Ethernet "treatment"?

No, my analogy is appropriate. Both situations involve “subjective experience” – seeing or hearing things – that may lack any reasonable explanation and, upon investigation, may not be repeatable for others or even for the subject himself.

AJ

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If people say their audio experience is increased, then in their subjective reality their audio experience is increased. Presumably, they’re not lying.

You can’t investigate the subjectivity of someone else.

Yeah, I already said that above.

AJ

Do you not get that I am not arguing against that? I doubt that anyone in this thread is arguing against that.

But you seem to be arguing that any “subjective experience” is “real.” And anyone who expresses his “subjective experience” – no matter how outlandish – should be accepted at face value because it is “real” to him.

Well, once that “subjective experience” leaves his mouth, it is out there in the world. It ceases to be solely his. Others are involved, and they have every right to express their “subjective experience” of extreme skepticism.

AJ

I see. So your, and others, involvement in this whole discussion is to prevent someone from making the mistake of believing those who would proselytize on the behalf of expensive cabling. Very altruistic of you, apart from any overwrought emotional response of others.

Again, your are setting up a straw man argument by accusing me of stating all subjective experiences are valid. I keep qualifying my statements by referring to the topic at hand, i.e. auditory experience.

Of course, subjective experiences are real. They’re real subjective experiences.

I tire of this hair splitting, now’s the time for you to get your last words in.

Yes that’s what the forum objectivist always falls back on once you prove a measured difference. First they say there’s no possible way there can be a measured difference. Then once you prove there is, it’s always a difference that’s beyond the threshold of audibility. This is why having the ability to hear is a great asset in this hobby.

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[quote=“Slim_Fishguttz, post:139, topic:26874”]
attempt by @evand to poison the waters.
[/quote]troll, much?

I’ve tried a few USB cables and couldn’t tell the difference. I’m using Belkin 3 foot USB so it’s 1/5th length of the standard. At 3 foot there isn’t much to go wrong and it’s a screened cable.

My issue with the reviewers on Ethernet is that 1. I know I know more about Ethernet (it’s part of the toolbox that I make my living with) and I’m pretty sure 2. I know more about audio. 3. I know there isn’t audible difference in Ethernet in the ways they describe it. That being they are attributing noise floor, channel separation/cross talk, FR response, which are all realtime analog to a non-realtime digital.

It’s entirely possible that when you are listening to music over the network that any given point in time what you are hearing was loaded 15 seconds prior. The Ethernet cable has ZERO to do with what you are listening to. It’s being played back out of cache.

IMO Michael Lavorgna, René van Es, Scott Hull, John Darko, Steve Plaskin, may or may not be purposeful liars, but they are liars none the less. They are 100% making stuff up. Now they may think they are hearing differences that patently can’t be there, and I believe that THEY believe they are hearing something but the bottom line is they won’t do it ears only.

If they can’t trust their ears neither can anyone else. I don’t believe a word they have to say about any piece of gear they’ve reviewed. There is a Home Theater Geeks interview with Lavorgna with him in his listening room and over the cheap boom mic on his headset you can hear the insanely resonant room. It’s hilarious how tin eared the guy is.

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It would have to be measured as a transfer function of the DAC. Benchmark Audio showed their DAC could take very noisy input over a 100 foot cable 10 + years ago and produce perfectly constructed audio. I have another way: I offer $5000 to someones $1000 that they can’t hear the difference.

Since it’s a slam dunk there is an easy $5k sitting out there.

Yes having knowledge about how Ethernet works, having captured the output of a DAC and performed FFT analysis myself with a 315ft @ $0.30 a foot and 3 foot @ $233 a foot gives me all the confidence I need.

This is a debate about intellectual humility / honesty. I’ve done the cable roulette, I’ve setup the data capturing, ran the calculations, compared the output, I done the research and my efforts and the papers I’ve posed line up with each other.

I’ve stated under what conditions I would be willing to change my mind. What are yours?

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Sure it makes a difference. What happens when you remove their awareness and their self delusion goes away with it? We are talking about recommendations that should be, in part, based on integrity, not just sighted experience.

Look: Bottom line is you are stating the subjective experience can not be obtained without pre-ordained knowledge of what is what in the signal chain.

If these items make a difference they should easily be placed in the chain without knowledge of what it is and have the same opinion stated. Sighted evaluation is not a prerequisite for subjective audio evaluation.

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So there’s that (altruism can be real, yes?), and perhaps more important, there’s the question of the best way to allocate limited resources in furtherance of the goal of improving one’s audio system.

If you have unlimited time and funds, then there’s really no problem in trying every audiophile tweak that captures your fancy (and I don’t object to that — I’ve done a bit of that myself). But if you don’t have unlimited resources, then some sort of overall understanding about what might get you the most bang for the buck (not to mention the minute) is helpful. Approaching the goal of better SQ via pure trial-and-error (which is where extreme subjectivism leads) is problematic as a methodology.

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And peace be to you, too.

I am open minded enough to have my opinions changed by objective testing or double blind testing. But to date in this and many other forums, all I have seen is subjective experiences or claims made by companies with agendas driven by profit. The mind is powerful thing, and it is quite easy to trick itself into believing things that cannot be proven objectively.

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Just some information and observations for those to consider:

I’m a Network Engineer, and have formal college Engineering, yet I’m stumped as to why a power cable can make a difference - and I’m not talking about removing EMI or other induced noise. I was a non-believer until I tried it and sure enough, felt stupefied.

