SOtM SMS-200

[Hifi_swlon]

Like our good old F1 engineer said, it's all magic, placebo or somesuch without any scientific basis. I think he forgot to mention that reviewers only write for money and all people writing positive experiences on different forums are nothing but shills working for snakeoil manufacturers trying to influence the gullible audiophools to make them draw their wallets.

Anyway, there's little more to understand or come to terms with than that. It's very simple, like digital really is too: with AIR we already have the best digital can offer. No need to look any further. Everyone knows all digital equipment sounds the same unless it's broken or designed poorly and since DAC analog output measurements and Dunn J-Tests most often show little or no difference they clearly prove this.

It might have sounded slightly tongue in cheek, but I'm genuinely interested. As you know I'm a sceptic who still experiments to try and see for myself, but ethernet I find the hardest to fathom. The bits aren't coming in a stream as such and might not even be sequential packets. We know there aren't errors as they're chucked out.

I kind of like SOTM as a brand (not sure why, just when I read about them they seem to have a passion for pushing audio, and images of their electronics internals look really neat and somethings just 'visually right' about them. That may of course mean nothing, but...). They sell an active LAN isolator, and also a cable with an active filter box attached. They claim using one of three different cable types, you can tune the sound output of your system from 'bright', to 'normal', to 'smooth'. Assuming it's not made up, I just don't see how this can be. Packet data doesn't have any sense of bass or treble while being transmitted, it needs to be buffered and decoded first. So how can a cable change the tonal balance?

So it's electrical noise along the lines and into the DAC somehow, whatever passes through the inbuilt isolation. I'm following so far. Seems believable. But where does it go to affect the sound?

Is the argument that noise does something - let's say makes the sound bright, so different levels of filtration make the sound go from bright to smooth - maybe smooth is zero noise. But why would you di that with a cable and not the active box of electronics? Why not have a rotating knob with bright one end and smooth the other?

Compared to some exotic cables they're not ludicrous, but it's still a few hundred quid for an isolation chip and few other components in a box, and a metre of Ethernet cable about the same money. So it's more expensive than any other cable I've bought, and expensive enough to not be sure about trying it, otherwise I'd get one in. AIR sounds great to me, but there's always a quest for a bit extra.

Maybe the new streamerboard will have all this filtration built into the input?