This really goes nowhere. Nothing you say will change my mind and nothing I say will change yours. I always say that listen to yourself and make up your own mind, what else is there really. This hobby to me is about enjoying music with all my senses and feelings involved, not measuring stuff.
Doing blind tests is useless for me since it has nothing to do with real world music listening. Even if blind test would make the differences disappear, they are back again when the blindfold is removed.
I’ve once laughed about differences on digital equipment chain, especially streaming. After experimenting myself and after clear audible differences, I’ve partly changed my mind. I’m strong believer of science but when it comes to hifi, I trust my own ears since nothing else matters and it’s really not that serious. No one dies if I add audiophile switch to my setup.
I even like to read ASR nowadays. There’s measurements telling me that equipment I find improve things, do nothing when measured. Changes nothing for me if I actually experience the difference myself. Maybe we just don’t know what to measure yet? Also every single human has unique hearing. How to measure that? But I guess science is at its peak currently and humanity won’t evolve past this point. In 2021 we have found everything with no room for improvement.
Does anyone know what kind of design methods and decision making manufacturers of audiophile switches follow when they develop these products? If, as some posters seem to suggest, accepted theory, specs and measurements are not enough to develop transparent audiophile products, based on what decisions, criteria or knowledge do they choose electronic components, casing, wiring, pcbs, etc? How do they arrive at products affecting sound quality according to some listeners?
love it ! The results of your listening test are not unexpected. Everyone has their own truth and I am not disputing the benefit of various pieces of componentry. Manufacture’s would like us to believe there is no end to quality improvements. " buy the latest this"… “get the latest that” . I most certainly enjoy quality sound. However, what I may hear and what other’s may hear can be entirely different. The quest for improvement can quickly lead to frustration. It all looks good on paper, but if you can’t hear the difference , then the only thing that has changed is in your bank balance.
Keep smiling and enjoy.
In my experience you soon normalise the sound of your system. Then an upgrade… wow, then that’s normalised and so the search goes on and on.
There comes a point where you have to say, that’s it, this is great sound and get off the upgrade train, a train that never stops but never goes very far either. Not once you have reached a decent place.
You just race on basically to stand still.
So for me, My Meridian 5200 SEs with 210/218 with MQA where available are as far as I wish to go. Yes, I could upgrade the pre amp (218) but guess what? My ears/Brain would soon normalise, and then what?
I could add a switch, then what?
“Far” is in the ear of the beholder. Chris doesn’t care to ride that train, so he doesn’t really know where it could take him.
I happen to enjoy the same Meridian audio gear that he is so satisfied with. Yes, it sounds very good without any of the snake oil products (not very expensive compared with a Meridian investment) which have taken me to new levels of music appreciation.
The perception of truth remains subjective. For me, Shunyata power, HAF room correction and, to a lesser extent, etherREGEN networking have all been worthwhile additions.
They tend to hark on about different clocks mainly and are then often rebadged, supplied with different psu this covers the EE8 and the Bonn8 as they are made in same factory. The ER is the most unique and bespoke in how it was designed compared to most and tried to identify what’s it tackling but without much evidence it is the issue in the first place we only have their word for it. Melco is a revised Buffalo switch as that’s there sister company god knows if they changed anything, but from what I have read of peoples.feedback they don’t actually like what it does and is one of the most expensive ones around, funnily enough like the Ansus switch in the blind tests posted above.
This is the part that baffles me. They claim a better clock reduces jitter, which they calim improves audio quality, but jitter is only an issue in RTP (Real-Time Protocol) applications such as VoIP. Here, if jitter becomes excessive, data is dropped.
They confuse network jitter with jitter that happens in D/A conversion. Music streamers work over TCP where data is transported in packets, so the jitter argument is nonsense.
Many audiophiles are so obsessive about the next step in sound quality that it becomes an addiction. They’re never satisfied that their system is ‘good enough’, so they will spend inordinate amounts of money on anything that promises an improvement in sound quality, however scientifically infeasible.
If you look around in the universe of possible addictions, this one is quite harmless.
Nothing serious happens if someone wants to convince me about sound improvments caused by his new switch. Harmless nonsense for me, but rather important for others.
Well, some days I feel powerless over the unsettling feeling I need to fix the next thing I realize is off when I figure out what that is. I’ll probably never recognize if I am spending an inordinate amount of money, but life is short and I want to smell the roses because I can’t take it with me. I don’t think its an addiction as my life has not become unmanageable because of it.
While I don’t have a lot of faith, I don’t put a lot of stock in science always giving the right answer. I do believe in what I see, hear and feel, even if I don’t understand it… My life is richer for it.
I don’t know why adding a Mutec master clock to the Etherregen was so transformational but I am inordinately pleased by how it helps those 1’s and 0’s.
Jitter and jitter buffers…
Effectively you need to just not run out of things to “play” in time. If you’ve got audio going in both directions… like a phone call… you run into the issue of such a deep jitter buffer the delay causes issues with conversation. But a one-way conversation, like streaming, it doesn’t matter how deep the buffer is. Heck, load the whole file into the buffer and you, effectively measure 0 network jitter at that point (although it may take a few seconds for a track to start and gapless becomes complicated).
So, yes, these “network jitter” arguments are silly until…
until…
you realize some streamers have such little buffer space it does, indeed, matter. And back to my original point… buying a low latency / low jitter switch to help the poorly designed streamer actually function properly.
It all comes down to chasing a poorly designed “box” and fixing with a device that shouldn’t matter.
But surely, you’re talking about UDP and RTP? My understanding is that most streamers still work over TCP. Your average streamer has a 1Gbit interface, and audio data rate is a mere fraction of that…