Update on good Ethernet switch

Well Fred, the facts are you have not heard or experienced true hifi.  You lack an open mind to the possibility that digital is more than 1’s and 0’s and packets of data.  And apparently, you find history irrelevant which is sure to lead to repeating of past mistakes.

A preacher in the late 19th Century said that God would not ever allow man to fly like a bird.  That man was Wilbur and Orville Wright’s father.  Try to have a more open mind.

@tonywinga not at all. That you resort to personal attacks shows that you don’t have an argument. 

@tonywinga not at all. That you resort to personal attacks shows that you don’t have an argument. 

I guess I hit a nerve. 

@tonywinga why is it that your camp always resort to personal attacks when you are confronted by facts?

Sophomoric trolls with nothing to contribute…

@tonywinga do you really think that was the best analogy? Our full understanding of the universe, which is currently beyond our comprehension since neither physics nor mathematics are complete and both are self referencing vs. a stack of protocol we humans designed and documented to exhaustion. 
 

any such comparison is just ridiculous.

@dfbrent 

The other thing that is just as interesting, is people that haven’t heard a piece of equipment proceed to explain how it doesn’t make any difference

@fredrik222 IS spot on; An ethernet frame is in essence an envelope that carries the digital data; TCPIP is the transport protocol used to ensure that the envelopes arrive in an order to ensure constant reliable transmission of data.  The disassembly and reassembly of these packets is done at the transmitting station and the receiving station -- your source for your music and your streamer or DAC. This is where the digital music files get pushed into whatever converter you have for the playing of the reconstructed analog signal.  I would always agree to buy a known reliable Ethernet switch and decent cabling; most ethernet chipsets used in comms gear globally are made by a handful of manufacturers, Broadcomm and Intel to name a couple.  I'd spend more money on interconnects than spending a fortune of comme gear.

As others have explained, TCP/IP is what it is.  But I love to read people rationalizing why they spent $$$$$ on Ethernet switches.

Sure, it happens sometimes. It is probably due to breakdown somewhere along the data path. But the data when you finally receive it will still be bit perfect.

If this failure happens locally on a streamer/swtch then the streamer will simply not play the song!
 

Then why does a page fail to load sometimes and I have to refresh the screen?

@fredrik222 Your explanation is spot on.

On the internet data reaches the end user via hundreds of such ethernet switches.

TCP/IP protocol ensures bit perfect transmission at every stage.

If it was not true than I will see random missing letters in the data I read on my screen!!

Sir Isaac Newton made some observations about falling objects and developed a few basic equations to describe the motion of bodies.  It took some time for people to accept his equations.  Then Einstein came along and showed that Newton’s equations were not entirely accurate.  Still, the observations never changed.

Many of us have experienced and observed that audiophile grade ethernet switches improve the sound of streaming music.  I have even observed it dramatically improve the picture quality on my TV while streaming.  Therefore, it is an exercise in futility to insist that an ethernet switch can do nothing.  Try to be more like Einstein. 

fredrik222

Ethernet sends a sine wave, however, depending on the speed, it could be as high as 4 simultaneously waves.

Huh? Word salad.

Ethernet standards, regardless of speed over what’s called an Ethernet cable (twisted pair) has building common more noise rejection, that handles most noise,

Word salad. What are you trying to say?

most music services that provides per song streaming actually downloads a large part, if not the entire song (Qobuz does the entire song)

As you know, I've previously shown an experiment that disproves that claim, so please stop repeating it.

Just go away Fred. You are not my saviour.

Bleating on the same drivel. Reminds me of George. 

@tonywinga  you have a few details correct, but you are missing a lot, like 90%.

