14-Jan-2020, 12:38
I’ve now had an EtherREGEN in my system for a bit over 4 and a half days. It’s been powered on for almost all of that time, the exception being around 8 hours when I disconnected the whole system including it and a lot of other electronics around the house because of thunderstorm activity. I’ve got around hours playing time on it.
As @Confused has said, it isn’t easy to do A/B comparisons. He’s got a more complex system than I have but having a simpler system doesn’t necessarily make things simple. Anyone who says that all you have to do is quickly unplug an ethernet cable from something and connect it to the EtherREGEN and music will keep playing without a pause is living in a different world to me. I didn’t even try to do that. I had to disconnect 3 ethernet cables from my Cisco switch, connect them to the EtherREGEN which also involved a major rearrangement of one cable because all cables went into one side of the Cisco switch while 2 had to go into one side of the EtherREGEN and one into the opposite side so it had to be rearranged to travel in a different direction to the one it had previously been arranged in, and then there’s a bit of a time lag after every connection while the router and the EtherREGEN communicate about DHCP addresses. What I did to make the change was to have the EtherREGEN powered up for half an hour or so while I played a familiar disc via the Cisco, paused playback, made the swap over, and then restarted playback. There was a several minute gap in playback while the changeover was happening. Not ideal but the best I could do.
So, what are my impressions? This is about the 3rd time I’ve tried to write something in the last couple of days and every time I’ve tried my impressions have changed in some ways. There are a lot of comments on the Uptone Audio forums about break-in and there does seem to be a break-in. Part of it is definitely a change in the overall sound over time and part of it is changes in me and how I’m relating to what I’m hearing. The general trend is for things to improve over time but I had a brief period where I thought things sounded a little aggressive and a longer period where I thought things were sounding overly polite. Both of those passed. I don’t know if I still have any more of those surprises in store for me.
What it’s supposed to do is to reduce/eliminate leakage currents and clock phase noise, in other words to remove things which supposedly negatively impact the sound. I don’t have a good handle on just what impact leakage currents and clock phase noise are supposed to have on the sound but basically I think everything I’m noticing comes down to a “cleaner” and/or “clearer” sound that affects different aspects of the sound in different ways. I hear more variety and gradation in tonal colours, especially in transitions from one tonal colour to another. I hear more variety and gradation in micro dynamics, the note to note dynamic variations that help delineate rhythm on the one hand and in the way musicians shape phrases for purposes of expression, and I have a sense of a larger soundstage, the space within which images of voices and instruments are placed and also a sense of more realistic and solid images of those voices and instruments.
That’s looking at things at a detail level, how the differences reveal themselves. There’s the issue of how these things work together and their effect on my impression of the music and one of the difficulties I’ve had is that they seem to work together a bit differently depending on the recording and music. In general things sound more natural with less harshness tonally, often a little sweeter than I’m used to while things like pace and rhythm are slightly enhanced. That can mean that the music seems to move forward a bit more insistently but I’ve been surprised on occasion by more relaxed sounding music actually sounding more laid back but in a way which enhanced things. All of that seems to happen in a more enveloping space and overall the music seems to hang together in a more cohesive and coherent way, I get a feel that groups are more of a single unit and less of an assemblage of several people doing different things. All of that is to the good in my view.
Have there been any negatives? I felt there was an increase in sibilance on the first album I played and I found that very distracting. I haven’t heard that sibilance on any other album and replaying the problem album a couple of days later I didn’t notice it anywhere near as much. One album i played has a kind of “radio static” sound added to some tracks as an effect that has always sounded a little artificial to me. It sounded a lot more artificial. The EtherREGEN is revealing, usually not in a way that exaggerates or makes things sound worse but while it reveals a lot of things that make music enjoyable for me, it occasionally shows up something that comes across as artificial as a bit more artificial. I don’t think it makes bad albums sound worse, I played some early CD remasters of 60’s vintage LPs that I don’t think were brilliantly remastered and they sounded quite nice but it seems some “effects trickery” doesn’t seem to benefit from it.
Basically the improvements in sound that impress me are in the subtleties. Some of them do reveal themselves strongly at times depending on the music but a lot of the time I’ve just found myself thinking that things sounded nicer and more natural, and often a fair bit more interesting. I’ve found myself being more engaged in what I’ve been listening to with the EtherREGEN in the system than I was before.
@Confused mentioned trying some high res content with his EtherREGEN and not running into problems with Roon/RAAT. I had Roon upsample one album to 192/24 and didn’t run into any problems and usually doing that in the past has been problematic. I swapped back to streaming at the original bit rate because I didn’t hear any improvement in sound with Roon doing the upsampling rather than leaving it to the Devialet to do it.
