enjoying our hifi, and disagreeing as we obviously need to!
Happy Sunday

[Anupc (Anup)]

@TheFlash

So how do you suggest I do such comparisons in future, you know, with expectation bias being a thing?

Unfortunately, the only way is to actually measure it. Double-blind testing while objective, is rather tedious, and doesn’t help quantify cause and effect, only whether something is truly changed, and not just imagined.

The dCS Vivaldi stack in my main system has multiple measurement kit almost permanently attached to it, including a Prism Sound DA-1 (synchronous digital analyser), and a TASCAM DA-3000 ADC. So it’s rather trivial to analyse any changes I make upstream in either the analog or digital domains.

@TheFlash

I believe your faith in the general as-a-principle rule-of-thumb technical superiority of optical is misplaced.

Well, let me put it this way; professionally, my primary area of technical and business expertise is Ethernet/IP and Optical networking. So, among other things, dealing with photonics (and SFPs) is what I do on a daily basis (for the last 20+ years). Most of what I read on audiophiles forums about SFPs are ludicrous and easily debunked on a test-bench

[BillK]

@Anupc

Unfortunately, the only way is to actually measure it. Double-blind testing while objective, is rather tedious, and doesn’t help quantify cause and effect, only whether something is truly changed, and not just imagined.

That only works if the audible effect you are hearing is something we know how to measure, and that is very, very far from a given.

Measuring just frequency response does not take into account all of the factors surrounding how we hear, which is why it is so difficult.

Note that I didn’t say we can’t measure them, simply that if you don’t know what to measure, you can’t.

All interconnects are the same to someone with a pair of 1.5v batteries and an LED, it’s only once you know what to measure that differences among them appear.

@Anupc

Most of what I read on audiophiles forums about SFPs are ludicrous and easily debunked on a test-bench

Once again, assuming what you have the ability to measure is what is causing SFPs and other optical equipment to cause differences in sound.

I will go back and reference it took quite some time before people discovered what made S/PDIF sound different among different TOSLINK cables was jitter.

Not that people didn’t know about jitter, not that jitter couldn’t be measured, but rather that it was jitter that was causing sonic differences.

Read an article on digital audio from 1984 or so - wrap your TOSLINK cable in a figure 8 or around a pencil if you like, as long as light pulses made it out the other end, it was OK because bits are bits.

I exclude coax from the discussion above because then electrical noise enters the fray.

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@Anupc

@TheFlash

So how do you suggest I do such comparisons in future, you know, with expectation bias being a thing?

Unfortunately, the only way is to actually measure it. Double-blind testing while objective, is rather tedious, and doesn’t help quantify cause and effect, only whether something is truly changed, and not just imagined.

You’re not seriously suggesting that I measure stuff (and presumably ignore the potential change if I cannot do so), are you? So I need to buy equipment capable of measuring a whole raft of attributes ( resistance, capacitance, inductance, impedance, ripple, jitter… - feel free to augment) in order to prove that I’m not imagining a difference. And only then should I involve my ears, in the crucial bit about working out whether the difference is audible… and only then in the even more crucial bit which is deciding whether the measurable audible difference is preferable or not.
What a faff (technical term).
And so riddled with caveats that only someone who does that sort of thing for a living might find it useful, informative, enjoyable.
Please don;t put me in the box marked “foo merchants” or “ridiculous try-anything subjectivists” when I say that I’m entirely unconvinced that everything we hear is measurable in any meaningful/controlled/comparable way. Unless you’re talking about pushing single tones through a system which in my experience tells us little.

@Anupc

The dCS Vivaldi stack in my main system has multiple measurement kit almost permanently attached to it, including a Prism Sound DA-1 (synchronous digital analyser), and a TASCAM DA-3000 ADC. So it’s rather trivial to analyse any changes I make upstream in either the analog or digital domains.

Almost permanently: why?! Do you keep messing with tweaks to it?
It would be interesting to hear, at a high level, about your general approach to such tweaks. Do you tweak then measure then listen? Then adjust and repeat? Does this help you decide whether to retain the tweak? Genuine Q.

@Anupc

@TheFlash

I believe your faith in the general as-a-principle rule-of-thumb technical superiority of optical is misplaced.

