Melco N5 with Mosaic

[Antonis]

Exactly! That is how I run my Melco N5 too.

[Merlot52 (David)]

Firstly, apologies to the OP for cutting in here and going off Topic.

Duncan…With regard to the N5 and Bartók, I’m trying to get Mosaic to list Audirvana as UPnP, but it only shows MinimServer which is on the N5. Are the two UPnPs conflicting each other?
Audirvana quite happily shows the Bartók as an Output.
Thanks

[Dunc (Duncan)]

Sorry David i can’t answer that one

[Merlot52 (David)]

Thanks Duncan.

Cut a long story short, I have deleted Audirvana. I had noticed that it was doing some very strange things to my N5 Music Data Base. When I attempted to play some music, several albums had tracks “Modified or deleted item”!

I have done a rescan of the library and all is back to normal. My N5 clearly didn’t like Audirvana.

[Merlot52 (David)]

@Antonis

If I chose the USB connection from N5 to Rossini

Good morning Antonis
I am trying various connections at the moment.

1. Direct Attach Cable from S100 Switch SFP Port, to N5 SFP Port. N5 Player Port to Bartók.
2. Direct Attach Cable from S100 Switch SFP Port, to N5 SFP Port. S100 Switch to Bartók.
3. USB Cable from N5 to Bartók USB 1 Port.

If you ask me what sounds better, I’m really not 100% sure! There wasn’t much in it.
Unless it was my imagination, I thought the volume was not quite as loud using the USB connection? Which meant I actually had to adjust to volume up from -18.5dB to -19.5dB.
BTW, I don’t have a Pre-amp so I use the volume control on Mosaic, which works well.

[Antonis]

The Nordost switch does not feature an SFP port.
Regarding the USB vs Ethernet connection to the DAC, I followed the DCS recommendation.

[Antonis]

I am using Valhalla-2 ethernet cables

[Ermos (Erno)]

@Antonis

I followed the DCS recommendation.

@Antonis

I am using Valhalla-2 ethernet cables

the Valhalla 2 Ethernet Cable has the advantage of eight, 23 AWG, solid core conductors wrapped in a high density polymer insulation. These annealed conductors are arranged into four twisted pairs before being triple-shielded.

That is against the dCS recommendation of using an unshielded ethernet cable.

What Ethernet cable are you using into you streamer?

I use an Amazon Special CAT6 (I believe the brand is either Cables 2 Go or Cables Matter) between my Vivaldi Upsampler and Ubiquiti switch. I have a unique position in the industry as the “network streaming guy” for one of the premier digital audio manufacturers so I could easily have any audiophile cable currently available. I still chose the basic unshielded cable that passed certification. Keywords above are unshielded and passed certification.

[Antonis]

I contacted the DCS support and they had nothing against the particular cable.

[Antonis]

With these cables my system also sounded better

[Antonis]

But now that you mention this fact and due to more spare time during summer, I might put on the DCS cables again and listen to my system again.

[Ermos (Erno)]

@Antonis

I might put on the DCS cables again and listen to my system again

I would not necessarily use the ethernet cable provided by dCS in the box, but one of these:

[FAQ] Do I need special Ethernet cables for my dCS product?

The Ethernet standard is regulated by the IEEE under 802.3. This means that provided an Ethernet cable has passed certification, you can be confident it will be fit for use in your system and will deliver the correct sonic performance, regardless of the specific details of the cable. Ironically, some ‘audiophile’ Ethernet cables and devices actually do not meet the requirements of IEEE 802.3, so are not fit for use. As an aside, some ‘audiophile’ Ethernet cables have extremely large connectors …

They are cheap. Take care to buy one that has passed certification, and preferably one that has thickness AWG 24 (American Wire Gauge), and is U/UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) and 100% copper (Cu).

[Antonis]

what certification should one look for?

[Ermos (Erno)]

Patchkabel CAT 5e U/UTP

Tested according to ISO/IEC 11801 and DIN EN 50173

Core should be 100% copper (CU), NOT the cheaper CCA, which core is aluminium.

[Phil (Phil Harris)]

Hi All,

Just a note regarding Ethernet Cables from our perspective.

The Ethernet port on our DACs and Players are transformer coupled so the actual ethernet connection is electrically isolated from the upstream network equipment, as such we recommend unshielded cables rather than shielded cables so that the shield of the network cable doesn’t connect the ground of the DAC to the ground of any other network equipment. This ensures that any electrical noise in the upstream networking kit cannot reach the DAC.

There are cables that are shielded but have the shield only terminated at one end, that’s fine but in a domestic environment there really is no need for shielding on Ethernet cables, Ethernet is designed from the ground up to be incredibly robust and reliable without needing a shield.

There is also no inherent advantage to be had using CAT8/7/6/6a cables over CAT5e as any extra bandwidth that they may support simply isn’t used for streaming audio … even uncompressed 24bit / 192kHz audio only requires 10mbits/sec of bandwidth which is 1% of the available bandwidth of a gigabit Ethernet connection (the most common home networking standard nowadays) but even Fast Ethernet (100mbits/sec) is more than capable of handling uncompressed high res audio streaming without breaking a sweat.

30 years ago networks used hubs rather than switches to connect network devices together but hubs were only really applicable to 10mbits/sec networking and were essentially killed off when 100mbits networking became popular and hubs were replaced by switches … hubs were dumb devices and simply broadcast any data received on one port out to every other port and it was very easy for networks to reach saturation but switches are “intelligent” devices that perform internal routing on your network by ensuring that traffic on the network is only sent to the port (or ports) that are necessary.

(I do keep an old 10/100 meg HUB in my test kit stash because there are certain things that a hub does that can be handy when testing but they have no place in any network nowadays otherwise.)

Because of all this it is incredibly difficult for network congestion to be an issue when playing audio with anything but “stone age” network hardware.

As such, any pre-made cable that is described as CAT5e (you’ll have trouble finding anything nowadays that is CAT5 - without the e - or lesser) will be more than up to the task of carrying streaming audio data reliably and without any bandwidth issues.

I see that @Ermos has made comment about making sure that you use a copper cable rather than copper clad aluminium … I would agree with this and myself I always look out for copper rather than CCA network cables but again within the context of what is needed for streaming audio (and the domestic environment that they are going to be used in) CCA cables won’t cause issues, they are just not as robust as a copper cable.

I would strongly suggest exercising caution with network cables that are thick / stiff / heavy, especially if they have long Ethernet plugs on them, as they can exert a lot of leverage / torsion on the RJ45 connectors depending on how they are dressed. Over the years that I’ve been doing this I’ve seen the connectors in RJ45 housings displaced, RJ45 housings cracked and RJ45 sockets torn off PCBs by such cables being used when they are then dressed so that they exert a lot of force on the connector.

I hope that helps…

Cheers

Phil

[Merlot52 (David)]

Thanks Phil for that clarification.
Melco also recommend unshielded Ethernet cables.

[Antonis]

After listening to my system, I have to admit that the improvement using Valhalla-2 ethernet cables vs Cat 5e U/UTP is much much smaller than expected: space and depth of the presentation, the definition of voices, instruments and lower frequencies were improved using the Nordost cables.