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Audiophile Network Switches for Streaming ... really ?

TheFlash said:
Thanks. It would be very interesting indeed to experiment with router to ee8 5m then ee8 to streaming bridge 2m (or less if you can make that work)… though it sounds like you’d need to invest in one of those 2 or 3 way mini-bricks to get an extra power socket! If you can’t plug the Zen Mini etc direct into the router, I’d personally out a cheap switch at that end and move EE8 to hifi end which is where it was designed to go (hence included 1m cable).

If you can ever be bothered of course!
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I guess if he likes pointlessly wasting his free time it'll be an excellent way to achieve precisely nothing.

TheFlash said:
It might look stupid to you (I’m not sure I’d be quite so insulting myself) and I can see why, but this is why I think it makes sense to test the theory of “this can’t possibly do anything so why should I even try?” with a £20 switch installed in the right place. Sometimes you’ve got to put down your copy of What Car and test drive the thing. In fact, I think £20 might be an exaggeration and you can pick up a Zyxel GS108B for £17 off Amazon.

I was hugely sceptical just 9 months ago. No I won’t be trying cable lifters or grounding boxes using the same “just try it, you never know” logic; I might be stupid but I’m not daft!:)
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If it makes you happy, rock on dude. Believe in Xenu or The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
 
TheFlash said:
Thanks. It would be very interesting indeed to experiment with router to ee8 5m then ee8 to streaming bridge 2m (or less if you can make that work)… though it sounds like you’d need to invest in one of those 2 or 3 way mini-bricks to get an extra power socket! If you can’t plug the Zen Mini etc direct into the router, I’d personally out a cheap switch at that end and move EE8 to hifi end which is where it was designed to go (hence included 1m cable).

If you can ever be bothered of course!
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looking at the manual, i read it that the supplied 1m is for the router end, might be wrong tho!
 
Funk said:
I guess if he likes pointlessly wasting his free time it'll be an excellent way to achieve precisely nothing.

If it makes you happy, rock on dude. Believe in Xenu or The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
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I wish I was as clever as you and just knew stuff, simply knew stuff with 100% certainty, and didn’t therefore need humility or even to read posts properly before replying. It must be so nice!

The good thing about actually experiencing something is that it squeezes belief out of the picture. You know the belief that you are right, so confidently right, that putting your beliefs to the test simply can’t be countenanced.

I have never heard of Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Should I have done?
 
hifi-dog said:
looking at the manual, i read it that the supplied 1m is for the router end, might be wrong tho!
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Could be. If you think you have any chance if trying it at t’other end then that would be peachy, but it sounds like it might be a bit more of a faff for you than for many
 
TheFlash said:
I wish I was as clever as you and just knew stuff, simply knew stuff with 100% certainty, and didn’t therefore need humility or even to read posts properly before replying. It must be so nice!

The good thing about actually experiencing something is that it squeezes belief out of the picture. You know the belief that you are right, so confidently right, that putting your beliefs to the test simply can’t be countenanced.

I have never heard of Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Should I have done?
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What you're suggesting is testing something that's already a known demonstrable fact; that a network switch cannot influence the sound. I don't need to waste time inserting unncessary switching products into my network or wondering whether using an 8m length here and a 2m length there makes any difference.

It's the exact same reason that I don't need to 'test' homeopathy remedies to know that they're pseudoscientific nonsense. You're espousing the hifi equivalent of homeopathy.
 
Fourlegs said:
Of course there is an element of truth in what you say.

On the other hand if digital devices such as servers and streamers are ‘only’ passing through digital information then they would all sound the same when played through the same DAC and yet that is demonstrably not the case.
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Oh, you must be aware of a statistically valid peer reviewed AB test that escaped the rest of us.

I've yet to hear any, none windows based, pc music source, sound different to another.
 
Fourlegs said:
Of course there is an element of truth in what you say.

On the other hand if digital devices such as servers and streamers are ‘only’ passing through digital information then they would all sound the same when played through the same DAC and yet that is demonstrably not the case. Hell, even different bit perfect playback software and firmware on the same device can (and do) sound different.
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I find that emailing myself a lossless audio file to my work email account changes the sound compared to emailing it to my Google email account!