Well, let me put it this way; professionally, my primary area of technical and business expertise is Ethernet/IP and Optical networking. So, among other things, dealing with photonics (and SFPs) is what I do on a daily basis (for the last 20+ years). Most of what I read on audiophiles forums about SFPs are ludicrous and easily debunked on a test-bench

Oh no, a professional. Run, everyone, run!
Yes, there’s a lot of rubbish out there and I’m sure it must make you very cross, especially if the folk talking the rubbish have an agenda - driving traffic to their site, selling stuff either overtly or obtusely, etc.
But I hope you also see the danger of restricting your private experiences with music reproduction to the bounds of your professional experience and knowledge. They’re related fields of course, but not the same. I’ve worked in tech (IT as we used to call it) for decades now and it bugs me when I have to argue with people from the same background about why and how a digital switch can make a difference to sound quality. They constrain their thinking to the digital domain in which we work, quite understandably, and either go into flat denial or bang on about measuring the wrong things.

I might start a separate thread about choosing SFP modules though!

All the best,
Nigel

[Anupc (Anup)]

@BillK

Once again, assuming what you have the ability to measure is what is causing SFPs and other optical equipment to cause differences in sound.

I will go back and reference it took quite some time before people discovered what made S/PDIF sound different among different TOSLINK cables was jitter.

Trying to equate an optical SFP with TOSlink suggests you don’t understand the fundamental difference between a synchronous physical layer protocol/interface, versus an asynchronous packetised transport that completely abstracts from the physical layer.

If that doesn’t quite register, don’t worry about it

@TheFlash

You’re not seriously suggesting that I measure stuff

Yes. If you intend to put forth an argument. Subjective listening opinions cannot be the basis for any real debate, there has to be an objective frame of reference.

@TheFlash

I’m entirely unconvinced that everything we hear is measurable in any meaningful/controlled/comparable way.

I don’t disagree that some of what we hear can’t easily be interpreted from measurements. However, the difference described by most in relation to Ethernet Cables or Switches, including the recent post by our TAS friend - to quote that review “another level of clarity”, “correct timbre of the instruments”, “20% improvement”, “smearing in the vocals”, “doesn’t sound bright with XX” - are all well within the realm of basic measurement that anyone can do with rather rudimentary measurement gear!

@TheFlash

Almost permanently: why?!

They’ve been in place from when most of my gear went through changes, and for room treatment measurements. Most of it has been static for a while, so it gets used less frequently.

@TheFlash

Yes, there’s a lot of rubbish out there

Unfortunately, most of the audiophile forums are riddled with folks with commercial interest pushing an agenda. Just look at what a disaster WBF is.

@TheFlash

They constrain their thinking

Does any of my posts strike you as “constrained thinking” when it comes to understanding the underlying technology and applying it to music reproduction? (can’t imagine my decades long AES membership has been in vain )

[BillK]

@Anupc

Trying to equate an optical SFP with TOSlink suggests you don’t understand the fundamental difference between a synchronous physical layer protocol/interface, versus an asynchronous packetised transport that completely abstracts from the physical layer.

I’m not trying to equate the two interfaces, but rather the fact that in the case of TOSLINK, the effect of jitter upon audio was discovered by hearing the effect before it was found that flexing or looping many (particularly inexpensive) TOSLINK cables increased jitter, causing the sonic degradation.

My point is we can only measure what we know to measure and only know those measurements affect what we hear because the correlation has been determined.

Certainly we can measure some parameters, but those measurements do not (yet) cover all details of what we hear.

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@Anupc

@TheFlash

You’re not seriously suggesting that I measure stuff

Yes. If you intend to put forth an argument. Subjective listening opinions cannot be the basis for any real debate, there has to be an objective frame of reference.

I think you’ll find they can

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@Anupc

@TheFlash

I’m entirely unconvinced that everything we hear is measurable in any meaningful/controlled/comparable way.

I don’t disagree that some of what we hear can’t easily be interpreted from measurements. However, the difference described by most in relation to Ethernet Cables or Switches, including the recent post by our TAS friend - to quote that review “another level of clarity”, “correct timbre of the instruments”, “20% improvement”, “smearing in the vocals”, “doesn’t sound bright with XX” - are all well within the realm of basic measurement that anyone can do with rather rudimentary measurement gear!

We agree re the digital aspect of ethernet cables; I’m not sure if there is a noise thing going on (with shielded or unshielded, in different ways) which I don’t yet understand sufficiently.

