"Audiophile Grade" Ethernet Switches - The new generation

[Confused]

Hi all, the Telegärtner M12 Gold has been here for a few days. 

Overall very impressive indeed although I am yet to conduct proper A/B testing with the SOtM. I hope to have a bit of time over the next few days and will report back.

What I should point out thus far however is that I have now settled with one media converter between router and first switch (SOtM). For some reason with 2 media converters (creating the bridge) and feeding my Draytek switch which in turn fed the SOtM (x2) via a 20M run of AQ Carbon ethernet cable resulted in a sound that whilst initially quite impressive I found a little too airy and not focussed enough, resulting in reduced enjoyment and some head scratching on my part.

Now I don't know much about these things but I wondered if in that setup the bridge wasn't "robbing Peter to pay Paul".

In the current setup I have therefore made 2 big changes: one is replacing the Draytek with one of the SOtM switches, and removing one media converter from the equation. As a result I can't be sure why I prefer what I now hear, there are just too many variables. But this is clearly better than having an optical bridge feeding into the Draytek which in turn feeds 2 bridged SOtMs. 

To properly A/B the Telegärtner and SOtM switches I will need to reinsert the Draytek, remove the bridge.... essentially simplify everything back down. 

Guillaume

I am a little puzzled as to why you want to run two media converters to create a "bridge", is it not the case that both the Draytek and SOtM switches have SFP ports?  So I would have thought it best to convert to fibre once, and then use the SFP in one of the switches.  Maybe you are just experimenting?  It looks like you are getting interesting results in any case.

Whilst on the subject of FMC's, have you looked at the new Sonore opticalModule, it might be a nice choice for the "first change to fibre"?

https://www.sonore.us/opticalModule.html