Can I connect Roon Nucleus directly to DAC, thus avoiding a streamer?

It seems to be the way of things. For example, Roon’s Nucleus uses a standard Intel NUC mobo.

I"ve often joked to friends and family I should open a side business building custom PCs for audiophiles.

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Anders

This time you’re totally wrong. There is or potentially can exist jitter in Ethernet transfer. It’s actually an requirement in high speed internet specifications. (To have jitter below a threshold).

I’m also sure you are aware of John Swenson’s etherRegen and his white paper.

You can google “White Rabbit Switch” and you will find documents and procedures how to remove and deal with jitter. And phase noise.

There is of cause many types of jitter, so hopefully you will get back on track :grinning:

Below is a sample from a Finisar SFP module.

This is so true, hence why I suggested fiber interface on Nucleus.

Here is a cheap 10GB fiber Ethernet switch “ MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN”

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Well, for what it’s worth, I’ve found a definite improvement in moving from ethernet to USB from my Rock. The Rock heats up a bit more though.

I also found that I could bypass my dac (an old ps audio perfect wave 2 with a bridge 2) and connect directly to the usb input on my McIntosh 6700 - there was no material difference, to my ears anyway. I had connected the dac via xlr to the amplifier using decent cables, incidentally.

I wonder if there is simply an old fashioned advantage in minimising the number of components in the chain from the source through to the speakers. An internal connection must be better than a cabled one; things should be better matched (so a dac built into an amplifier should match the amplifier); you might have one noisy power supply instead of two or three (eg with a router); the longer the chain, the greater potential for timing issues and so on.

In any event, I think its worth trying it out and seeing for yourself. I certainly found things which were contrary to accepted wisdom when I did it.

Cheers
Gareth

But we don’t claim superior sound quality. Fanless yes, but no audio voodoo.

Nucleus is the turnkey fanless Roon OS. It’s the best experience to run Roon.

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But you aren’t sending audio over ethernet. You are sending an error corrected reliable protocol over it. That protocol then has audio encapsulated in it. This is the point of digital streams. They aren’t subject to the errors of the analog domain.

The beauty of digital streams is that you truly can and should ignore what they sit upon.

Once again:

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Yes they are.
Or maybe we speak about two different issues.
I’m not saying there will be bit errors.

People do get better sound from fiber, 10GB Ethernet, or just change to a high quality switch.

Edit:
I read your last chapter in the link now. Yes, we’re not discussing the same issue.

The specifications for 10GB Ethernet require a stressed eye pattern test to pass.
This is a verification of almost zero jitter.

I think the idea of moving to high quality Ethernet and fiber would benefit audiophiles.

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Were measurements ever provided to support their white paper?

That is down to your thought processes deciding what drugs are, alcohol is a drug.

I think these discussions are somewhat pointless. I suggest, if you want to try to improve SQ, you purchase a device with a good return policy and give it a try. Some people hear, or think they hear, differences. Others don’t.

For me, a Roon Nucleus works great, but I can tell no difference in SQ using ethernet or HDMI to Oppo 203. It just doesn’t matter.

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Not yet.
One could probably achieve something equal by implementation of 10GB standards and fiber. And that may also introduce some challenges, depending on your system. (And cost as always).

You may still struggle to get measurements from manufacturers, like stressed eye pattern and properly data sheets. I must admit it’s hard to understand over 600 pages in a standard related to network transfer :grinning:

I found Finisar SFP’s at least seems to have some proper and valid information.
I also think 1310 nm singel mode fiber is a good choice. Mikrotik has a very reasonable 4 port 10GB switch with SFP+ cages.

Unless you building your own PC, no audio equipment as of today support SFP+
There exist SPF+ modules that are compatible with one GB network. I only know about Lumin and Sonore that supports optical SFP (1GB).

I do hope fiber will be more widely adopted in audio network.
Let’s talk in 5 years from now. Who knows, maybe IoT and 5G will take the lead :grinning:

Hi Richard,

I had the same opinion.
MacMini -> (via USB) McIntosh D100 -> MC275

I tried to change.

Despite the fact I added a very expensive layer (Optical Rendu - Sonore), apparently only a “complication” in the connection flow, at the end of the day, the end results, after many comparisons between the two configurations, at least in my case, the second one, with OpticalRendu is much better. It’s worth the additional cost, I don’t know, but it’s better.
MacMini -> network via ethernet -> switcher with FiberOptic -> optical Rendu -> (via USB) D100 -> and finally MC275 (any either effective or potential electrical noise disappeared via FiberOptic).

In addition you can move MacMini (or any NAS) you can put it away from the listening room.

But my final suggestion is trust only your ears, nothing better exists in order to measure the final results.

Enjoy listening to your music.

