Melco £1999 ethernet switch

I can find a 1000 people that think the Earth is flat.

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As I see it, it’s mainly because of “answers” like this that you’re getting what you perceive as “a steam of bile”. Your strategy of deliberately misunderstanding well-written posts is highly unfair. (You knew full well @hwz was talking about the Melco switch! Why didn’t you respond to his [IMO very convincing] line of argument?)

Why are you “sharing” your “perspective” if you don’t want others to comment on it? This is a thread about whether super expensive ethernet switches make sense or not. Seriously, what were you expecting?

Nobody in this thread has ever claimed that pasta and lobster taste exactly the same…:wink:

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I like turtle

Nor has anyone here ever claimed that all ethernet switches taste the same…

Keep your fish, I’ll have RibEye.

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I wonder what will happen when Audio Precision or someone can measure these things… :grinning:

Thanks and it’s even EASIER than that… Go ahead and get the cheap $15 GBe switch from Amazon.

Connect the NAIM streamer to it. I believe NAIM can buffer something like 30-60 seconds of 16/44.1.

Simply have someone plug / un-plug while the participant is blind to this fact.

If they can’t tell when the cable is unplugged then you don’t even need to bother with getting a fancy switch.

Yeah, but no true audiophile would sully their rig with anything less that 24/192. :slight_smile:

With my (slightly more involved) test, the true audiophile can use as high-res a source as he wants, and take as much time as he needs, to identify the switch being used.

This point I keep reading about buffers - when you unplug an ethernet cable/switch etc… as a valid test to tell these differences or bunkum. Once you unplug the cable/disconnect the switch - its immaterial about the network at that point as the data/music bits are already in the buffer of the dac/streamer aren’t they?
Is the valid test, once the buffer stops, to then swap what ever cable device or not at that point - i.e. start playing the music again and see if you can hear any difference?

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I don’t believe your logic work for this. In the case of one manufacturer they speak about ‘leakage currents’. They are referring to a pervasive and constant analog effect making it over the cable and introducing ‘phase noise’ or ‘clock float’ of the DAC section.

So this is prevalent only when the cable is plugged in. So it doesn’t matter if you have 60 seconds of buffered audio (some streamers) or the entire track buffered like you can in JRiver.

Just by virtue of being plugged in you are compromised. They will even maintain that if you are playing a file off of local non-volatile storage that you are still compromised if any data is going over the Ethernet port because they can’t argue that leakage current only exist when you are transmitting data that contains audio vs data that contains something like a 4GB ISO or Family Photos.

So, I guess the noise is not part of the data stream, it’s in addition to the data stream.


Correct. If a manufacturer made the argument that noise is in the data they would get denounced even more voraciously then they currently do.

So they have to argue the layer 1 of the OSI model angle and fortunately with buffered systems it’s easy enough as I showed in my video in another thread here to create redundant links that allow us to make swaps with non-stop/hit-less fail over.

And, as I pointed out elsewhere, even if this were true, it wouldn’t matter. Because any decent DAC will filter out any RF noise, that might be present, as a function of the way delta-sigma DACs operate. This is something that can be and has been measured.

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All audiophile discussions ends up about cables anyway.

Even more unfortunate it seems to always start with willfully uncorrected ignorance.

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@pl_svn Yes, there are a lot of things going on. Psychoacoustics, anchoring, confirmation bias, halo effect (nice cables!), observer bias, and sometimes even Dunning-Kruger effect. A full menu.

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sure: all sort of things in every possible domain but the one you experts already know everything about :stuck_out_tongue:

those are not fish :wink:

Without the risk of further controversy, there are different DAC technologies to Delta-Sigma.

Some vendors use R2R Ladder DACs (with and without Oversampling), some use FPGA based solutions.

Everyone’s noise environment is going to be different, because everyone’s configuration, environment and setup is different, and therefore the application of different technologies, solutions will have different effects. And at the end of the day,we have to listen to these systems to make the final assessment.

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