Room Treatments?
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Absolutely!
Agreed. No kit upgrades and audiophoolery will get you as large an upgrade as a properly treated room or at least some DRC.
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Kit excluding speakers themselves of course. No amount of room treatment was going to make my Focals sound like my new Wilsons. 
Yeah. My listening room is my great room with a tv, DVR, etc. in it, so the room isn’t the best. Better speakers make the most improvement.
[quote=“Amir_Majidimehr, post:42, topic:11761, full:true”]
Sorry, I assume everyone knows my history of testing of other products from John Swenson. He has produced another project, a USB device called the Regen. As here, I found through my measurements that it degraded performance when used as intended. And again like this round, usage of my lab supply cleaned up the problem. I then met with him and his sales person Alex and rocky mountain audio fest (RMAF). We spent a good hour together and during that time I realized that he doesn’t have any audio measurement tools. And that his day job is a digital designer in unrelated field so he did not have access to such equipment at work either.
Perhaps he now has such measurements and will post the results. Until then, my assumption is that no one would would measure this combo would recommend it for sale to audiophiles. A 30 db increase in mains noise and harmonics is no small matter.
Good USB DACs, even bus powered ones like the iFi DAC that I used, have post regulators that clean up the USB power. There is no reason or excuse for power supply noise to bleed into their output. And this is a low end DAC. I expect high-end audiophile USB DACs to be totally insensitive to such things. Please see the measurements of my Berkeley Alpha USB bridge driving my DAC here:
Those measurements were with my then Sony laptop driving the DAC. We see no evidence of the kind of noise that is present in microRendu. Performance is superb across the board. See this graph:
I would immediately return any high-end USB DAC that is not immune to source/computer USB vagaries, noise, etc.
Indeed by using a low-end DAC here, I am giving these devices every chance to show that they can reduce noise. Yet what we see at best is no difference and at worse, degradation.
The marketing of audio tweaks has done a disservice to consumers by creating such worries and then selling products to fix them. They may be right but where are the measurements? Noise is trivial to measure. Why not demonstrate such facts? Where are all the measurements of laptops having noise injected into high-end DACs? I have not seen such.
What is your DAC? I would start with its measurements through its USB port. If it excellent, then I would not worry whatsoever about using it direct.
You should only use these devices if you need to put them far away from your computer server. Otherwise, you are buying yourself less reliability and extra expense.
[/quote]Sorry to have to ask this again but… You have only use this testing methodology it seems to test two devices designed by John Swenson. You have given your opinion which we all have read, but we have no idea if this testing is valid. You have been asked more than once to please test some other devices, plug in a different DAC for example to see if the results are the same. If your testing cannot differentiate between DAC’s, that means all DAC’s must sound the same. It is important to know if your testing methodology is even valid.
Interesting comments here from Superdad (Alex Crespi of Uptone) re-counting John Swenson’s thoughts on these ASR measurements. I hope JS wades in somewhere officially and blows @Amir_Majidimehr methodology out the water, not least because there does seem to be some hidden agenda going on here. First the Regen and now the mR, both products designed by Swenson which I am absolutely loving in my system. My ears tell me that there is very little ‘noise’ deep down in what I am hearing on either of these products, just as the designer intended.
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I have provided little opinion. I have documented a test procedure with known and top class instrumentation used by major audio magazines such as Stereophile. As with their reviews, manufacturer and others are welcome to conduct their own tests and present their data in conflict. I read yesterday that John has reviewed my results so that part is done. Hopefully they present their measurement data to confirm or dispute what I have done and we go from there. Until then, this is the only objective data that you can touch and smell about this product.
There is a difference between people who make constructive comments and those who try to create dust in the discussion to protect the manufacturer. I am not here to go and chase everything you throw at the dart board. I have a long list of other projects to do. The data as it stands has disputed the manufacturer’s statements of what this product does (i.e. reduce noise whereas it increased it here). And confirmed that otherwise, it has not had ability to improve the DAC. Testing other DACs with other outcomes does not change what has already been presented.
You want more measurements and are on the side of consumers? Go and challenge the manufacturer to do that.
This is all moot at this point any way as my device is no longer functional. The have asked me to return it and that is what I will do. Until I get a fix, this is the end of this project.
I looked up the measurements JA did in Stereophile and it was superb. The amount of distortion products while using USB was incredibly low. And this was JA testing it with some old Mac computer. http://www.stereophile.com/content/auralic-vega-da-processor-measurements#MptLv3uJUEZi102K.97
I would not use any tweaks, etc. to improve on its performance. Unless of course you need to extend its reach through Ethernet as you mention. There I would look for the cheapest, most reliable and manageable option you can find. If microRendu is it, use it with a linear power supply.