Sante

Honestly I facepalm every time a post begins with an expertise declaration. There are experts who disagree all of the time. Having expertise in a field is not dispositive. If I ever got cancer I’d not go to one expert who said to me “trust me, I’m an expert”. I’d be sure to get second and third opinions from other experts and probably reject the one who began and ended his analysis with “trust me I’m an expert”. I’m not doubting either your expertise or the validity of what you have written. I just don’t think it’s effective to start with the declaration of expertise.

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I agree. Being an “expert” or “audiophile” does not give you magic hearing. People need to decide for themselves.

There is no such thing as a “golden ear”.

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The OP’s question was answered a long time ago!

Yes, yes, yes, for f#$ksake YES, you can connect directly from Nucleus to DAC via USB and avoid a streamer. Try it. If you like the sound, you are finished and you can just enjoy your music.

The rest of this topic is just…argh…painful.

No one should be so full of themselves that they believe they have the divine expertise to tell anyone else what the other individual can or can’t hear or what they should or shouldn’t hear.

Research your topic of interest, read reviews, ask questions…all good. But then go build your system to a budget YOU are comfortable with, with components YOU like, with a sounds that YOU like, and then tune out all the damn “experts” and sit down and enjoy YOUR music.

Enjoy the damn music. That’s what this is all supposed to be about. The music. The rest is just extraneous noise and hot air…and not via some USB cable or Ethernet cable.

OK, stepping off my soapbox. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

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High end audio is so full of bullsh:t and snake-oil products, it’s the worst hobby for this sort of crap of any I can think of. So lots of people have zero trust or confidence in vendors (there’s no correlation between cost of a product and it’s performance) and the products they peddle. Because of that, you see a lot of people buying things that some of us feel are a complete waste of money and we lash out partly out of frustration that those products exist and partly as a warning, and maybe as a poorly aimed way to try to help, etc.

Sheldon

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Wake me when they happen. I’d like to see them.

I doubt it. The electrical isolation issues you seem so concerned about have already been dealt with in less complicated and less expensive ways.

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Well, except for priests and other societally-blessed shamans. I suppose psychiatrists might also consider they have a sort of secularly divine expertise.

I didn’t intend to argue here, but there is an important point.
@danny is touching on it, but I’ll belabor it.
There is a subjective element to this, but there are parts that are objective and inarguable. It has to do with layers of abstraction — if you don’t take this concept into account you are led astray. And these layers of abstraction are objective and inarguable because they are invented, not measured and discovered. This is how we have built our systems.
If you have studied this at all, you know the OSI Model for networking:
image
What does it mean to define these layers? It isn’t just a pedagogical diagram.
Layers of abstraction means that we can innovate and modify in one layer, as long as it conforms to the abstraction, without harming the overall system.
How is it that the whole network stack continues to work when we replace the physical Ethernet layer with WiFi, or cellular modems, or USB? Because of the abstraction.

And the abstraction isolates the upper layers from the implementation details of the lower layers. This is why @R1200CL is wrong about jitter (which is what triggered this post). There is indeed a concept of jitter in Ethernet, and the White Rabbit thing he mentioned addresses that. But if you read the advertising copy for it (and @R1200CL’s notes), you see that all of this is about the bottom layers of the stack. This jitter may be perfectly valid for the performance and reliability of the Ethernet layers, but it has nothing to do with the jitter we are concerned about for DACs. Because of the layers of abstraction.
If an implementation of Gigabit Ethernet suffers from out-of-spec jitter, it will fail to deliver its functionality, it will not meet the abstraction, but that has nothing to do with jitter in the payload, the data stream jitter that may cause distortion in the DAC output.
The issue of Ethernet jitter is not wrong, but it is irrelevant.
Similarly, it has been popular in the recent year to explain that the “digital” signal Is actual an analog electrical signal that can be distorted by various flaws. Again, true but irrelevant. If we want to go crazy, we might say that the signal has fine grained noise because it is made up of electrons. Silly: it isn’t silly for physical reasons (even though the electron noise is 380 dB down), it is silly for engineering reasons because the abstraction hides that noise.

Problems in the bottom layers do not shine through to the top layers.

This doesn’t mean that problems in the bottom layers are not significant. (If a backhoe cuts the Layer 1 Physical cable, the top layers don’t work.) But layer 1 jitter has nothing to do with Layer 7 jitter (actually the digital to-analog conversion itself is above layer 7, it isn’t a network function at all, it’s a consumer of this stack.)

Note that I did not say that network implementations and cable have no audible effect. I take no position on that, I this post. What I am saying is that any audible improvement from a “USB cleanser” is not caused by jitter reduction.

If you want to see the effect of a femtoclock ISB cleanser on a modern DAC, don’t look at this diagram because these DACs are fed straight from a PC (Audio Science Review):

Those are thousand dollar DACs. Here is a $400 DAC:

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