last mile ethernet

[Rufus McDufus]

Agree. What some people tend to misunderstand is that many of us actaully enjoy this fiddling. Sure there's a big element of psychological difference involved but then again speaking for myself my system is miles better than it was even a year ago and many of the changes have been of the 'woo-woo' variety. The grounding boxes in particular were responsible for fixing my mainly 'broken' & hugely variable power supply.
I'm a system engineer by trade (when I get my lazy ass out to work!) and have networking qualifications so I was hugely sceptical about the benefits of network cables making a difference. To be honest I still find it hard to determine a difference on my own system but on a hugely transparent and high resolution system like Guillaume's I can hear a difference with different cables. It should just be '1s & 0s' but we're talking a mixture of digital and analogue devices here (unlike an entirely digital system) with a massively sensitive analogue components, or rather massively sensitive measuring devices monitoring the analogue components (our ears). It shouldn't make a difference but it appears to me that it does.

Oh, and the simplicity of Devialet and reducing the box count was what attracted me to it in the first place. Much easier to isolate problems or test new bits of equipment or cables even. In my case it made it much easier to fix that 'broken' power supply too.

Hello
I completely agree with you but you cannot force people/high-end journalist to do blind tests.... and make them stop "dreaming" too.
When I am reading all those posts I am impressed by many people spending not only money but lots of time tweaking/testing different parts (not only cables but also batteries, hardware/software, file format, hard disk, rack…) to fine-tune their system. And their technical knowledge is pretty high too. But for those people it is a real pleasure not only to listen music but also to test/tweak and constantly add/remove a piece in their system to improve it. Whether the improvement is only a perception or a reality is another question, but the passion to test/tweak/improve is a reality. At least this is how I feel about many posts I can read… and I am very happy to read them and learn from their experiences. There is obviously a lot of subjectivity in what people think but again some people have earing capabilities/musical education different/better than other so this is why we have a forum to talk about it.
With Devialet as a one box system, there are less tweaks to do since there is theoretically nothing to add except the speakers and one cable from the computer (USB) or the router (Lan cable) to listen music (recommended by Devialet). At least this is how I use my Devialet (I wish the Wifi would be flawless... and no cable would be necessary).
But still I wish there would be more blind tests listening sessions too….
Regards
philoouu

Great post!

Cheers

Guillaume