"Audiophile Grade" Ethernet Switches - The new generation

[octaviars]

While we're swapping incredulity: another interesting story on the AS thread(s) (I can't remember which one exactly) was the debacle about the v2 firmware.  To summarise, among all the glowing initial reports there were a few people who reported drop-outs with the ER in place.  Turns out that this was an engineering mistake to do with support for Energy-Efficient Ethernet, which was fixed by a firmware update.  No problem, it's a new product, and these things happen...

Then there was a stream of reports that the new firmware caused the ER to sound significantly worse than the original firmware.  We then had the very peculiar situation where Superdad on that forum, who I understand is the owner/boss of UpTone, said that people couldn't trust their listening tests between v2 and v1 firmware, because their aural memory was too short and they were in reality comparing the new firmware with what they *thought* the old firmware sounded like, and that was not a valid basis for comparison.  I'll leave you to ponder the irony of that.  Really, you couldn't make it up.

(Needless to say, if anyone thinks I've misunderstood or misconstrued what happened, let me know.)

I think Uptone could release a new firmware saying it will do this and that but there are really no changes done to it and you will still get reports about how bad/good the "sound" is from this new firmware....

I dont think we will ever see any measurments from Uptone providing evidence what actually is happening....and why, they dont need to do that as they have allready sold 750 of them without any measurments.

As a owner of one I still have two concerns about it (Uptones measurments is not one of them) and one is that it is not sent to a third party to measure it how it complies to EMC rules and it is not certified (CE for us in Europe) and second is the heat I dont want it to incinerate.

[thumb5]

While we're swapping incredulity: another interesting story on the AS thread(s) (I can't remember which one exactly) was the debacle about the v2 firmware. 

That can be found here:
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic...nt=1007914

Thanks, Antoine.

[Desert38]

I just got my Uptone Audio Etherregen yesterday and finally had some time today to sit and listen.  I replaced a Linear Solution OCXO switch 2.0 with the ER.  I have a fairly simple set up and was skeptical about the ER.  Well I am not a skeptic anymore.  I sat and listened for 4 straight hours burning through my favorite tracks.  Every one of them was much more engaging and life-like.  Even my significant other who could care less about sound quality commented from the other room that I must have made another change because everything was sounding so much better.  I have read most of the posts at Audiophilestyle and some from ASR and I suggest that the skeptics order one and try it for 30 days.  If you don't like it or you don't hear a difference, then return it.  I don't understand how some people can be so critical without using it in their system.  For the money, it is by far the best upgrade that I have ever made.

[David A]

@David A - We've already discussed the ASR test in enough detail for both of us to understand how we feel about it, I think, so there is no need to re-hash that.

First of all I am not "throwing stones" at the listening reports, as you seem to suggest.  As I've said, I have nothing to say about the subjective sound quality offered by ER or whether it might be affected by the firmware update.  My point is solely about Alex Crespi's response - it is unreasonable for him to try to make excuses for negative listening reports by pointing fingers at the method which was also used to generate positive listening reports.  If he does not trust the method by which the positive reports were obtained he should have said so when they first started coming in.  If he does trust it, he should not be making excuses for the negative reports.  Simple as that.

First, I agreed with you about the fact that Alex Crespi's response was unreasonable given that he was now discounting the reports of people whose reports he had previously been happy to accept plus one could infer an element of "I'm telling you that there isn't an audible difference for you to hear here" in his response.

My point in analysing the ASR test was to point out that Amirm had conducted a test that was more than open to criticism and then said to readers that if they heard a difference then they needed to go back and conduct a far more stringent test than he had conducted and that they would then find that, like him, they heard no difference. That's equally unreasonable and also contains a solid element of "I'm telling you that there isn't an audible difference for you to hear here". I'm quite happy to see you criticise Uptone for their response, but ASR took a similar approach to anyone who wants to report hearing something different to what they hear. I simply made the point that neither of them are doing themselvces any good in my view with that approach.

