Network Switches

I have the EtherRegen on order from UpTone.  I’ll be in the first batch delivered, and can comment hopefully in a few weeks.  

To the people that believe an isolated switch cannot reap sonic benefits, I wonder why they are on an audiophile hobby site In the first place? The entire purpose here is to optimize one’s musical experience, be it with component upgrades, setup or tweeks. The 30 day return policy means one can see for themselves if it improves one’s system.

My cable tv signal has traveled through miles of wire and like many I have to isolate it from that system to avoid hum and there no reason to believe other forms of isolation can’t be beneficial in a high resolution system.

It’s as if we’ve returned to the days where people claimed nothing more than lamp cord was needed for speaker cabling, or the fake audio “science” crowd that uses test gear improperly to prove the gear they sell is superior.

I don’t believe that you can measure the benefit of having a black border around a projection screen but to deny that they enhance the perception of contrast is absurd.

Steve, the guy that designed the etherRegen has designed many of the chips used in standard switches, so I think his credentials and experience far outweigh any here or the doubters who claim these things don’t matter.

Also ethernet is not just for streaming audio. All my music is on local drives.

Another crazy thing that illustrates how counterintuitive audio quality can be is that UpTone has found that the etherRegen seems to benefit from breakin. (When comparing a prototype to a newly assembled one)

This seems to make no sense (at least to me as a non engineer), but yet it is.

Perhaps there is something else about the prototype vs assembled version that can explain the difference.

Also the level of system does make a difference in whether or not someone may receive a difference. There is so many opportunities for coloration and loss of resolution in a system (especially the analog volume control and digital volume control)

From a video perspective there are details not readily visible on a 55” monitor that are visible on a huge projection screen, and I would liken a highly resolving stereo to the large screen when details are exploded and now audible.

Just last night I was listening to Springsteen’s Seeger sessions (a well recorded acoustic album) and was comparing a 16 bit WAV file with the 24 bit flac. (All 44.1). The WAV sounded better. Once I unpacked the 24 bit flac to WAV, it now had more detail and was more intimate than the 16bit WAV. This is using a Mac Pro tower with 64 gigs ram and 6 cores so the computer isn’t using much of its horsepower decoding the flac.

Much of audio is counterintuitive, and with no (or lacking) explanation and yet these differences exist for people with the systems and the aural experience to hear the nuances.

So I’ve had the EtherRegen in my system for over a day now. I run an Ethernet cable directly from my Mac Pro tower running Jriver to a Directstream dac with bridge2. My point is that I’m not going through a switch. There is switch and the rest of my network on the mac’s second Ethernet port)

I haven’t tested to see if my system (Tad Cr1’s And BHK300 amps- Atmasphere pre) sounds cleaner than running through a switch.

I’ll make a bold (and silly) statement. If you are running an Ethernet based audio system which is of significant fidelity, and you have $650 of disposable income, one would have to suffer from some form of mental illness if they didn’t buy this product (or a competing one which works similarly and as effectively)

After hearing it, I consider this type of isolation
to be mandatory. Not an optional tweek, but mandatory.

No amount of downstream gear upgrade, attention to setup, or expensive cable is going to fix what I now consider the inherently flawed signal timing (and noise possibly) associated with computer based Ethernet audio.

Perhaps I’ll post a proper review compiled from my comments from another message board, but avoid this product at your own peril. 

No description of telling how it benefited my system (which already has a passive medical type Ethernet isolator in line ) is going to replace you hearing what fixing this problem (we never knew we had) will sound like until you hear it preferably in your own system.

With a 30 day evaluation it’s a no brainer. The only downside to this product is the wait time to get one. I now wonder if there might be any benefit for video. It all seems counterintuitive at first in a “bit perfect” world of thinking, but clearly as digital audio evolves we are leaning aspects previously thought irrelevant. I’ve already recommended it to a pro audio guy using Dante based Ethernet audio.