We disagree re switches, as you know: again, in the digital domain there is nothing to see but there is clearly something going on - audibly going on - in the analogue (RFI/EMI) domain which impacts sound quality.
18 months ago, I read my first post in another place re switches and I think it was titled “Innuos PhoenixNET: really?” or similarly. My tech creds kicked in and I basically sneered. Then I read more, then I bought a £30 switch on the basis that the whole experiment might cost me £10 when I sell it on, and at least I’d be able to say I’d tried it and in my system to my ears it did nothing. Well, that obviiusly didn’t work out.
I recognise those descriptions and could apply some of them to differences I’ve heard. No measurement needed, the proof is in the listening. Measurement can come afterwards for those who were there, heard the difference, and want to try and work out what the hell is going on.

[HMPtonNJ (HM)]

I’ll start with a brief bit of background – simply to highlight the different worlds I’ve lived in – before moving on to my plea. In addition to an engineering Ph.D. and a decade’s worth of a career as a scientist at NASA and separately one in biotechnology R&D, I’ve spent many years as a management consultant, and an entrepreneur growing a marketing consulting and digital marketing agency. I’ve led engineers and scientists, also account managers and creatives, and been involved in double blind clinical trials and understanding/prediction of human behavior.

With that as backdrop I hope you’ll permit me to step into what I see as this endless and by now getting tedious debate about “sighted listening” versus “A/B/X tests”. While there’s absolutely room and even need for both in our lives, here’s the rub – no one way is definitively better than the other all the time!

Greg, I respect your opinions and enjoy your well written posts virtually all the time. You have helped me enhance my system and I look forward to hopefully meeting you one day when I’m in San Francisco. But this insistence on A/B/X testing being the one superior way to demonstrate truth and anything else as subservient is grinding and incorrect.

Just as one counter example for instance, I know you’ve heard of the placebo effect. That is as real as the clinical effect in drug development especially, especially so in areas that involve therapeutics for the brain/central nervous system, where the placebo effect is the bane of clinical trials. Prozac for example failed at least 3 (many say 7) trials before any clinical effect could be demonstrated to an acceptable p-value by the FDA. Because the placebo effect is so high and yes people do get better, even cured, from severe conditions with sugar pills!

And in all of this – “copper is better than optical”, “my cable needs to be brand X”, “my DAC is unlistenable without an attendant clock” – is it so difficult to simply accept that if that’s what the listener hears/believes, so be it, for him/her. None of us need to hammer home that what someone believes they hear necessarily needs to be analytically demonstrated. As has been said, even by you Greg, it’s their money and their ears. If you fully accepted that, then why the (often) consistent addition of some version of “prove it” or provide a hypothesis as to why? A part of me loves the request for the hypothesis (I too think that way), but if they don’t or don’t want to, that’s equally fine, right? If one accepts, for example, Miguel’s assertion that the memory of his Rossini is so seared in his brain that he hears the amazing difference Apex makes, then apply the same leeway to ethernet switches? I mean some level of incredulous questioning is fine, maybe even enjoyable, but we sure seem to be entering the realm of, ahem, religion?

Anup, you claim professional creds of various sorts and have landed in what I believe is a measurement is all mantra. I wonder how you’d deal with the placebo effect of an unperformed arthroscopic surgery enabling an individual to walk fine afterwards. Argue with the person who is somehow now walking fine that she really isn’t better?

I have thoroughly enjoyed this forum and think it’s the best one I’m part of. Ergo this plea to at least not rehash/tone down the same argument. I ask this even as I enjoy some of the back and forth between Nigel et al and Greg/Anup but if we could keep it just in good fun, without casting aspersions …?

The key purposes of the forum, at least as I see it and would like it to be, is for us dCS aficionados to answer queries to help others (PAR is el supremo at this and his refusal to wade into the “my view is better than yours” waters is rather telling), to share great music recommendations, to celebrate what dCS has achieved, to engage with dCS in an ongoing quest for upgrades or whatever else, to share our love of our hobby, post pictures of our systems and upgrades, and to wax poetic about anything audio. And perhaps also to needle each other some but hopefully without the need to claim superiority. As I used to say when teaching both data science and marketing, it sure helps to keep candor and curiosity in balance …!