As @Confused has said, it isn’t easy to do A/B comparisons. He’s got a more complex system than I have but having a simpler system doesn’t necessarily make things simple. Anyone who says that all you have to do is quickly unplug an ethernet cable from something and connect it to the EtherREGEN and music will keep playing without a pause is living in a different world to me. I didn’t even try to do that. I had to disconnect 3 ethernet cables from my Cisco switch, connect them to the EtherREGEN which also involved a major rearrangement of one cable because all cables went into one side of the Cisco switch while 2 had to go into one side of the EtherREGEN and one into the opposite side so it had to be rearranged to travel in a different direction to the one it had previously been arranged in, and then there’s a bit of a time lag after every connection while the router and the EtherREGEN communicate about DHCP addresses. What I did to make the change was to have the EtherREGEN powered up for half an hour or so while I played a familiar disc via the Cisco, paused playback, made the swap over, and then restarted playback. There was a several minute gap in playback while the changeover was happening. Not ideal but the best I could do.
So, what are my impressions? This is about the 3rd time I’ve tried to write something in the last couple of days and every time I’ve tried my impressions have changed in some ways. There are a lot of comments on the Uptone Audio forums about break-in and there does seem to be a break-in. Part of it is definitely a change in the overall sound over time and part of it is changes in me and how I’m relating to what I’m hearing. The general trend is for things to improve over time but I had a brief period where I thought things sounded a little aggressive and a longer period where I thought things were sounding overly polite. Both of those passed. I don’t know if I still have any more of those surprises in store for me.
What it’s supposed to do is to reduce/eliminate leakage currents and clock phase noise, in other words to remove things which supposedly negatively impact the sound. I don’t have a good handle on just what impact leakage currents and clock phase noise are supposed to have on the sound but basically I think everything I’m noticing comes down to a “cleaner” and/or “clearer” sound that affects different aspects of the sound in different ways. I hear more variety and gradation in tonal colours, especially in transitions from one tonal colour to another. I hear more variety and gradation in micro dynamics, the note to note dynamic variations that help delineate rhythm on the one hand and in the way musicians shape phrases for purposes of expression, and I have a sense of a larger soundstage, the space within which images of voices and instruments are placed and also a sense of more realistic and solid images of those voices and instruments.
That’s looking at things at a detail level, how the differences reveal themselves. There’s the issue of how these things work together and their effect on my impression of the music and one of the difficulties I’ve had is that they seem to work together a bit differently depending on the recording and music. In general things sound more natural with less harshness tonally, often a little sweeter than I’m used to while things like pace and rhythm are slightly enhanced. That can mean that the music seems to move forward a bit more insistently but I’ve been surprised on occasion by more relaxed sounding music actually sounding more laid back but in a way which enhanced things. All of that seems to happen in a more enveloping space and overall the music seems to hang together in a more cohesive and coherent way, I get a feel that groups are more of a single unit and less of an assemblage of several people doing different things. All of that is to the good in my view.
Have there been any negatives? I felt there was an increase in sibilance on the first album I played and I found that very distracting. I haven’t heard that sibilance on any other album and replaying the problem album a couple of days later I didn’t notice it anywhere near as much. One album i played has a kind of “radio static” sound added to some tracks as an effect that has always sounded a little artificial to me. It sounded a lot more artificial. The EtherREGEN is revealing, usually not in a way that exaggerates or makes things sound worse but while it reveals a lot of things that make music enjoyable for me, it occasionally shows up something that comes across as artificial as a bit more artificial. I don’t think it makes bad albums sound worse, I played some early CD remasters of 60’s vintage LPs that I don’t think were brilliantly remastered and they sounded quite nice but it seems some “effects trickery” doesn’t seem to benefit from it.
Basically the improvements in sound that impress me are in the subtleties. Some of them do reveal themselves strongly at times depending on the music but a lot of the time I’ve just found myself thinking that things sounded nicer and more natural, and often a fair bit more interesting. I’ve found myself being more engaged in what I’ve been listening to with the EtherREGEN in the system than I was before.
@Confused mentioned trying some high res content with his EtherREGEN and not running into problems with Roon/RAAT. I had Roon upsample one album to 192/24 and didn’t run into any problems and usually doing that in the past has been problematic. I swapped back to streaming at the original bit rate because I didn’t hear any improvement in sound with Roon doing the upsampling rather than leaving it to the Devialet to do it.
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