 You are correct in that Ethernet sends a sine wave, however, depending on the speed, it could be as high as 4 simultaneously waves. Ethernet uses something called a frame to transmit over the wire. Built into the the frame is a crc check, so if there is anything that goes wrong, the frame is discarded. 
also important is that Ethernet standards, regardless of speed over what’s called an Ethernet cable (twisted pair) has building common more noise rejection, that handles most noise, certainly all noise in a residential setting, at speeds less than 2.5Gbit/s. 
 

what you are also missing is that it is a stack of protocols, called TCP/IP, which ensures bit perfect transmission, 100% of the time under normal operating conditions. And you are missing that most music services that provides per song streaming actually downloads a large part, if not the entire song (Qobuz does the entire song) as fast as possible, it doesn’t take very long to download a 24/96 FLAC, seconds, and this download is done over HTTPS, which is encrypted, so you can miss any packets at all or the decryption will fail.

so, now that you have more information, it is easy to see a switch cannot do anything to improve. A poorly design switch can detract and introduce packet loss, but no switch can improve. It is not how the protocol stack functions, in fact it is the opposite of how it works.

My experience is a high quality network switch is better than no switch and that seems to be the consensus of a lot of listeners.  

My simplified view as a Mechanical Engineer is that unlike the Analog realm where less is more, the digital realm seems to work differently.  As I understand it, the digital signal is a square wave propagated through wiring.  The “ones and zeros” are created by these square wave pulses.  The 16 bit or 24 bit word length is made up of these ones and zeros as pulses which must be timed perfectly as they leave the originator and are captured by the receiver.  I think of it as a Morse Code operator.  If he misses one “dot” or “dash” thereby getting out of sync with the sender, the message becomes garbled.

I think the D/A converter needs as clean a square wave as possible with exact timing in order to produce a good analog signal.  The less well defined square wave causes the D/A converter to underperform or interpolate, ie guess at what the analog waveform should look like at that moment.  At this point the music is compromised.  

Therefore, the cleaner the square wave the better the chance for the music to get through a D/A converter.  Electrical wiring has some level of capacitance, resistance and inductance which can round off the edges of the square wave.  Electrical noise can be introduced into the wiring through EMI that can make it harder for the D/A converter to interpret the signal.  The network bridge, if my analogy is correct, redraws that square wave and sets the timing by its own internal clock passing on a sharp, clean square wave to the D/A converter.  

It’s like reading for us.  If the print is too small or too large, or the contrast is too low, our reading slows down and we might misread a few words, or have to go back and reread a sentence because it did not make sense.  We might even misread the sentence and end up completely misinterpreting it.  Newspapers and book publishers probably spent a lot of effort into researching in the past century the best print font, size and contrast for readers.   Now we are doing the same thing for music D/A converters.

I have a question.

If we could get rid of the switch between the music server and streamer, will it better than adding a audiophile switch?

the lhy is a good one, as is the english electric

The LHY has been around for a while and is a bargain. 

I run LHY-SW10 because it has optical connections and connects directly to My Green Computer optical bundle. Not to mention the external clock connection of the SW10 which connects to the Gustard c18 which takes over the Gustard X26 PRO clock. So my newly acquired Innuos ZENith mk3, which has no clock of its own, is clocked both with the SW-10 and Gustard x26 pro through the gustard c18. The result is top notch. Not a lot superior sound wise to what I achieved with my excellent Node/Pardo combo, but even a more reliable OS. Kudos to Innuos sense. Now using the Node combo in my living room with my headphones system. 

@audioman58  thanks. Not warm means it isn’t generating much heat, which is a good thing.

It does not get that warm ,the case being all aluminum acts in part like a heat sink.

@audioman58  Thanks for your post.  Not sure I followed it all but I appreciat it.

   I have one question.  How warm does it run.  I'm becoming intolerant of the new brand of audio components with supercaps and high current chargers that run very warm to the touch--some at high as 150 F and you can't hold your hand on them.  Hopefully this isnt the case here.

I see they have a dealer in texas.  They also carry Kinki Studios.  I have their amp and it is an excellent piece of equipment.   Also very nicely designed case.  

LHY has a second switch, twice as big, twice as much money, but looks like the money was put into more power supply and better clock.  Might be worth a try.

I have an ether-regen switch but might be looking to try this one. Thanks for posting it.

Jerry