I have had a similar experience to discopants in regards to a linear power supply, however in my USB. roberttdid mentioned about power to the USB, and I removed power for my computer based USB card to an external quality linear power supply with very good results.
The last review I posted that said the linear power supply yielded better results, didn’t actually continue by giving any indication they used the linear power supply in the modified switch though. Which of course is more money.
A linear power supply will be better but will introduce also a noise of his own....
I know i use one....
But add to it a passive materials without electronic components in it, then no noise added, and listen the difference....
My "golden plates" work without active electronic components, are low cost and work better than costlier electronical power conditioner that filtrate but with the introduction of a necessary trade -off....
Unconventional idea are not popular tough..... :)
Please dont propose a blindtest for my golden plates.....i use 30 in my electrical grid....
How does my comment “say it all”? How would you define “peace” and “control” in Audio terms. In a best case scenario, some reviewer may have previously described what these terms mean to them acoustically. In reality, nobody has any idea what the hell that means, or what that person experienced. It’s why the scientific portion of this hobby matters, otherwise it’s all unsubstantiated claims and tomfoolery.
I don't get the point. I'm sure I could point to some component, cable or outlet, speaker placement etc. in the OP's system and make fun of it. So what? If that's what he likes and is happy, who am I to deny him his bliss? The original premise is flawed for a reasonable conversation about a hobby and smacks of a "bullying" attitude.
I thought those things were simply "art" but it seems they are claiming something about acoustics of your room? Tibetan meditation bowls? Just buy those they're cheaper and they sound nice.
Its very rare for Ted to have anything that’s not a) incredibly effective and b) good value for money. My system is treated with HFT, ECT and PHT, all of which bear some similarity to the new ART. https://highend-electronics.com/products/synergistic-research-acoustic-art Which stands for Analogue Room Treatment, an unfortunate (or perhaps intended?) acronym that makes people think its all for show. If I know Ted nothing could be further from the truth.
The joke here is a bunch of guys on a site dedicated to audiophiles are doing nothing but cracking wise and heaping derision on.... audiophiles. The ones who aren’t- me and mahgister- also happen to be the ones with actual experience with a wide range of tweaks. Hmmm.
On the slim chance anyone actually interested in improving their audio is reading this thread, it looks to me like the technical explanation to this ART thing is dither. Look it up. Noise added to a signal actually improves human perception of clarity and detail, but only when the noise is randomized a particular way. Anyone truly interested can look this up and learn that’s how dither works, and its been in standard use in video for many years now.
The principle in sound should be obvious and clear but only to thinking audiophiles so let me explain. All sound waves in a room reflect and form modes and standing waves. Traditional acoustic treatments work by damping (reducing, attenuating) depending on the size, shape, location and mechanical properties of the damping material. Simplifying immensely, the bigger and thicker the lower the affected frequency. Its real easy to overdamp a room using these traditional old-school methods. Been there. Done that.
HFT are much more high tech. Even one of these tiny little dots makes a difference that can be heard. A whole set of them makes your speakers disappear. More sets on the walls and you start to get reviews like you will read on my system page. The beauty of these things is unlike GIK type panels they do not alter the fundamental acoustic signature of the room. What they do instead is greatly improve clarity of detail resulting in a much more lifelike 3D sound. Pretty remarkable for a handful of little peanut M&M size doo-dads.
So to me, being an educated, open-minded audiophile who listens to ideas as much as to music, and thinks deep and hard about both, it seems Ted has come up with an even more powerful means of breaking up standing waves allowing us to hear details more clearly. Sounds to me like this ART thing is no laughing matter. More likely it is just one more on a long list of success stories and one I will be keeping an eye on.
I improve the HFT idea with homemade fishing cones lines... And with herkimer diamond inside some.... With various size for the cones.... And even connect grid of cones with copper tape and incredibly that work... I put also a bell of cones in my room center.....
I use also other less efficient resonator and 10 cheap modified Schumann generator with great succeess.... This is ACTIVE acoustic controls...
Most people use only passive materials for acoustic controls, but active methods help a lot especially in the high frequencies...
cost: peanuts
My motto is: Hi-Fi for the poor My act is: Homemade work
The greatest myth in audio is the relation between quality and price, in fact the relation is non linear....
the second greatest myth is the idea that an audio system sound at his optimal level without needing to be embeds in the mechanical resonant dimension, in the electro-magnetic grid of the house, and in the acoustical fied of the room....
You do have to give credit to a person who wrote this...
