We Need To Talk About Ones And Zeroes

@devinplombier 

Since you choose to highlight my comment about an M12 Gold switch redundancy….I would like to provide bit more context to my previous post. On its own, M12 in my system, contributed to a smoother and more refined sound. And further improved tonal density and micro-dynamics. No other filtering device were used with M12 Switch. 

When Telegartner released the Optical Isolator Bridge, I decided to take the plunge. My prior experience with fibre optic / Ethernet converters didn’t yield favorable outcome. I never cared for the dry (clinical) sound through fiber optic cables. 

One of the prime reason for me to consider the Telegartner Optical Bridge is its ability to keep the transmission over Ethernet cables. IME, Ethernet cables sounds much more organic over any fibre optic cables. 

In a/b comparison, i.e. Optical Bridge vs M12 Switch, Optical Bridge went few steps further in terms of increased dynamics, presence and resolution during both streaming and local playback. Keeping M12 in signal chain with Optical Bridge brought no audible enhancements hence my assessment of a Ethernet switch redundancy in a system that has already addressed galvanic isolation effectively. 

Hope this clears any confusion! 

@mclinnguy 

Love your sense of humor, hope you’re doing well! Did you switched to Horning Eufrodites? Those are amazing speakers, clearly underrated and don’t get enough recognition in North America. 

Hope this clears any confusion!

@lalitk 

It does! Thank you!

It is indeed good to know that the "M12 [switch] in [your] system contributed to a smoother and more refined sound and further improved tonal density and micro-dynamics"! Otherwise, we might have thought - mistakenly, it turns out! - that you "found audiophile switches redundant or hav[ing] very minimal impact, as long as we have addressed galvanic isolation between network devices". So, thank you for clarifying!

Happy listening!

To whom it may concern,

https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5a3608c8-0cf3-458b-a68e-6bfd1564ec15

All the best,
Nonoise

@nonoise I can't view that. I must not have paid the 25% tariff, so it wouldn't load. I know it wasn't addressed to me anyway. 

@lalitk Doing very well friend! hope you are doing the same! Yes the Eufrodites are what I am listening to at the moment until system #2 is completed, and then I will alternate between the two. And yes, most don't have a clue what these things are. I can't wait to get them into the 12' ceiling room; the "1's and 0's" will sound so much better in there. 

And since you mentioned it: My fibre optic experiment I also found inferior to using copper from the Cisco 2960 switch to Etherregen- added some extra sharpness, but less smooth- and not inclined to try any "fancy audiophile" connectors. 

@mclinnguy 

Glad to hear you’re doing well. If I may say so, you’ve got quite the setup rotation going. Looking forward to hearing how those speakers perform in the high-ceiling room……you can count on those “1’s and 0’s” breathe little deeper in your amazing space :-) 

I have found I prefer the sound of the ones over the zeroes. Not that the zeroes are bad, but the ones are sharper and have more detail, while the zeroes are smoother but it is hard to tell when they begin and end.

"@sns Still, one can benefit from a 'clean' home network."

This needs to be clearly defined. Are we talking about a clean network, or clean components from an audiophile stance? Sadly, us audio guys try to treat networking like our stereo systems. They are not even close to being the same. 

Have had several people say they have a "clean" network for streaming. Sadly, you do not. You have a network segment, separate from your home network. This does not give you any benefits to steaming. If you want a "clean" network, it takes a ton of work to keep all traffic off the network except for streaming traffic. In networking we call this "air-gaped" You have a network bridge, and firewall, sometimes a dedicated point to point VPN, or packet encapsulations. Then you do some port forwarding, QoS, segmentation, setup the firewall to only allow the ports needed on the streamer, along with closing off all other traffic, etc... 

I can put a packet sniffer on any of these clean networks, and in about 10 sec of sampling tell you all the "noise" on your network. This all means nothing. If you have a 100g network, a few thousand bits of network traffic will have 0 affect on your streaming. 

My point is, having a streaming network is mostly pointless unless your main subnet is full, and/or is having any kind of packet collision issues. 

Now if we are talking about WiFi, that is an entirely different issue. No enterprise gear will have networking and WiFi in the same package. Wifi is also "air-gaped" while being radio, it will not contain anything ridding on the original packet from the source to the destination. 

FWIW, I used to work for the company that supplies the full racks to AWS that AWS runs on. Was an engineer then architect, dealing with server farms over a thousand racks. Being on-call to AWS, and working 80hs a week was not for me. 

It's 2025 and we're still talking about "Ones and Zeros."  You'd think that after many decades of involvement with digital music, we'd be up to 6, or even 7 by now.  Or, at a minimum, 2 or 3.

What's up with that?

Or maybe by now we’d be good enough listeners to buy a 1k turntable, a phono stage and some records and say f**k it with streaming unless we’re going down the YouTube rabbit hole while “working” on our PCs….☘️🎶

Realize that all of these problems you describe are non-problems for business/banking/national defense who use bitperfect algorithms to confirm the file recieved is exactly, to the bit, identical to the file sent.

Now on streaming, we can't use such and algorithm, thus the need for quality streamers and other quality digital equipment.

But this tells you all the information is there, you just need to do your best not to lose any of it while streaming.

jerry