"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.