"...outlets are treated with 1,000,000 volts of electricity at specific frequencies and pulse modulations, creating a canal in the conductor material and contact points at the molecular level that allows electrons to flow more freely giving a beautiful start to your music"
...and this...
"...passing 1'000'000 volts of electricity, pulse modulated at extreme high frequencies through each of the outlets.
This creates a path on the conductor’s surface that allows electrons to flow more freely, opening up the music and giving uncompressed, realistic live sound."
It is just unclear if electrons flow more freely in a canal in the conductor material or on a path on the conductor’s surface.
’Anyone read that drive by advertisement by a shill?’
Unfortunately I did.
Both millercarbon and mahgister seem to know their way around what might best be (kindly) defined as environmentally determined psycho-acoustic effects.
Fair enough, if that’s their thing. In my case I haven’t experienced any room issues that I’m aware of, but then I’ve never had speakers with enough low bass that could trigger booming issues so it’s never been a problem.
My current speakers need a minimum of 8 inches behind them or else the sound can start to get thick, slow, muddy etc.
So I think we all understand about the need for a little experimenting with speaker positioning, as well as the importance of getting the tweeters up to ear height, especially for those speakers which may have narrower dispersion.
Most of us will also have some idea that the difference between direct sound and reflected sound will depend upon things like speaker placement/ toe in etc, the distance we are sitting from them, the volume we are listening at, and possibly the shape of the room and its surfaces.
Some of us might prefer a more lively/reflective room (bare walls, hard surfaces) and some might want a more acoustically dead room (furnishings, carpets, curtains, bookshelves etc).
I’m pretty certain none of us would want to listen in a echoey cave or an anechoic chamber.
I have a large glass window (4ft by 6ft) close behind my listening position and sometimes I might prefer to close the curtains, but sometimes I might not. The effect is only barely perceptible either way.
I admit I can’t get my head around the mathematics needed for optimum acoustics but I’m not bothered. If the likes of the Floyd Toole and Siegfried Linkwitz say that we shouldn’t get too obsessed about room acoustics, well that’s good enough for me.
The likes of millercarbon and mahgister may disagree. Good for them.
Fair enough, if that’s their thing. In my case I haven’t experienced any room issues that I’m aware of, but then I’ve never had speakers with enough low bass that could trigger booming issues so it’s never been a problem.
I dont want to disagree with a gentleman...
I will only say that controls of room acoustics affect not especially the bass frequencies but all the spectrum... And people before experiencing it dont know it and are not conscious of the improper rendition of timbre, imaging and all other characteristis that are affected by the non controlled room acoustic....
I was my self completely flabbergasted by those changes because some people speak about them times to times without insisting on them...The upgrade of a room acoustic exceed easily almost any other upgrade most of the times even of the speakers often...
I wish you the best....
P.S.
Dont be afraid by those who advise to use tech program, or measuring apparus, SPL meter etc... I makes all my changes by way of fun play listening, incrementally, and step by step with the helping of my ears only... There are PASSIVE materials used for the treatment.... But way less known are ACTIVE ways like resonators, Schumann generators, Helmholtz bottles, etc; these active ways changes the look of a room tough much more so than the passive way....My wife dont like that.... But they are very powerful....I use passive and active ways...
I call the acoustical treatment an acoustical embedding of the audio system, there are 2 others embeddings the resonant-mechanical embedding and the electrical grid embedding.... These 3 treatments exceed in S.Q. change any normal upgrade not of one component, but in "some" cases the upgrade of all components, so powerful they are....
Think about any manufacturer in the obligation to reveal these inconvenient truth(for the sale pitch) to you before you bought his 10,000 dollars amplifier or dac? Will you be pleased to learn that day that his perfect engineering gear is not enough by themself to create Hi-Fi experience? Asking the question is answering it.... :)
This is my painful, unsuspected, slowly gained, experience in my journey to win S.Q. Hi-Fi by myselves because of the lack of money...
If i ever had all the money necessary, perhaps i would have never guess that truth and would have been happy with costly gear, almost used like it is out of the box with very few means on controls in these 3 embeddings dimensions.... Like most people if you look at their virtual page system... minimalistic controls if there is some....