From my perspective I don't think we've discussed the ASR test in detail nor am I certain that we both understand how the other feels about it. In may view what I discussed was the fact that I don't believe the test conducted supports the conclusion drawn. I don't believe that the fact that no difference was found on a couple of parameters in a comparison of the the ER to one other switch goes anywhere near enabling anyone to claim that there is no difference period, which means that you won't be able to find a difference on any other parameter with the switch the ER was compared to, and also that you won't find any difference with any other switch you wish to compare the ER to. 

To make my position as clear as I can, I'm saying that to date no one has produced any compelling evidence to conclusively establish whether or not the ER works or doesn't work. I don't think anyone is in a position to claim to "know" whether it works or doesn't work. People on both sides are making statements based on their own beliefs and assumptions and people on both sides are making mistakes in their reasoning. What stands out for me, so far, is actually the owners' reports of what they have heard. Yes, the reliability of those reports can be questioned on several counts including expectation bias but taken as a whole I find it reassuring that they're not all saying the same thing, that some people are reporting hearing something different to others but often reaching a similar overall assessment to those reporting something different, the fact that a small number of people have not been happy with it, and that there has been some dispute over whether the firmware update makes an audible difference. You don't expect everyone to say the same thing about a device that has been proven to work. I think the variety I see in the reports I've read is actually a reason to believe that it could be doing something (note that I didn't say "is doing something"). On the other hand I find that some of the comments made by both Uptone and ASR ring warning bells for me. On a scale of 0 to 10 basically my assessment of the usefulness/reliability of what I've read so far from Uptone, from ASR, and from the owners who have commented on their experience is Uptone 5, ASR 3 (marked down for serious logic failure in drawing the conclusions he has drawn from the results of the only measurements we've seen), and owners 6.5 because while we can question their reports those reports do come across as honest attempts to describe what their listening experience has been rather than as attempts to justify their purchase. Over time I'm becoming more impressed by what I read from the owners than what I read from anyone else. Yes, owners can have a bias towards seeing their product in a positive light but look at the number of class action law suits that owners have brought against manufacturers and the willingness of owners to criticise products (how much criticism does Devialet get here from time to time?) and I think it iw quite obvious that owners are capable of reaching reliable assessments about the products they buy and that the kinds of bias that critics associate with ownership definitely are not capable of making people think that anything they own is perfect. Owners can actually be a much better source of info about a product than anyone else and I'm seeing signs of that here.

[thumb5]

@David A Thanks for explaining your point of view in more detail, I found that interesting.  I agree that there is clearly a lot of noise surrounding ER, to some extent driven by marketing, emotion, assumption and bad reasoning.  I respectfully disagree with your analysis of the evidence about whether or not ER "works", partly because I believe we have a different idea of what that means.

[baconbrain]

Interesting:

https://www.psaudio.com/askpaul/connecti...-ethernet/

[audio_engr]

Interesting:

https://www.psaudio.com/askpaul/connecti...-ethernet/

Thank you @baconbrain

So, Paul says its doesn't matter ...

Some couple of months back both @David A and I realised that for many-many months, we were running our streaming systems on WiFi. And when we returned back to Ethernet, it did make a helluva lot of difference for the better ... Now I am awaiting @David A to tell me how good his ER works in his system (once he gets his) and very possibly I too will follow. 

Hmm! ... I differ from Paul on this ! 

[Antoine]

Ehh, 4,5 minutes and all he said was that modern WiFi routers have plenty of bandwidth for an audio stream, that there’s a small difference in noise between ethernet and WiFi and that he’s heard differences between ethernet cables.

[baddog]

I am reminded of this again when reading some of the related postings on some other forums, but I just wanted to thank everyone for their ability to share and discuss respectfully their thoughts and differing points of views on a variety of different topics. This is what makes this Forum and its participants very unique in my humble opinion. I have learned alot, even if I don't always agree.

