chiily
PFM Special Builder
I think you are talking about clarity there, which is not always the absence of noise. Clarity could be an improvement in Freq response and bandwidth, a change to the group delay, or a different harmonic spread, for example. Some "noise", for example harmonics can provide a better listening experience, and is readily measurable at levels that can be heard.With all (and I do mean all) due respect, no.
This suggests that a switch makes a difference only either (a) where the user has an overactive imagination and/or (b) where the streamer and/or DAC they use is poorly designed. You really do need to hear the difference a switch makes to even a well-designed DAC before you tie yourself to that mast.
The noise is not audible in the sense most people would intepret that. We're not talking hisses and pops and stuff. You only "hear" it when you've heard your system with and without it.
Think high quality passive preamp like Music First Audio Baby Ref. I thought I had a had a great pre, very transparent, didn't get in the way of the music. When I replaced it with a Baby Ref, the difference was jaw-dropping. With the former preamp, the system sounded great; no "distortion", just great music; but with the Baby Ref, drums were visceral, double bass plucks in the room etc etc. A Baby Ref passive pre can't add anything to the the music; all it can do is to show what getting out of the way sounds like - what removing distortion sounds like. It's incredible.
I'm not seeking to equate the scale of impact of a switch (installed just before the streamer not just anywhere) with that of something like an MFA Baby Ref of course; I merely seek to point out how the absence of something you didn't previously realise was there - because you can't hear it explicitly - can make a serious difference. I just wish more people would risk exposing themselves to the experience so they could speak from both theoretical and practical bases.
Established earlier in this thread was that the sound of a switch wasn't changing the actual data but more likely the "sound" that people were hearing was an artefact of some noise leaking on to the gnd and power of the streamer from the switch. One has to consider that the DAC and its own PSU could also be adding noise to its own gnd and power lines. Streamer designers understand this and understand the joy of a mixed signal environment and will, unless incompetent, ensure that regardless of where the noise comes from, will filter out that out of band noise - noting that any in band noise could be measured in the audio Freq range just like our ears can hear it However, because there is no evidence, measured that is, of in band noise, it doesn't exist - for some that will be hard to grasp, but the area of science and technology in play here is very well understood, we are not at the edge of science here. And no one on this thread so far has demonstrated, or communicated in an accepted method of capturing and presenting evidence of this type to make it reviewable and reliably, constantly, repeatable, that within the performance of our ears any change to the sound occurs when, all other things being constant, the network switch has been changed.
Take a switch,. measure the output of the DAC, change the switch, measure the output of the sample DAC. Subtract one from the other, plot on a log graph, please
Apologies for the ramble...