The truth is more controls there are, better the sound will be truest to his optimal original design potential.... Most gear are good enough for us if we treat these embeddings... Upgrading is not the way half the times.... And the good news is cost may be low.... I have purchase only very low cost materials and i have reverse engineer many tweaks with ideas of my own and it was fun.... If i can make it ANYBODY can.... I am a poet not a scientist nor a solder handyman, nor very crafty hands man .... :)
After 6 months of thinking about it and reading both sides of the debate, I decided to take the plunge and received my Etherregen yesterday. My philosophy about these things...if I need to ’blind test’ or switch the product in and out of my system, to double-check if it’s really improving anything - then it’s not doing enough for me. It goes back, simple as that. I’ve done it so many times and have no qualms about it.
In this particular case, the improvement in SQ is obvious and, quite honestly, I’m blown away by this switch. It’s staying in my system and has indeed taken it to a higher level. The test results published by ASR are useless, completely irrelevant. As further proof (for me)....I recently bought a DAC they had tested and found to be nearly perfect (Topping D90). It was rubbish compared to my Chord and was sent back without a second thought. It cost about 30% the price of the Chord, but was less than 30% as good, in my system. Ah but it tested brilliantly LOL
"
Tibetian singing bowl handmade in Nepal. Should it be Nepalese singing bowl, then? How does all that go?
"
When the Chinese invaded Tibet in the early 50's, many Tibetans fled to escape the Chinese, including the Dali Lama who fled to India. When I visited Nepal bordering Tibet on the south, many Tibetan influences in art was easily found. My silver and gold bracelet has Tibetan writing on it.
That Tibetian/Nepalese statement reminded me of a board above the counter at a well-known local store. "Italian sodas. All natural pure fruit syrup from the heart of the French Alps". It was not even a joke, it was a real advertisement.
I guess that more accurate would be "Nepalese singing bowls made by Tibetans". Not that it matters, probably half of the world thinks it is the same thing.
The more i read this topic, the more i see that a large part of people here don’t understand how networks work. Yes it’s really about 0’s and 1’s and from end to end, TCP/IP network equipment calculate / validate a checksum. (UDP/IP does it too)
About the transit time, "jitter", etc: There is an easy remedy for this and it is called buffering. A TCP/IP network is a best effort network. You have to design any solution around this. So a 20$ switch will do the same as a 50K$ one. Why the difference of price? Horsepower, # and type of interfaces, high end enterprise management, licences for specific features, modularity, etc etc etc.
So you can place whatever capacitor or anything else on your switch / product router (even gold and diamond if you want!), it’s up to you. But somebody somewhere will easily beat you if you throw in useless expensive parts... For those who does it (or try to say they do), it is only ripoff of customer who don’t know how a best effort network works and proper design around it.
Understanding how networks work is just that: a primer on how it’s designed to work and not how it will sound if noise is introduced at some juncture. Knowing how it works doesn’t preclude that something poorly designed won’t have an effect.
I have a funny feeling that there are some who actually believe that since it’s just ones and zeros, that they’re so small as to be unimportant. That’s fine for printing text but reproducing sound is another matter.
Here’s a link that shows just how fragile those ones and zeros are since they are an electrical representation of them and are just as susceptible to damage as anything else in the audio chain:https://6moons.com/audioreview_articles/audiocadabra/
Just the first two pages or so are needed to be read and even though the review is on a USB cable, the primer at the beginning still applies, I would think.
’My philosophy about these things...if I need to ’blind test’ or switch the product in and out of my system, to double-check if it’s really improving anything - then it’s not doing enough for me.’
Does not compute.
If it’s so stunningly obvious to you then surely you’d welcome any comparison - sighted or unsighted.
Wouldn’t you?
For many years I also ’knew’ my Marantz CD player was better than my Sony MP3 player as a source for my main system.
Then one day, just for easy access to 64GB of stored music/playlists and unwillingness to keep getting up to change discs I wired up the MP3 player to my Creek amplifier with a bog standard RCA to to Sony connector (as that was all that was available).
All went well but I was a little concerned with the sound quality. It somehow sounded flat and dull to my ears.
To console myself that I shouldn’t be expecting too much from a mere £100 MP3 player I decided to compare some tracks with those ripped from the original CDs. I think they were mostly Doors tracks taken from Morrison Hotel and LA Woman and maybe a few from U2s Achtung Baby.
The next 15 minutes left me feeling very strange indeed.
Each and every comparison between the CD and MP3 output, with levels matched by ear, proved to be indistinguishable from one another.
I kind of felt sick and confused for a while. This was going in the face of everything I knew about audio - and I thought after 20 years I knew a few things.
I even tried to alter the EQ settings on the portable device but they had no effect on the feed going to the amplifier.
Then I remembered some of the stuff that I’d seen mentioned occasionally hidden away in the margins of the audio press. One such name was the writer / enthusiast Peter Aczel.
