"Audiophile Grade" Ethernet Switches - The new generation

[David A]

@ogs  - I was holding back a little re the EtherRegen.  With new products like this I like to wait to see what the early reports are like and also see if there are any problems or issues etc.  I had managed to get a "second batch" pre-order slot with Vortex Box AudioStore (which cost £0.01), and recently I was happy enough to pay in full.  Subsequently, AudioStore have confirmed that I will indeed be in the "from Dec 12" batch.

So if all goes to plan, I should have my EtherRegen in time for the "festive holidays".  I will use it to feed my sMS-200Ultra Neo / Mutec set-up, but I do plan to try a comparison running the EtherRegen direct to the Devialet using AIR / Roon AIR.  Should be interesting.  Some might remember that I have been here before with an AQVOX switch, which I ultimately decided to return for a refund.  Hopefully the EtherRegen will perform better, time will tell.

@Antoine @octaviars - good luck with your EtherRegen's!  - I look forward to reading your listening impressions whenever you are ready to report back.

I'm going to be late to this party. My order with Uptone Audio is down for the third batch in January though Alex Crespi recently posted on his forums that some people from the January batch may be supplied from the December batch. I can hope but I think I put my order in too late for it to be bumped to December if that happens for some.

In my system it will replace a Cisco switch connecting my Nucleus+ server and 140 Pro to my router so mine is a "minimalist" setup with few devices to problems so it remains to be seen whether that means that there's little to clean up so not much noticeable benefit or cleaning up what's there (if it does the job it's claimed to do) produces a noticeable benefit.

Since I use RAAT, there may well be an additional benefit. I've been lucky and not had significant problems streaming with RAAT over a gigabit speed connection, about the only time I have had consistent issues is when I've used Roon to upsample everything to 192/24  which seems to trigger issues for me. Streaming everything at the original resolution, given I have no 192/24 content, only 1 album at 176.4/24 which hasn't triggered problems, and everything else I have is 96/24 or l over resolution, has been virtually trouble free for me. The "clean" output on the EtherRegen is 100T rather than gigabit, however, and one of the workarounds people have had success with for the gigabit connection problem with RAAT is slowing the connection to 100T so the EtherRegen may benefit some people on that front. If you do try RAAT as @ogs suggested, you may also want to test RAAT with 192/24 material, either native or upsampled, and see whether that triggers any issues that you don't get at lower resolution.

In the meantime I'm waiting, and reading the mostly positive listening comments with the occasional "no difference" report. I don't think I've seen any comments that it has made things worse.