Both UPnP as well as RAAT (Roon) are TCP based locally, and with the Streaming services - Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Spotify - are all TCP based streams directly into the dCS DACs.
IIRC, Roon used to be UDP based, but they switched with RAAT (Roon Advanced Audio Transport) to be TCP based.
Indeed, both Brian and Danny are among the best in the industry IMHO; they’re been doing network based Audio streaming for a very long time (I was on the verge of acquiring a Sooloos system just before Meridian acquired them).
Speaking of which, not to open another can of worms, but I’m curious on your personal take, subjective or otherwise, on the whole dCS DAC Mosaic/UPnP vs. Roon/RAAT sound quality debate? Care to weigh in publicly (or not, your choice, no pressure ).
Maybe this belongs to a separate topic, but I never use Mosaic for music playback because I prefer the convenience of Roon. For the rest, I am with this:
Ahhh, makes sense, especially given your souped-up Roon core
Not sure it warrants a separate thread though; there will always be a fringe few who don’t quite get something right in their set-up (or are over-imaginative ) and hear a difference despite such a clear statement of fact from dCS;
Over the years home audio has shifted from analogue to digital. From vinyl, cassette and tape to streaming, and DAC. From physical media connection to abstract. From media you can hold, see, and manipulate to just consume. All progress in SQ comes at a cost. To get it right asks for more knowledge.
To be honest, back in the days, I enjoyed listening to analogue music actually even more than I do now. Despite the improved SQ.
I know that feeling. For me, it’s not 100%, but there were definitely times in my youth, when I first got into hifi, that the fun trumped the SQ. Now, as good as the SQ is, some of that fun is more ephemeral. I remember the joy of saving enough money for a few new LPs, and listening to them over and over. Now, I can play almost anything anytime anywhere. As good as my systems are, I probably still have the most fun with music in the car. The SQ at home is amazing. The music in the car sounds very good, though not as good, but I listen just for fun.
You know that old joke between musicians about audiophiles: “ordinary people listen to your music with their equipment; audiophiles listen to their equipment with your music.”It’s beguiling.
This! My latest car came standard with a fancy sound system and it sounds damn good. Special bonus - when I play EDM at full volume and bury the throttle it’s like a Fast and Furious movie!
It’s also an old canard rolled out to make fun of audiophiles that has little to do with the truth.
Yes, there are some that do as stated but that’s no more the norm than people with ears who actually believe all CD players sound the same and you should buy on features.
Well, it may be “crude” to you, but along with multi-tone tests and other current measurement techniques, it’s still able to very easily debunk every audiophoolery out there.
Debunk as in prove objectively beyond any doubt - we can measure galaxies 33 billion light years away, and the mass of the Higgs Boson. We can certainly measure the sounds from your HiFi. The only thing we can’t measure is the Audiophile’s vivid imagination.
In any case, we digress. Would be good to see some real new commentary about the topic at hand - comparing Ethernet Switches - rather than useless generalities over and over again.
The thing is, we don’t understand our sense of hearing any more than we understand any of our other sensors.
We can come up with digital sensors to do just about everything except reproduce the signals any of our organs actually send to the brain, so there’s an incredible amount we simply don’t know.
We can only “hear” down to 20 Hz, but why do sounds below 20 Hz affect our perception of space? Is it purely a sensory by feel nature, or is there something else? We don’t know, and no one’s funding the research.
We can predict some aspects of human emotion, but we can’t predict emotion. Despite their being innumerable medications on the market, we don’t understand how depression works, or how to kill cancer cells without also doing a good job of killing the patient by blasting both with radiation.
We can measure the mass of the Higgs Boson, but is light a wave or particle? “It depends on if it’s being measured and how.”
Those for whom measurements mean ALL can’t be accepting of much of quantum mechanics.
The bottom line is we’ve become very skilled at measuring things we know how to measure, but not as skilled at measuring things for which measurements do not tell all, and it’s clear what audio analyzers measure between 20 Hz - 20 KHz are not all that goes into how we hear and what affects our perception of soundstage and our sense of space and reproduction of it.
Measurements mean a lot, but they haven’t explained why some gear that measures extremely well sounds horrible and other gear that doesn’t measure all that well sounds absolutely heavenly. .
For many other sensory pleasures of life, how can they be measured? Can you measure that one vintage wine is better than another, or one painting is better than the rest?
Exactly. Attempting to measure subjective responses is pretty useless IMHO.
In any case, bringing the discussion back to the topic of audible impact of Ethernet Switches… I think fundamentally there are really only 2 questions;
Whether or not noise and/or jitter emanating from Ethernet Switches can somehow make its way to, or otherwise impact, the analog output of a particular Streamer/DAC, such that it’s audible.
Do the results of 1. from one particular Streamer/DAC automatically apply to every other Streamer/DAC?
The tests conducted by AA addresses 1., but without measuring the DAC’s output, it’s really half-done. Other than AA I’ve only seen two other attempts tackle this objectively.
A German audio forum; but similar to AA, they measured only in the digital domain, in this case the Ethernet Switch’s output. While clear differences in noise/jitter were seen, there was no measurement extended to the Streamer/DAC stage, so any audible impact from the measurements was conjecture only. Nevertheless it’s got some interesting conclusions, including debunking external clocking improvements of Ethernet Switches - specifically the Uptone EtherREGEN showing worse results from an external clock. Have a read (it’s in German but works well wth Google Translate): https://www.open-end-music.com/forum/privatforen/thomas-michael-rudolph-tmr/651284-messungen-von-ethernet-infrastruktur-switches-nur-lesen
And the other site was ASR/Amir, where he did a pretty good job of testing two “Audiophile Ethernet Switches” versus normal ones, and all the way to the DAC outputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHPwPRLxDWc
As for 2. like practically every piece of equipment, I’m 100% certain YMMV applies