I managed to find some pdf copies of his magazine The Audio Critic, and then began to take a closer look.
That was my first steps on the road to Damascus, or at least its audio equivalent.
It was shocking, it was heretical, and it was disturbing. It was worse than Proust’s Marcel finding out his girlfriend was a lesbian and that his macho uncle a masochistic homosexual. Ok, maybe quite not that bad, but on the same page.
Yet some 10 years later I still have to find something he wrote that I know to be a falsehood.
Sadly it’s unsurprisingly getting harder and harder to access those magazines now, far too many vested interests who’d wish the name Peter Aczel to disappear from history, but you can still find the odd reference here and there.
In a perfect world I’d love to see decent reviewers such as Steve Guttenberg, who must have known Peter, at least discuss his writings and opinions, but I guess the business politics of the industry doesn’t work that way.
Aczel doesn’t seem to have made many friends in the audio press and in a world drowning in euphemism, he wasn’t one to pull his punches.
Here’s just a snippet of Aczel’s work. Once again calling out the lies that seem to pervade the world of consumer audio.
"Financial interests" link in the beginning of above 6moons article lists what people do in their lives, but does not really state that they have no conflict of interest in this particular matter. A little unusual approach, one could say.
There are one or two members here who personally knew Peter Aczel and he had notoriously very bad hearing, to the point where he really couldn't hear readily discernible differences that everyone else could.
Back in the day, before I knew that, I read The Audio Critic and took solace in my modest system and wrote off all the more expensive stuff as just that: expensive. I know better now.
I make my own amplifiers and get to choose to over-design: resistors rated for several times the wattage they will dissipate, Polypropylene power supply capacitors rated at more than twice the voltage (2.3 kV rating foe a 1 kV power supply) transformers chosen the same way. I don't have to worry about electrolytic capacitors' limited life expectancy. I avoid marketed junk physics for cables costing thousands of dollars.
"Financial interests" link in the beginning of above 6moons article lists what people do in their lives, but does not really state that they have no conflict of interest in this particular matter. A little unusual approach, one could say.
I don't know of any other review sites out there that list any kind of financial or conflict of interest in the header of the reviewers bio. Some do go so far as to mention in in the body of the review if pertinent so I can't see why you'd bring that up.
Simply because they put it just under the names of reviewers and before any equipment that it was tested with. It appears that revealing "financial interests" was very important to them. I can't see why you'd skip that.
I also do not remember noticing "financial disclosure" of any kind in audio reviews which made this one even more odd. Maybe it was just a nice, but clumsy, try to appear fully legitimate.
I have no issue with them. I just noticed a little unusual approach to what is usually not even mentioned. If they think I could be of any help. please let them know it is ok to contact me directly.
I've read here, in these threads, posts about conflicts of interest and all sorts of accusations about reviewers and their reviews. 6moons has been, for some reason, singled out as not being on the up and up for reasons I can't fathom.
Srajan has addressed these issues at length in the past so maybe he put that up there so no one can accuse them of not being up front about it. That, and I've seen where he's taken some really obnoxious and accusatory emails about his practices and posted them with their names on his "letters" section and addressed them for the public to read for themselves.
I don't see why he wouldn't answer any inquiries you'd have.
I don't see anything wrong with the 6moons article as far as it goes. Where it needs a bit of clarification for me is when they talk about "timing jitter". I agree there is always room for improvement. If they're talking about jitter in the signal the timing is controlled by the DAC clock not the source in asynchronous transfer. In older DACs when isynchronous transfer was used jitter was more of a problem. If they're talking about line jitter, that's divorced from the DAC clock by the DAC software and buffer. In well designed DACs USB jitter is actually handled better than SPDIF jitter.
Then once again my last post leaves me with the problem I have with these expensive audiophile switches. No matter if they do clean the signal of some noise actually doing what they claim it’s not really important. For instance you take two equally dirty shirts, you prewash one then wash both in your washing machine they come out equally clean. What good did prewashing do? If you have an older washing machine it might help it’s basically the same thing here you have a good measuring DAC well engineered with isolated USB these switches don’t really matter the DAC is going to clean the signal.
@nonoise Not knowing how digital works really shows you need a primer on electrical engineering and design... Same applies for networks.
About the link to this fallacious article you provided, it is only trying to look like "technical" but only to fool people into buying expensive useless hardware... Audio is not transmitted "real time" to DAC so to speak, it's transmitted asynchronously and DAC has input buffering. Again, an easy engineering thing...
