I’m inclined to agree, but just wondered if @Jut had any evidence to the contrary.
Yes at Philips Natlab in the 80-s the engineers knew that spdif was not perfect and 14 bit was not really enough and they kept on developing, At Philips Natlab they were not stupid. They even develloped a large professional magnetostatic tweeter. Why would they do that, a dome tweeter also reaches 20k with flat response. It was not for commercial reasons. They had to sell the tweeter to another brand (that also went bankrupt).
But I think it is just two kinds of people debating here.
1: the technician. 20-20.000 Hz is good enough.so mp3 should sound the same as dsd. CD in the 80-s is as good as the best digital system now. A 10k turntable with 2k cartridge should sound the same as a 1k turntable with $30 cartridge because the differences in wow&flutter and frequency response should be inaudible. They are the lucky ones, they are totally happy with a Sonos system (and will never buy Roon)
2: other people who do hear differences between equipment that does measure within the range that should be inaudible (1dB is just audible).
If people no.2 didn’t exist, we would all be happy with a simple sonos speaker.
I think you meant to say people who think they can hear differences. Unless objectively confirmed, it’s just unsubstantiated claims.
My apologies, I meant is there any evidence (tests or measurements) regarding the transmission of data via ethernet cables?
Wow! This set of straw men you set up convinces me you really don’t understand the people you are attempting to trivialize. Let’s take them one by one:
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“20-20.000 Hz is good enough.so mp3 should sound the same as dsd.” No not-insane technically competent person would say that. 20-20KHz is probably good enough. But MP3 is a lossy protocol, and DSD is not. Why would they sound the same? That doesn’t make sense.
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“CD in the 80-s is as good as the best digital system now.” Clearly not. No technically competent person would argue that. Competence in digital reproduction, both on the recording/mastering end, and on the reproduction side, clearly grew for many years after the 1982 introduction of the CD. Maybe if you said, “The best digital system now is not much better than the best CD reproduction in 2010 was.” That you might get some people to sign on to.
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“A 10k turntable with 2k cartridge should sound the same as a 1k turntable with $30 cartridge because the differences in wow&flutter and frequency response should be inaudible.” Again, no one argues this. One might argue that turntables in general are obsolete because their failure modes are so much worse than digital recordings. So you might say that turntables and vinyl are all bad, just because they aren’t digital. But no one would argue that two turntables should sound the same, even though I suppose that through careful selection of the cheap turntable and the expensive one a person might be able to achieve an instance of this.
I’m not sure how it furthers the discussion to advance this kind of nonsense?
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Hi Bill,
Maybe you only think that you can hear a difference between mp3 and dsd. There is no proof for that.
I am joking, but still: how can one proof this? Especially in higher end audio is becomes more difficult. I can hear more details on a certain speaker, which measures worse (distortion, frequency response). But what I cannot measure is transparancy. And I cannot proof that (it is just my word). But a good engineer just wants to know how it is possible to have better transparancy when something measures worse. You want to be able to understand this phenomena.
When many people talk about lower noisefloor or black background, we can say: ■■■■■■■■■ we measured the noise and it is inaudible. It could be the same thing as with bass sounding fast. “ We measured the speed of a heavy and a light cone and it is the same so there is no fast bass”. In stead of that, one could try to figure out what people mean when they say fast bass or lower noisefloor. Of coarse the bass is not fast (high frequencies are faster). People mean something else when they say that.
I have read long threads about just the value of a shunt capacitor over the main power supply capacitors to suppress high frequency noise. Many many pages with modeling and measuring, everything matters, from the position of the shunt capacirot to the length of the connectors, HF noise from the mains will get through whatever you do, the perfect power supply doesn’t exist. That HF noise will also get modulated together with the dc part of the current. It might transform into a distortion type or so and will not be measured as simple noise at the output. So to hear a lower noisefloor is actually wrong to say because there is no lower measurable noisefloor, but what you hear sounds less ‘noisy’. It is to the engineers to find out what this is and where it comes from and how a power supply can be bettered so that people don’t need these after market products like those mains filters or even expensive ethernet cables. Well, maybe no one needs expensive ethernet cables because cat6 protocol is perfect enough for audio, even if it is called high end.