[David A]

Interesting:

https://www.psaudio.com/askpaul/connecti...-ethernet/

Thank you @baconbrain

So, Paul says its doesn't matter ...

Some couple of months back both @David A and I realised that for many-many months, we were running our streaming systems on WiFi. And when we returned back to Ethernet, it did make a helluva lot of difference for the better ... Now I am awaiting @David A to tell me how good his ER works in his system (once he gets his) and very possibly I too will follow. 

Hmm! ... I differ from Paul on this ! 

Arup,

I only used the wifi input for a few days before I realised that was what I was doing but we were both playing with one other variable as well, using a direct ethernet connection from our servers to our Devialets instead of the normal network connection and the big difference was between a direct ethernet connection and the normal network ethernet connection. I'm not certain how much difference I'd say there was between the wifi connection and the normal network connection to the Devialet, especially given that your routers were sourcing the signal for wifi to the Devialet from a standard ethernet connection to our servers.

I think @baconbrain said "Interesting" because of the comments posted about the video, not about the video itself which really only addressed whether wifi could do a good enough job of carrying a high res music signal and it can, there's more than enough bandwidth.

For me, the big issue in choosing between wifi and ethernet is about getting a good, stable, signal. When I first got my Devialet I could not get wifi to work reliably, it kept dropping out, and I ended up having to use a second Airport Extreme near the Devialet as a wifi receiver and connect it to the Devialet by ethernet to get a reliable, stable connection. If we're talking sound quality I would have said at the time that ethernet was infinitely better than wifi because I could actually play music without problems with ethernet and I couldn't with wifi. To have good sound quality first you have to have sound and a lot of the time back then with wifi I didn't have sound. I think that situation has improved a lot with the CI board and the external antenna that came with it but by the time the CI board was released I had had a wired connection installed to my listening room and had been enjoying the stability of a wired connection for some months. I wouldn't go back to wifi simply because I've always found ethernet more trouble free than wifi.

When it comes to what can we do to improve the sound quality we get using the Devialet's ethernet input then I think a lot will depend on whether you're using Roon and RAAT over a gigabit connection because that can introduce problems that can easily outweigh any difference in sound quality that exist between wifi and ethernet, and between using an audiophile ethernet switch instead of a normal networking ethernet switch. The Uptone etherRegen may have one advantage their, the B-side ethernet port which is the recommended port for your endpoint is only 100T, not a gigabit port, and that may solve the gigabit speed RAAT problem while we wait for Devialet to issue a firmware fix, but the etherRegen is an expensive fix if all you want from it is a fix for that issue. I hope it does more than that.

I got an email the other day from Uptone telling me that my etherRegen should ship before 16 January and it will probably take about a week or so to make it here to Australiaso hopefully I'll be able to make some comments in around 6 or 7 weeks. In the meantime I seem to be getting my kicks by reading comments about the etherRegen which leave me wondering how many people actually know anything about the scientific method and just what one can legitimately infer from a test. To date UPtone have provided no measurements or data to confirm their claims and the only tests I've seen are from the AVR forum. I'm prepared to accept the accuracy of his measurements but since Uptone have provided no data we can't be sure that the right things were measured and the conclusions drawn from those test results aren't justified since the etherRegen was only compared to 1 other switch. In addition I feel his listening test was flawed in its design. Taken  together, that means we have no reliable objective data to draw any conclusions fromand the only other data we have is listening reports from owners. All I'm going to be able to do is to add another listening report to the stack of reports we've already seen.

What we sorely need is some more info from Uptone. Ideally that would be some  actual test data but, failing that, even some information about what they think should be measured in order to see what the etherRegen is doing would be useful. That would at least let us know whether or not anyone conducting independent tests is on the right track or not with what they're measuring.

Having said that, Uptone is not alone in releasing products of this sort with no supporting test data. Sadly it seems to be all too common.