EtherRegen saved my Devialet experience

[David A]

Couple of questions (as I have the recurring 'dropout over RAAT via gigabit ethernet' bug):
- do you use Roon RAAT (the Roon Ready input vie ethernet on the Devialet)?
- did you ever have any dropouts? Or just poor/harsh sound?

I am currently playing Roon RAAT via wifi but would prefer to use a stable ethernet conenction. I have tried hanging a 10/100 switch off my gigabit switch and connecting the Dev to a 100 mb port but I still get the occasional dropout, so then I switch back to wifi.

Does anyone have any opinion or experience on whether the Uptone EtherRegen mitigates the gigabit ethernet bug on Roon RAAT?

I use RAAT with ethernet and I have an ETHERRegen. I used RAAT with a gigabit connection to the Devialet before getting the ER and with the 100 Mbps connection after getting it.

I'll make 2 observations.

The first is that there is a lot of variation in what people experience with the gigabit ethernet bug. Before I got the ETHERRegenb I rarely esxperienced any problem from the bug when I streamed contend at its native resolution but I have no music at a native resolution of 192/24. If I had Roon upsample to 192/24 and stream that to the Devialet I had lots of dropouts. Since I could never hear any improvement in sound quality between streaming at native resolution or having the music upsampled and streamed at 192/24, I never bothered with letting Roon upsample what I was streaming. After getting the ETHERRegen, streaming at native resolution was just as trouble free as before but I can now have Roon upsample everything to 192/24 and play it without problems. I still don't hear any advantage to having Roon do the upsampling so I'm still streaming at native resolution but I did spend some time listening with everything upsampled to 192/24 when I first got the ETHERRegen to see if that still caused problems and, as I said, I never had any.

Second, the gigabit ethernet bug isn't the only reason for dropouts with ethernet and perhaps once every 4-6 weeks I get a dropout for 30 seconds to a  minute or so with no error message. There have been comments on the ETHERRegen forums of occasional dropouts while a router is renewing a DHCP address for a device (apparently this happens at regular intervals as a normal network process) and I suspect other network problems can cause dropouts as well. If you want to get guaranteed performance with no dropouts ever, then I think you're going to have to forget about networked music. I've had my ETHERRegen for a bit over 5 months now and I've had maybe 4 dropouts in that period and no sign of any other problem, plus no reason to connect the dropouts I've had with the gigabit ethernet bug.

I've never had poor/harsh sound before or after getting the ETHERRegen.

I haven't heard of any Devialet owner using the ETHERRegen, and there are a few of us, who have had problems with the gigabit ethernet bug while using the ETHERRegen.