Roon / streaming simplified

My experience is that price does not correlate with quality, particularly in the audio field. There are lots of people who want to sell you unnecessary stuff at wildly inflated prices.

If it was a problem you heard before adding the Jitterbug, and adding it fixed the problem, great!

If not, remember that the folks who prey on audiophile consumers deliberately create that fog of FUD – fear (of missing out, hence FOMO), uncertainty (about what is and isn’t necessary), and doubt (about what advice to take) – in order to scare folks into buying their products.

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And frequently, the higher the price, the better it sounds. At least, that’s the expectation bias if not always real.

The cheaper I can get a given component for the better it sounds to me :smiley:. Love 2nd hand hifi.

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Yeah, people hate to admit they’ve been taken to the cleaners.

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An Ethernet connection is for both internet connectivity and intranet (.i.e. within one’s home network) connectivity. Roon uses both, but it sounds like you don’t have a home network, so intranet connection wouldn’t apply in your case.

Your Mac is connected to your Mytek, you know all you need to know. The rest is just fussiness.

BTW - any place on this forum is a place to ask any question. No questions are stupid and I’ve never seen any post that was treated that way.

As far as acronyms go, Google is your friend.

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I’ve got one

I took it to my friend’s place, popped it on the USB SSD - it made a significant and very audible improvement. 3 of us, genuinely surprised

We took it off, left it off for a couple of hours while trying different cables, switches etc - put it back and it had the same impact. Far greater than any of the other things tried, all of them more expensive

The system; NUC, Aurelic G2.1, Lyngdorf 3400, Lyngdorf DP1 speakers, Lyngdorf 2200 driving AE passive subs
I highly resolving system costing many £000s

A complete bargain and welcome surprise at 50 odd quid

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You’ve got a $4800 streamer and it’s putting noise out over its USB connection? And the Lyngdorf is, what, $6500? And it can’t suppress the noise on its USB input, but a $50 gadget can? Truly, more is less.

Speaking of “more”, I’d believe this more if it wasn’t an earwitness anecdote, of course. Don’t suppoe you have measurements of this alleged noise reduction?

£50/$50
Try it
Take/send it back if it doesn’t work
Give it away if you can’t be bothered
It works

Sure it does.

Excellent, thanks Bill, nice to know you’re now sure

But please tell me (and others, I’d guess…) how on earth did you manage to get one, test it (A/B, blind?) and, most importantly, measure it so quickly?!

Really robust and objective work, well done

Luckily, the objective measurements have already been done. And the conclusion is:

But it is always good to confirm our understandings using precise measurements. Measurements that can dig way, way deeper than levels we can hear. There, across four different DACs, there is no difference that can be detected in any measurement from distortion to noise and jitter. The only differences were seen were negative in the form of tiny output level and increased jitter in Modi 2.

Bottom line, the AudioQuest Jitterbug does one only one thing: it filters your bank account, reducing your balance by $60. If anyone can demonstrate that it makes an audible difference in a controlled blind test, I will donate US $600 to the charity of their choosing.

Please save your money folks. Give it to Charity. Go have a great dinner. Anything but rewarding people who build these useless devices that attempt to solve problems that don’t exist.

You should talk to him. Tell him your story. Get the $600.

Look at it this way. The USB output of the Auralic is designed to be connected via a certified USB cable to the USB input of the Lyngdorf. What you’re actually doing, by adding the Jitterbug, is to construct an uncertified who-knows-if-it-works USB cable and using that to connect the two. Why would anyone expect good things from doing that?

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Furthermore, from the same source -

Hey, it was only $60. On this forum, to doubt someone’s experience about the efficacy of such devices is to call them either fools or liars. Is it worth it?

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Actually, it’s up to $70 now. And, bear in mind, I’m doubting everyone’s experience, so no one need feel special. :slight_smile:

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Not your work, measurement or listening then, Bill? Never mind

I took it to my friend’s place, popped it on the USB SSD” into the NUC (I didn’t say) - which then goes to the Aurelic

I’ve no idea how/why it made a difference, but it did

And for 50 quid (US$66) for 3 of us to have some fun (which is what this hobby is all about, after all) for a couple of hours, it remains a bargain.

Like so many of these SQ devices, it doesn’t matter. If you think it works, then it does.

Which one? I find that interesting because the web site says if using it with USB 3 connection…, well here ya go some copypasta:

However, when partnering JitterBug with hard drives that use the USB 3.0 interface, performance will be decelerated to High-Speed USB. If you are using this type of hard drive to store your music library, then it would be best to forgo the JitterBug altogether so that the hard drive takes full advantage of the USB 3.0 speed.

Here’s John Atkinson’s Stereophile review (spoiler: he likes it, too):

I could find no significant effect that the JitterBug had on the analog signals output by three of the DACs I had to hand. Yet with those DACs and others, I heard an improvement in sound quality that I can attribute only to the JitterBug. I hate when that happens!

Sad to say, in almost all the tests, I could find no measurable difference between the analog signals, whether there were two, one, or no JitterBugs associated with the USB ports in use.

Audio voodoo!

Note that apparently you can plug it into any USB port on your computer, need not be in the “obvious” audio path.

Yes, it was a fun experiment, sounded (very surprisingly) good - and cost the square root of FA - the beer cost more and we had a lovely time :grinning:

I haven’t tried it in my main system as I put a SSD inside my Nucleus - the USB SSD I originally bought it for is now the backup drive, so there’s no obvious use for it

Dunno, it was originally into an ASRock mini PC when I used it on my HK system (pre Nucleus)

The SSD (hang on, runs downstairs…) is a Samsung T5 (1TB I guess?). It’s USB C on the drive and blue so must be '3 on the fat end. I guess it’s a bit overkill for a backup drive, ho ho

Did it (the Jitterbug) make a difference into the PC or Nucleus? - can’t remember, so I’d hazard ‘a bit’ or ‘nothing’ as it wasn’t strikingly memorable. They were feeding KEF LS50Ws.

Oh! I’m not answering the question, soz. The USB drive into the NUC on my mate’s system - I don’t know, didn’t look. Just plugged it in, listened, were very surprised. Took it out, put it back in. Still surprised. Laughed and joked about ‘not possible’, ‘confirmation bias’, ‘getting old’ etc. etc. Took it out, tried several other changes (switch, LPS, Net cable, USB cable). Same surprise later when we retried it

Did I waste 50 quid, nope - I played with it in HK, brought it back to England, played with it at my mate’s, we were pleasantly surprised with the result and a good time was had. By us, directly.

No measurements were taken in the making of this adventure :rofl:

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We tried that later, when assessing USB cables, specifically the JB put into the spare USB - nothing to get excited about