Network traffic is 1’s and 0’s, and technically so is the digital output from a source device to a DAC, so you’d think something as stupid as a USB cable wouldn’t make a difference – yet, again, my formal training and knowledge proved wrong and a quality USB cable improved dynamics. It wasn’t subtle either.

So now we’re at the network cable, and my logical brain totally agrees with you @Mike_Plugge , however I haven’t tried out any fancy “CAT 7” cables, which all in the business know that “CAT 7” has not been recognized by TIA/EIA and there are still come issues to agree upon for this “standard”. The only thing I can think would cause issues would be bad grounding and linking up a unit plugged in a basement wired directly to your unit in your rack upstairs (creating a ground loop – assuming the NIC interface isn’t properly isolated all the way through to the decode chain).

As for packets, they can be fragmented, reduced in size due to a provider screwing with MTU’s on your local side, which might put a bit more processing requirements on your system receiving the packets due to buffering, reassembling, and retransmits, etc. We know that a heavy load on a networked unit can decrease its sound quality (at least it’s been informally accepted by the folks over at Computer Audiophile). But a local cable isn’t going to resolve that. Again, I can see some edge cases where your network connection can affect sound quality, but primarily at your local side. I still don’t think with all the advances we have in playback such as “play from memory (RAM) only”, which buffers the complete song into RAM and plays it back there, and other buffering technologies that a 5-8 foot (or less) “CAT 7” cable can improve sound quality as a standard (discarding cases of replacing a bad cable/connector).

But again, everyone in this business says, “Can you hear the difference”, and “if so, you’re the only one that matters as you hear the improvement” – Lots of snake oil gets sold that way (not saying these “CAT 7’s” are snake oil – put down the pitchforks please.

Interestingly enough, I’ve read a few reviews over the last year that have said the device they were reviewing sounded better when fed directly via ethernet instead of USB (one product that immediately comes to mind is Meridian’s Sooloos, which is apropos to this site). I highly doubt those reviewers had anything special about their networks that were “made for audio”.

When you remove one’s awareness they die. :sunglasses:

Not at all. I am saying that one’s subjective experience is one’s subjective experience, no matter what does or doesn’t cause it.

For the most part, I’ve had a blast. Checking out of this post.

A visitor of the home of in Tisvilde asked to Niels Bohr (a Theoretical Physicist better than me) if he really believed a horseshoe above his door brought him luck.
“Of course not … but I am told it works even if you don’t believe in it”, was the Bohr reply.
Same for cables.
People (those who trust in measurements) is urged to have a look to http://archimago.blogspot.it/.

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archimago does a nice job. Good stuff.

Yup, read his stuff. Not to get too off-topic, but he does try to be as analytic as possible. Occasionally, he misses – no, more like rarely. I like his approach at turning an MQA signal into PCM to compare with the std PCM original – However, we now know that there are some files out there from the same source in DSD/PCM and in MQA that can be compared (see https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-laas). I’d like to see his analysis done on those files. All said, I’ve heard MQA in a lot of sessions and for what it does, you need a time-aligned, highly-resolving (expensive) system to get all the benefits.

But in all reality, the crazy tweaks we use are sometimes our own failure to admit that we need to replace a certain piece of gear and either don’t have the money, or don’t want to spend it. And sadly, we can spend just as much as the tweaks add up. Stillpoints, special “Cat 7” cables, etc.etc. (again, not bashing these things - I happen to have Stillpoints).

Back to the OP, the idea of sending data over an optical cable, thus isolating the two devices and keeping out ground loops was done with TOSLINK, but now everyone uses a non-optical format for transmitting digita audio data – be it twin-AES (to support rates above 192K like all the DSD variants), USB or plan old coax.

And to add onto that, the only reason we use optical in networking is because of distance, interference AND speed and not just bandwidth – in networking bandwidth and throughput are not the same (speed you ask? - yes, see https://www.quora.com/Does-electricity-travel-at-the-speed-of-light).

So here’s an experiment for Archimago: create a completely copper CAT 6x network and a parallel optical network (both connected to the same source server/SAN. Plug them both up to whatever networked DAC that will accept both formats (if not, build one – it’s not that hard with commodity hardware and a really nice DAC Card in a server 4U Chassis). Then compare the sound of the two. Prove us all wrong (or right) :slight_smile: And then for the “last 8 feet” switch out the copper networked side with one of these special “CAT 7” cables and then shock and awe us all haha (not joking, just thinking it would be a hoot to read the results).

Oh, and @Teodoro_Marinucci - I love that Bohr story. Thanks, made my day.

It’s a waste of time and effort contributing more to this thread. In fact contributing more to any audio forum at all is a fruitless venture and a total waste of time and effort. This is why you rarely see anyone who is actually behind any noteworthy product in the industry contribute to forums. Much better to just hire a team highly trained at blowing smoke up asses to captivate all the clowns.

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It’s not hair splitting. It’s pointing out the fallacy of substituting the term ‘subjective’ in place of ‘self delusion’.

If I take a person that has made superfluous statements about two cables that can’t be possible and they basically end up recanting in a bias controlled evaluation they aren’t subjective any longer. If you can’t get that point then I understand how you think a hair is being split.

I agree it’s a waste of your time if all you are going to offer is conjecture. I’ve offered hard cash for subjectivist that thinks they can hear a difference do it in a bias controlled fashion.

I’ve yet to see a manufacturer of an network attached streamer offer native SFP. Are they all mistaken?

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