Best linear power supply for Nucleus now?

I didn’t say “all digital signals are analog”, that was all you, I said digital signals do not exist, they are constructs derived from electrical impulses which are analog.

Well, are they? You might as well say, electrical impulses are electrons (or maybe holes) moving in wires, which brings it back to discrete elements again. This is pointless argument: the signals are digital; to concentrate on the way the signals are delivered, whether via smoke signals or homing pigeon or signal mirrors or even electrical impulses, is sheer flummery.

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One could argue that RFC 1149 leads to bird sh!t on the porch even though the digital bits are transmitted cleanly without unrecoverable error :wink:

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Yes, that’s all they are.

No one is debating data integrity, it’s about timing errors and distortion as a result of the analog transport that affect SQ.

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I am aware. The analogy to this in RFC 1149 is the bird sh!t

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“Analog” versus “digital” are really an audio construct – they have no real meaning at the physical level, where “continuous” versus “discrete” rule the world. In general, everything – matter, movement, light – is continuous waveforms, because that’s the kind of universe we exist in (or at least, that’s the kind of universe we perceive as existing in, to the best of our perceptions). In the real world, the things we call “discrete” are really just continuous simulations of an ideal concept. So to say that this or that is really analog – that is, continuous – is to say nothing, because everything is analog.

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Analog and digital transports function in fundamentally different ways. That’s what doesn’t seem to click. Timing is completely irrelevant before the D/A stage inside the DAC; what matters is the order of bits, which is part of the data integrity and it’s thus preserved.

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I’ve been a part of this thread for a couple of years. Thank you @Henry_McLeod and @Marian for your input and at this point I am going to stop tracking this conversation. I’m sure that my hearing is irrelevant regarding the physics of anything but I’m still listening and enjoying my system.

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And what about if you replace a cable with an expensive one and it sounds worse? That’s happened to me - certainly my ‘bias’ would have been for it to sound better after spending that money, but that didn’t happen.

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I don’t know the cable in question, but ironically there’s a simple & practical explanation as to why an ‘expensive’ cable ‘might’ sound worse and that’s because in an attempt to differentiate itself from a cheaper cable the manufacturers have deviated from an official specification and in effect produced a ‘faulty’ cable (at least for the intended purpose).

Unnecessary shielding causing ground loops or acting as an aerial is one common example.

In short you’re (possibly) noticing the effect of a cable deviating from specification which in turn is producing an actual, real world audible difference.

That’s very different to a bias for what you know or think is a more expensive (or cheaper) cable when comparing two cable that actually sound identical or rather, equally have no affect on sound quality.

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Nope. Where Roon is concerned, all the way up to the endpoint it’s RAAT (TCP/IP). Everything is buffered/checksummed. Time distortions are irrelevant.

Common mode and differential noise are rejected via ethernet.

Stop applying analogue thinking to digital data transmission. 1s and 0s really are just 1s and 0s…

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If you want to believe 0s and 1s are being transmitted over an RG59 and not analog square waves you are free to do so, but is very simple, electrical noise is carried across copper wires, a fact that has nothing to do with data integrity or buffering.

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I think we all understand that elecrical noise can be carried across copper wires. But there are three questions I haven’t seen answered.

  1. Does any electrical noise exist? I have seen no evidence of this.
  2. If it does exist, and is carried across wires, does it affect the device on the other end of the wire in some way? Again, I’ve seen no evidence of this.
  3. If it exists, and is carried across, does it somehow also affect a higher-level system, the digital transport layer, which is engineered specifically to be robust in the face of that kind of noise? I’ve seen no evidence of this, either.

I think if anyone could produce actual evidence of any of these three things, instead of this incessant hand-waving about “noise”, everyone else would stop protesting.

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How does a poisoned Nucleus affected by ‘some noises’ from some ‘bad’ power supply re-transmit those ‘contaminated’ noises via RAAT to your streamer then?

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We’re talking ethernet here though, not RG59…

It’s also copper.

Do not confuse layer 1 with layer 7.

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What layer is a RAM buffer or a shift register?

Indeed, though ethernet employs transformer coupled differential noise rejection and choked common mode noise rejection. RG59 doesn’t…