EtherRegen saved my Devialet experience

[Sailor4W]

@Sailor4W  - I don't think there is "a lot of discrepancy whether one hears a difference in sound with to without ETHERRegen". I've posted my comments here after getting mine and I've been following the comments of other owners closely. I think if you go back over the posts by those of us here who have tried one the great majority of reports from those who have used one are that it does make a difference and a quite positive improvement. A small minority have reported little or no difference.

Also not everyone agrees about the benefit of a 100 Mbps output with Roon RAAT. We have a long thread here about that issue and there are a minority who have reported little or no problem with a gigabit input and Roon RAAT. I'm in that camp. I really only experienced problems with a gigabit connection when I had Roon upscale everything to 192/24. Most of my library is CD quality, 44.1/16, with some 44.1/24, 48/24, 88.2/24, 96/24, and one album at 176.4/24 plus around 30 albums which are DSD/64.  I had few to no problems with those files streamed at native resolution but ran into problems immediately when I had Roon upscale to 192/24. In my case the gigabit problem seemed specifically related to 192/24 streams and I'm not alone in reporting little to no problem with a gigabit connection but the majority of reports from people who experience problems were more frequent than I and a couple of others reported and do relate to lower resolution streams than 192/24.

Having said that, I also have the impression by looking at the number of people reporting problems here and on the Roon forums that many Roon users are not having problems with RAAT. Some of that is definitely because they are using AIR rather than RAAT, or using RAAT over wifi and both of those situations are not subject to the problem. It's actually quite difficult to determine how widespread the problem is for RAAT users with a gigabit connection. Devialet have been very quiet about the number of people who have reported issues but both Devialet and Roon have stated that they did not come across the problem during testing. Reading the thread here about the problem and also the threads on the Roon forums carefully, what you will find are some very long threads with a lot of posts from a much smaller number of people than you might expect and those who have reported problems have reported those problems several times in response to queries and responses from other posters. They give an impression of a lot of people having problems but in reality there are far fewer people reporting problems and those people are reporting the same problems several times. My feeling is that those reporting problems are in the minority of Devialet Roon users but that is partly due to many Devialet Roon users either using AIR instead of RAAT or using RAAT with a wifi connection.

I agree that using a 10/100 switch is a lot cheaper alternative to the ETHERRegen and just as effective at avoiding the problem as the ETHERRegen. AIR and RAAT over wifi are even cheaper still, having no cost at all. The ETHERRegen or one of the other audiophile switches with a 100 Mbps output such as the Melco are really only the "method of choice" if they give you enough of an improvement in sound quality to justify their cost and the ETHERRegen does that for me in my system.

In the end, however, the problem exists and has been acknowledged by Devialet, it definitely needs to be fixed so gigabit connections work without problems, and it most definitely shouldn't still be a problem 17 months after we got the firmware which introduced the problem. No one who wants to use an ethernet connection for streaming and wants to use RAAT should have to replace their existing switch with a 100 Mbps switch as a workaround. It's one thing to decide to replace your switch with something like an ETHERRegen or Melco in order to get better sound quality but no one should be forced to change their switch to a 100 Mbps switch, no matter how inexpensive it may be, to solve a problem with a gigabit speed connection when the Devialet is advertised as accepting gigabit connections and being Roon Ready which means it's supposed to work with RAAT.

I totally agree that Devialet should solve this issue! I haven‘t quite followed all the Roon/RAAT posts, because I have an Expert 120 and therefore, rely on AIR. This issue prevented me from upgrading to an Expert Pro, but mentally, I am now ready for an upgrade.

But whether a ETHERRegen makes a difference or not, I am unable to tell, as I don‘t have one and I don‘t intend to buy one. The benefit of an ETHERRegen is much too controversally discussed that I would spend  money for one. I rather save ist for the upgrade!

I certainly don‘t question people‘s judgement who hear a positive effect with the ETHERRegen!