How do you think CPU works in the gigahertz spectrum with billions of micro-transistors in multi-layer arrangement + in a mutual noisy environment without making any error? It’s not even logic at TTL levels, it’s lower than that! Billions of micro transmission lines, via, metal layers, etc. In the same enclosure, you have the GPU, the chipset, etc. all operating in gigahertz range.
So you’re sweet little low spectrum audio is really not an engineering challenge... The only challenge is external constraints like budget, contracts, quality control, compromises, etc. If you have any minimal knowledge in engineering, you should know that... As for networks, TCP/IP is so robust, you just need proper buffering to account for the fact that it’s a best effort network.
But hey, you can throw your money at the windows, it’s all up to you. It’s just disgusting to see how many people here on this board show complete disrespect for consumers....
I second millercarbon's opinion on HFTs. I have installed 32 of them, 3 types. Five levels plus 5 per speaker (tweeter HFTs are a fail on my speakers). The most important HFT is the side speaker ones with 1/8" change radically changes the frequency response up or down. Instead of front and rear wall exterior treatments, HFTs are it!. I have massive built in wall bass filtering/conditioning/traps and thick studio quality side wall and suspended ceiling acoustic panels. I also think SRs fuses and power outlets are great buys. However, I heard the ART system in a showroom and had them removed as well. The difference was subtle better with them in but not worth my money. The bass unit was a failure in my friend and my system, ruined the highs (none over 8Khz) and weirded up the sound (ah, but with a "darker" background). SR is a great company for what they accomplished for my system.
@nonoise Yeah i know, you don't have "a dog" to respond to real arguments... Your previous response "fueled" mine trying to sound superior and shut down real world digital principles...
"Knowing how it works doesn’t preclude that something poorly designed won’t have an effect". This thread is about a network switch ripoff and abuse of consumer... I'll repeat again and repeat with me: TCP/IP has been designed for best effort networks. So what is you don't understand in that?
So after you add: "I have a funny feeling that there are some who actually believe that since it’s just ones and zeros, that they’re so small as to be unimportant. That’s fine for printing text but reproducing sound is another matter." "So small to be unimportant": You think that i, and engineers in general, don't know about the importance of errors in digital in general and how to handle it?
Not enough, you add: "That’s fine for printing text but reproducing sound is another matter"... You're trying to dismiss what i said and mixing things but at the end, it's the same. Printing doesn't work if you send errors, be it on any interface / transport medium. You really don't seem to understand digital in general: Storage, processing, transport, error correction, etc.
So the reason of my response. I know what i'm talking about and Digital / network devices must be designed for the environment they are into.
Same apply for USB cables and the crap link you cited is just another of those stupid "trying to look technical" BS to push people wasting their money... Computer interfaces, be it USB or any other, are designed to transfer data without errors... Same apply for the USB interface of a DAC. If you think it takes expensive cables, it's because you don't know about twisted pair, digital interfaces, checksums and async communications principles... It's as simple as that. Flip a bit and the checksum tells...so the idea of async communication + buffering. If the DAC you buy can't handle that, it's simply because of a poor design.
So find back the "dog" you use at first toward me, barking doesn't impress me at all... And study the subject before throwing your "funny feelings" around here... All the best, my friend!
For the best effort networks (that's what you have inside you own house!), you could use pro routers / switches that support QoS (Quality Of Service). QoS will help for those who use streamers and have a busy network. You know, games of your kids, Netflix, big downloads, etc!
Don't let the price fool you: It's really a pro product and we have many installed in SMB clients offices. It easily beats models costing 5-10X more. I use his bigger brother (RB4011) with more ports in my own house.
But there is indeed a learning curve, it's pro stuff. One has to understand networking, be good at googling and not afraid of reading / testing. Those "audio networking products" should just concentrate on real important topics and provide a friendly user interface.
This whole thread is reminding me of the current political climate in the US. Half the population seems to have zero interest in expert opinions (engineers), facts, or science, and only want to hear what they already believe echo’d back at them.
Network wise, I’d put my TP-Link Archer AC750 flashed with DD-WRT up against anybodies $5k router with complete confidence in the outcome.
This whole thread is reminding me of the current political climate in the US. Half the population seems to have zero interest in expert opinions (engineers), facts, or science, and only want to hear what they already believe echo’d back at them.
Careful there, Dougie..... When it comes to global warming and this criminally avoidable pandemic, I'm the guy you want in your corner. To conflate the two for purposes of scoring points would not serve your interests well.
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