I’m guessing a lot of folks can’t tell the difference between, say, high-bit-rate MP3 and bit-perfect DSD.
What? Compare the inputs to the outputs, and see how well they match. That’s what transparency is.
Well, I’d certainly agree that when people use nonstandard or even undefined meanings for words, it’s hard to figure out what they’re saying. What is this “SQ” everyone is so obsessed with, anyway? 
Sometimes I think that the largest problem with the audio “hobby” is all those long threads – the blind leading the blind, more often than not.
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This kind of stuff vexes me. How can an addition of a low value capacitor (nanoFarads) across PSU caps (1000s of microFarads) reduce high frequency noise, when the PSU caps provide an almost zero impedance path to ground for high frequencies?
Xc=1/ωC
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That is because those large caps are not perfect capacitors when frequency rises.
Do you have any engineering background or at least some electrotechnical knowledge as that statement is a bit awkward? And even without - can you substantiate this claim in any way?
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You are right, the audio press is using it’s own language to describe things and often it sounds like real estate management. When you read “tight bass”, it means that there is no low bass, “musical sounding” means a lot of even type of harmonic distortion, “lively” means odd distortion or resonances or… 
“Boring” means neutral or good.
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Placing these high frequency bypass capacitors there will not be serving the claimed effect, since EMI will creep in on the way to the active devices, or even be generated by the active devices themself and spread over copper traces and wiring.
To be an effective measure, they’d have to be connected as close to all active devices’ power supply pins as is possible - electronics layout 101.
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No capacitor is perfect, but your response is based on audiophile mythology, not electrical/electronic engineering.
That is right, somewhere the mythology and engineering have to come together. To address exactly what you hear to a “problem” in the whole chain from electrical to acoustical is difficult. When you’re good at it, you can have succes designing, for example amps and power supplies like Nelson Pass or Bob Carver. I still believe the audio industry needs the critical listener who is willing to pay a lot of money for the next hype, just to keep cash flowing towards innovation. It’s sad to see that some companies only innovate in marketing, but there are still companies left over that come up with new ways and technologies.
Mythology has no place in science, technology and engineering. The only way for them to come together is to do away with mythology.
Current digital audio technology is already beyond our hearing capabilities. There is nothing to innovate in terms of SQ, strictly speaking. There is innovation in digital transports in general (i.e. what I would loosely call “computer networks”), but the benefits for audio are limited to reliability, since current bandwidths are already sufficient. The way I see it, innovation will happen in the area of transducers (speakers and headphones) and in what we generically call “immersive audio”.
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Loudspeaker and headphone distortion is still orders of magnitude greater than that of any other component in the hi-fi chain. This is definitely one area where there is still room for serious innovation.
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Or, as Bruno Putzeys put it in his Sound & Vision interview,
This morass of folk lore has slowed down real progress in high-end audio for over a generation now. … You have to love great sound and great music but you have to be equally fanatic about facts. Reality makes logical sense. Anything that doesn’t make logical sense isn’t real.
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This just shows that distortion is not as big a deal as some people make it out to be.
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I can’t stand blinking lights… especially on Christmas trees!
But I really do like the blinking LEDs on network adapters and switches… especially the 10gbe ones. 
I hope they’re leaving my digital audio data bits alone. 
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I am sure that you are absolutely correct in respect of the accuracy and integrity of the musical file data sent and received if you measure the traffic. Can you and have you also measured the EMI/RFIs that will be generated by a basic switch that can then accompany the digital signal? It is the EMI/RFIs that are the problem in the context of a lower noise floor and therefore better SQ. A quality audio switch and or the appropriate cables will be less of a problem with EMI/RFIs. Try it. You may be surprised and benefit with your listening experience outcome