"Audiophile Grade" Ethernet Switches - The new generation

[David A]

Interesting:

https://www.psaudio.com/askpaul/connecti...-ethernet/

Thank you @baconbrain

So, Paul says its doesn't matter ...

Some couple of months back both @David A and I realised that for many-many months, we were running our streaming systems on WiFi. And when we returned back to Ethernet, it did make a helluva lot of difference for the better ... Now I am awaiting @David A to tell me how good his ER works in his system (once he gets his) and very possibly I too will follow. 

Hmm! ... I differ from Paul on this ! 

Arup,

I only used the wifi input for a few days before I realised that was what I was doing but we were both playing with one other variable as well, using a direct ethernet connection from our servers to our Devialets instead of the normal network connection and the big difference was between a direct ethernet connection and the normal network ethernet connection. I'm not certain how much difference I'd say there was between the wifi connection and the normal network connection to the Devialet, especially given that your routers were sourcing the signal for wifi to the Devialet from a standard ethernet connection to our servers.

I think @baconbrain said "Interesting" because of the comments posted about the video, not about the video itself which really only addressed whether wifi could do a good enough job of carrying a high res music signal and it can, there's more than enough bandwidth.

For me, the big issue in choosing between wifi and ethernet is about getting a good, stable, signal. When I first got my Devialet I could not get wifi to work reliably, it kept dropping out, and I ended up having to use a second Airport Extreme near the Devialet as a wifi receiver and connect it to the Devialet by ethernet to get a reliable, stable connection. If we're talking sound quality I would have said at the time that ethernet was infinitely better than wifi because I could actually play music without problems with ethernet and I couldn't with wifi. To have good sound quality first you have to have sound and a lot of the time back then with wifi I didn't have sound. I think that situation has improved a lot with the CI board and the external antenna that came with it but by the time the CI board was released I had had a wired connection installed to my listening room and had been enjoying the stability of a wired connection for some months. I wouldn't go back to wifi simply because I've always found ethernet more trouble free than wifi.

When it comes to what can we do to improve the sound quality we get using the Devialet's ethernet input then I think a lot will depend on whether you're using Roon and RAAT over a gigabit connection because that can introduce problems that can easily outweigh any difference in sound quality that exist between wifi and ethernet, and between using an audiophile ethernet switch instead of a normal networking ethernet switch. The Uptone etherRegen may have one advantage their, the B-side ethernet port which is the recommended port for your endpoint is only 100T, not a gigabit port, and that may solve the gigabit speed RAAT problem while we wait for Devialet to issue a firmware fix, but the etherRegen is an expensive fix if all you want from it is a fix for that issue. I hope it does more than that.

I got an email the other day from Uptone telling me that my etherRegen should ship before 16 January and it will probably take about a week or so to make it here to Australiaso hopefully I'll be able to make some comments in around 6 or 7 weeks. In the meantime I seem to be getting my kicks by reading comments about the etherRegen which leave me wondering how many people actually know anything about the scientific method and just what one can legitimately infer from a test. To date UPtone have provided no measurements or data to confirm their claims and the only tests I've seen are from the AVR forum. I'm prepared to accept the accuracy of his measurements but since Uptone have provided no data we can't be sure that the right things were measured and the conclusions drawn from those test results aren't justified since the etherRegen was only compared to 1 other switch. In addition I feel his listening test was flawed in its design. Taken  together, that means we have no reliable objective data to draw any conclusions fromand the only other data we have is listening reports from owners. All I'm going to be able to do is to add another listening report to the stack of reports we've already seen.

What we sorely need is some more info from Uptone. Ideally that would be some  actual test data but, failing that, even some information about what they think should be measured in order to see what the etherRegen is doing would be useful. That would at least let us know whether or not anyone conducting independent tests is on the right track or not with what they're measuring.

Having said that, Uptone is not alone in releasing products of this sort with no supporting test data. Sadly it seems to be all too common.