....come on now, that's nonsense...YMMV, but I'd guess that's all in one's head, unless you can demonstrate...
 
chiily said:
I find that emailing myself a lossless audio file to my work email account changes the sound compared to emailing it to my Google email account!

....come on now, that's nonsense...YMMV, but I'd guess that's all in one's head, unless you can demonstrate...
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No that isn’t what I meant and I hope you realised that. What I meant was that LMS (Squeeze) sounds different to MPD and that in turn sounds different to Roon server with the Roon Player and that also sounds different to Roon server using Squeezelite as the player. All with no fancy twiddles turned on, just bit perfect replay.

It is easy to demonstrate and to hear.
 
I haven't read all the replies, but just in case it's not been mentioned, there are some fancy switches that really do help audio quality in some very specific configurations. There is a standard called AVB which some audio interfaces support, and this distributes audio from host to audio interface via IP (so rather than plug a USB audio interface into your computer, your computer connects to the audio interface over IP). In this protocol, the clock needs to be distributed to resolve some funky problems which happen if you have multiple interfaces or driving machines, and you need switches which support AVB to achieve this.

AVB is part of the IEEE 802.1 international standard, and offers I think 512 channels of audio @48k/24 with a fixed latency (which is I believe 2ms) and uses PTP to distribute time between the nodes, and I guess the fancier switches supporting it will provide high quality clock sources for the PTP feed. It uses QoS, so the switch dedicates bandwidth to the audio feeds, so *no matter what else* you run on the network, you can't starve the audio feeds.

As you can imagine, the application for this sort of thing is more live venues, and large cinema complexes than domestic audio, but I could imagine it being used in home cinema applications.

It's basically a free version of the Dante protocol if you've heard of that, and implements some of the distributed AES protocols (AES50 I believe).

Anyhow, bit of a brain dump there, carry on.
 
Funk said:
No switch (£20, £200 or £2000) can alter the sound as it passes the digital data stream to the playback device. The data either arrives correctly or it doesn't - the switch has no idea that what's transmitting happens to be audio, let alone be able to influence it positively or negatively in the analogue domain.
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Along with the data travels noise. A switch and unshielded Ethernet cables will (partly) filter that noise.
This investigation on network noise is worth reading (fully, including the links which contain measurements):

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/64138-best-ethernet-cards-for-streaming/#comments
 
Funk said:
OMG. We should use SO MANY switches! That'll solve the non-existent problem.

It's hi-fi homeopathy, nothing more.
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Or ignorance on your part. Depends on the point of view, I suppose.

(I am not advocating for expensive switches BTW)
 
tuga said:
Along with the data travels noise. A switch and unshielded Ethernet cables will (partly) filter that noise.
This investigation on network noise is worth reading (fully, including the links which contain measurements):

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/64138-best-ethernet-cards-for-streaming/#comments
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The noise is completely outside the digital/data domain and ethernet frame format, and it will not manifest into the D/A conversion as a qualified signal and therefor have no impact on the sound quality.
 
@Cesare does AVB use AES50? My understand is that AES50 doesn't run over IP just the physical ethernet layer (hence I guess the need to certify switches?) but I've not used it.
 
Cesare said:
I haven't read all the replies, but just in case it's not been mentioned, there are some fancy switches that really do help audio quality in some very specific configurations.
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You don't need a fancy switch to manage bandwidth, it's more about common sense. If people in your home each like to stream 4K videos on each of their own devices, the bottle neck is the CPE used for the level of bandwidth the household needs.

The specific situation is really a case of bandwidth contention, it's not a hi-fi issue.
 
Meanwhile, back at Snake Oil HQ:

riQNED0.png
 
Fourlegs said:
No that isn’t what I meant and I hope you realised that. What I meant was that LMS (Squeeze) sounds different to MPD and that in turn sounds different to Roon server with the Roon Player and that also sounds different to Roon server using Squeezelite as the player. All with no fancy twiddles turned on, just bit perfect replay.

It is easy to demonstrate and to hear.
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The bits presented to the players will all be the same over ethernet, has to be or all our Word/Execl/gerbers files are all buggered; hell all our archives, gone!

I would suspect it is simply analogue filtering that you are hearing, or up/down sampling, DSP, sound shaping, compression, etc, some artefact that has nothing to do with the transmission of data over ethernet.
 
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