Congrats for buying such a high performance DAC! 
I have responded to those comments on ASR forum.
I am disappointed in the tone and style of Alex there. I had actually offered my own time and resources to them to fix the Regen. After such cordial interactions, it was difficult to read him question my competence. But I will live As always, I welcome manufacturer data that corrects any mistakes in my work. That is not a concern.
Anyway, I am going to leave this discussion as the management seems to be blocking some of the content in my posts which I respect. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. Take care you all.
By wades in, do you mean measurements to disprove Amir? Anything less with just be "blow"ing in the wind. I find it rather amusing that some owners are on defence and accusing persons of hidden agendas. It’s your money, you feel it’s an improvement over what you had before enjoy your kit. Sheesh!
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What’s with the ‘seesh’? Bit passive aggressive? Not defensive at all here and like I did say, I have enjoyed the Regen (previously) and I am very much enjoying the mR.
I find this thread (and the one on ASR) just a bit on the bizarre side. While ostentatiously intended to be a reporting of measurements, it sounds far more like a marginally veiled means of trashing John Swenson and a product that has been reported to have a significant sonic and functional benefit to Roon users.
I have no qualms with elaborating on and furthering the measurements, but I see no value to Roon users to have this thread devolve into the negative debate that already exists on ASR. Kudos to @andybob for trying to moderate.
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Agreed, but no poor acoustic environment is going to reveal what your Focals or your Wilsons are capable of.
Agreed, its worth flagging the issue on this site here as many use the MR and other Sonore products but for those who want to continue the debate in more depth why not join in on the ASR site and have the debate in one location, no need to duplicate it here.
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Apart from Moderation by me referred to above, multiple posts by a new user linking to an external domain (the ASR site) triggered the automatic spam threshold in Discourse (the forum software). I’ve changed your account to basic user, which has higher thresholds that should enable you to link without difficulty.
As a general rule Mods don’t discourage external linking to other boards, forums, blogs etc. If people find that happening it will usually be some automatic control in Discourse as above and users should contact a Moderator to resolve it. There are, of course, links on the internet we would block, but I haven’t seen any in this Forum yet.
Some interesting tests, graphs and discussion from manisandher at CA regarding the mR, Roon and HQP.
The link in @AllenB 's post has become inactive. Posting the comment by Alex C referred to below:
Superdad’s Avatar
Superdad - Yesterday, 07:34 PM
Reply
BTW, John took a look at the graphs Amir published with the iFi SMPS and based on the nature of it, believes that most likely Amir is using a single-ended input and probe on his AP unit and that what is being seen is the leakage current of the iFi (all SMPS have caps that couple to AC ground and you get about 49 volts of between the mains ground and the DC output ground). His test system is tied into this and in a sense injecting/conducting the noise into the DAC since the devices are all tied together. If he would use a balanced input and probe with his Audio Precision system that crap would likely go away.
I am sure John will come and explain it a bit better.
This is not the first time Amir has made this sort of error (cough, REGEN, cough) with measurement grounding set up. So many people seem to think that all one needs to make good measurements is a fancy system and probes–when the truth is, it takes skill and understanding, especially when you are trying to measure very low level signals.
But as I said before, whatever he is measuring is not going to tell anyone a thing about how the product sounds.
I think I mentioned elsewhere (just after Chris un-redacted some of the tech stuff with Jesus’s okay) that when John sat in my room and loaded the code into the MicroRendu to enable the “clock injection” (feeding the low-jitter USB hub clock back into the processor board so its USB sub-system would fund from it), my jaw dropped to the floor. What changed will likely never be able to be readily measured (or correlated to what was heard) at the output. In fact it would probably take a dedicated $100K jitter analyzer to even get close to probing in the right spot to be able to point to the change. But it took less than 10 seconds to hear it–and it is just one of many refinements that make the MicroRendu rise above other streamers/renderers/servers/computers for audio.
–Alex C.
I didn’t understand Alex’s comment (my ignorance, not his explanation) so if anyone sees a direct response by John Swanson as suggested by Alex, please feel free to link it here. Others have suggested that Amir may have had a ground loop in his test setup. Is that the same issue as identified by Alex above ?
Made me laugh out loud but guilty as charged.
Just having a quick catch up over at ASR to see where things have gone, and it seems absolutely nowhere. I love the way that they have a resident henchman (sorry moderator it seems) with the aptly named ‘savage’. Complete farce.
Makes you appreciate the mods here
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