Fiber or Eithenet

This thread is a few months old but I’m chiming in because I also have a 50’ run of ethernet (Audioquest Cinnamon) between my router and Bricasti M1 DAC/streamer. I use a IFI LAN IPURIFIER PRO between the long ethernet run and my DAC/streamer. It breaks the electrical connection by converting to optical and back to ethernet internally. It also reclocks. I’ve been pretty happy with this setup, particularly for the $300 cost of the purifier. I’m playing around with a short run of high end ethernet coming off the purifier, and a better power supply for it, so it will be probably 3X the cost of the device, but I listen to a lot of streamed music and think it’s worth it.

Marco1, I’m using Snake River products now but used Cardas exclusively for many years. Cardas is a great company to deal with, I bet they would fix that USB cable for you.

I’ve got a selection of ethernet and USBs coming on loan from the Cable Company next week. Their lending library for cables is exceptional. You pay to rent the cables but the money goes on account towards a future purchase. I’ll report back what differences I hear. I already hear a big difference in the power supplies for the iFi LAN Purifier. The tiny one it comes with is surprisingly good, and breaks in almost immediately. Right out of the box, the $300 power supply is really closed off but 48 hours later is significantly better. More weight and better bass but the top end is still less open than the power supply it came with. I’m hoping another couple of days will change that. I also have the $100 power supply burning in on my AV system. Same thing with the sound being closed off immediately on installation but I’ll give it a week. I’m interested to hear the difference each of these makes. Free, $100 and $300 worth of power supplies from the same company. We’ll see, and if not better, then Amazon returns here I come.

One of the bigger improvements to streaming, which I made a few years back, was to add a linear power supply for my router. Verizon does not make it easy though, because they use some seemingly proprietary plug jack that has a just slightly bigger center pin than anything else I’ve found. Options are to chop the cable off the wall wort and use that, modify a nicer plug by drilling out the center and then soldering to decent wire, or just bypassing the plug jack and soldering wire to the board. I ended up removing the plug jack from the router board and directly soldering some Kimber cable in its place and running that to the linear power supply. Instantly better bass and weight to the streamed music.

I’ve just done some listening on multiple power supplies for the iFi Purifier Pro, and strangely it was the wall-wort that came with it that sounded best. I tried iFi’s top and second from top supplies and they just weren’t as open sounding even after a few hundred hours. I also tried a few ethernet and USB options from: Nordost, Shunyata, Synergistic Research, Cardas, Snake River, Pangea and Audio Quest.  I liked the Cardas Clear best for both ethernet and USB but for 1/10 the cost the Pangea didn’t embarrass itself. I also moved my ONT close to my router since I had enough of the incoming FIOS fiber to do it. This allowed me to go to a short run of high end Cardas ethernet between ONT and router and cut out about 60’ of unnecessary lower quality ethernet. I think I’m going to take the recommendation of some other folks on here and go fiber out of the router to my DAC and use a Sonore Optical to convert back just before.