My statement about advertising revenue wasn’t specifically directed at the EtherRegen, it was more of a general statement about snake-oil in the hi-fi industry and one of the reasons it’s perpetuated.
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But you’ve never heard it on your system, got it. 
Makes you perfectly qualified to comment on the subject and make preemptive declaritive statements to others that have heard it and hear a differences that it doesn’t make a difference.
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So what if I haven’t actually listened to it? That’s a straw man argument.
There’s nothing to hear:
If I’d listened to it and said I couldn’t hear a difference, would you argue my hearing isn’t good enough or that my system isn’t resolving enough?
An AP analyser which surpasses my hearing perception by a good 60dB can’t detect a difference. Why would I need to listen to it?
60dB better than my hearing makes it 1000 times more sensitive than my hearing at detecting signal changes. Ponder that for a second or two…
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See my earlier comment about sighted, uncontrolled listening tests. I’m not saying people can’t hear differences. What I’m saying is the perceived differences can’t be accounted for by any change in signal. The only other explanation lies in the auditory cortex of the listener which is highly influenced by expectation bias.
Find me someone who can pick out the EtherRegen vs without 10 times out of 10 in a blind listening test, and you’ll get my attention.
Edit:
As an EtherRegen owner, you’re implying I should trust your ears over an Audio Precision analyser.
If you were putting a shelf up, would you trust my eyes when I said it was level, or would you pull out a spirit level to check?
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The most important words in your comment are “I’d say.”
I understand its your opinion but it’s a sweeping one with no facts to back it up. So you’re free to share it and I’m free to disagree with it.
FYI UpTone Audio is a very small company – which has provided outsize customer service to those of us who have purchased its products – that as far as I know does not advertise in The Absolute Sound. TAS gave the EtherRegen a lot of space and I sincerely doubt it expected any advertising income in return.
But I suspect trying to influence your opinion on this subject with facts is a fools errand.
Geoff, I’m not seeing a lot of “facts” here. “As far as I know” and “I sincerely doubt” read to me like guesses, possibly informed, possibly not, I have no way of knowing.
But I do have lots of facts about networking, electricity, and Ethernet in particular at my disposal. They come together to tell me there’s no chance of a device like the EtherRegen having any kind of positive influence on SQ. Until someone adds verifiable facts to my store of knowledge, facts that contradict what is already known, I’ll continue to dismiss it as snake-oil for the vulnerable mind.
If you do have such facts, please bring them on! I’d love to see them, as I suspect would many other people.
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I don’t think you understood the implication here. I didn’t say that UpTone (whatever their size) was paying for a good review by advertising; I was saying that TAS is basically an advertising medium, not a serious critique journal, and that anything published there is probably favorable fluff only, so as not to scare away potential advertisers, who are not necessarily UpTone.
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I suppose you would also argue with someone who says that a man can not fly (movie taglines notwithstanding) unless they stepped out of a skyscraper window to prove it?
Well, good for them. When you sell something that costs $15 to manufacture, and an absolute $0 in R&D costs for hundreds of dollars a piece, good customer support would be the bare minimjum I’d expect
They also do want to receive free gadgets for review, and if you start giving honest reviews, that river will dry up soon, too.
Besides, TAS reviews aren’t in the very least bit useful (apart from pictures and prices, I guess) since they do not include any factual hard data about the product under review, only subjective impressions from people not quite qualified to plug an ethernet cable in, let alone review expensive equipment without review results being driven to much greater extent by the price tag (primary criteria for how gushing the review will be) and how good a breakfast reviewer had that morning than by anything in the product’s performance.
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Very well said, next time I copy your phrase if someone wants me to prove something unreasonably. 
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How many times should I say I am not offering any opinions on the technical issues?
The facts I referred to don’t concern those subjects.
Reading carefully before commenting is a good practice.
In your first comment you wrote:
Since then you’ve offered all kinds of opinions about what that magazine does and doesn’t do.
I don’t see much basis for continuing that discussion. Have a good night.
I recommend trying it both ways and deciding based on your listening experience. I am wired and stick to that. For an experiment I used a wireless to ethernet donggle. I sat with it for a two weeks. To my ears I did not notice a difference. I still went back to wired.
Edit: I responded to the OP without reading any of the other threads. Now that I have waited my way through a couple of the comments… “beam me up Scotty!”
I do not think there is any SQ impact if your laptop is on wifi or wired because your streamer is not physically connected to your laptop.
I know Roon recommend that everything should be wired, because the majority of Roon users are not network savvy so it is difficult or time-consuming to debug if something goes wrong, but it is absolutely fine if you have a strong, robust, reliable wifi system.
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Thanks for your contributions, Geoff.
I’m expressing myself badly today, I fear.
Not all knowledge comes from direct experience. My stated opinion of TAS was formed from a combination of experience and deductive logic. About five years ago I stumbled over Roon, more or less by accident. That led me into five years of more stumbling around the forum and other forums and Web sites, trying to make sense of the superstition-riddled labyrinth of luxury marketing, trivia tinkering (the very soul of hobby), and gear argumentation that is classic audiophilia, with the goal of understanding what the state of the practice is in high-fidelity audio reproduction. Yet in those five years, I’ve never had occasion to look at TAS. If there ever was anything to see there, I suspect I would have looked at it before. Thus my opinion.
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Well, what kind of facts should we pay attention to then? That poor little UpTone is a small company of crooks providing good customer service (but still crooks)? Are we supposed to feel sorry for them because they haven’t graduated to big leagues of crookery like FraudioQuest or Synergistic yet? That’s all very sad, but has no bearing on the sonic impact (none whatsoever) of their products.
Thanks Sean. That makes sense to me. Now, my laptop is old and crappy, and I do occassionally have dropoffs from wireless (I suspect), so I am getting a new laptop for a core with an RJ45 port, and will run it wired (possibly adding HQplayer). At a weak moment, I did order an ENO filter, but I promise, that’s it! I will spend no more money on imaginary network sound quality improvements! I generally embrace the philosophy of Graeme (facts and scientific method always rule, and humans are horribly susceptible to all forms of cognitive bias). My money would be better spent on room treatments as Graeme said, but with the caveat that I do not completely control the room, and my wife has opinions on what goes on the walls (but not in the network cabinet)!
You can also get a USB Ethernet adapter. That may expand the list of laptops quite a bit.
@Graeme_Finlayson - Thanks for sharing your experience And good luck with the BIG speaker project
If you look at the table below:
Overall shield / twisted pair shield: U (unshielded), F (foil), S (shield with fine wire braiding)
EMI characteristics: 1 () - worst characteristics, 5 (*****) - best characteristics*
and want to make sure that you won’t have or will get - even if it is probably not needed, but just in case - than S/FTP would be the best.
Would a Cat.6 patch cable RJ45 LAN cable S-FTP/PIMF be OK? Or U-FTP? ( U-FTP is vary hard to find in the market)
Torben
I think everyone listens with their ears it’s what they are for after all.
Hi Torben, many thanks. Any cable will be OK, just don’t connect the grounds at either end, as it will likely cause a ground loop!
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