News $2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles From Cash

[mdd1963]

Synergy Research has made an ethernet switch for audiophiles that smooths out electric signals in the switch, to improve audio quality.

$2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles From Cash : Read more

I remember a guy 30+ years ago swore CD's sounded better if he waxed/polished them!

 

[Paul Basso]

It doesn't. It's more snake oil. A digital signal either arrives intact or it doesn't. And while you could make the claim that this helps improve the chances of a digital signal not being corrupted while in transit, this is only something you have to worry about if you're in adverse conditions. Which I'm pretty sure most audiophiles wouldn't allow their setups to be in the first place.

If anything the quality of the cable is more important, but at the data rates required for audio, you don't need to go that far either.

In the top communication layer if a TCP package is corrupted, the system will request it again, so there is no corruption in the data, and I don't know any audio or video system that use UDP. There are also correction in lower layers, all those to preserve data integrity.

Hope that switch comes at least with some good cat 8 cables.

 

[lxh89]

I going to start with, I am no sound expert, not even by a long shot. However, music from streaming services is encoded digitally, transmitted digitally and then decoded into analog signals once it reaches its final destination device (phone, tablet, AV unit, TV, etc.). So how exactly does this do anything for that digital signal in transport? Seems like it would have little effect me based on what I know, but maybe someone can enlighten me.

This technology ensures that each 1 and 0 is perfectly formed without error. God forbid your computer incorrectly interpret a malformed 1 as a 0. Do you not realize how this destroys the sound quality?

Now that we have this cleared up and if you agree with my explanation, I want to discuss a great opportunity working from home where you can make $289 dollars an hour. My cousin's friend knows a guy who does this and made $1.2 million dollars last year. I'm happy to sell you the details of this opportunity for only $19.95 but if only if you reply to this message as soon as possible because I have a limited number of digital copies and its very expensive to create more.

Thanks

 

[coloradoblah]

I know real audiophiles, and they dont to "stream" music to their 50000$+ setups... But it is gonna be good to some amateur who wants to impress people with useless rigs that nobody has

I think most audiophiles usually dont spend that much coin on their setups, they are usually trying to find best value. I can definitely see how you send that much on large space setups though, im more of a head fi guy so Im probably underestimating how expensive things are in the speaker world. Now if i had money then yeah i guess I would have a 50k system lol

 

[drtweak]

Except wouldn't you need one of these at every point from the steaming server to you? Its like putting a signal booster as the last 10 feet of a 1000 foot cable. At least that is how I see it.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Except wouldn't you need one of these at every point from the steaming server to you? Its like putting a signal booster as the last 10 feet of a 1000 foot cable. At least that is how I see it.

No.

This sort of marketing is banking on the hope that people who don't know anything about digital signaling doesn't realize that:

• The quality of the signal doesn't matter, to a point, as long as the receiver correctly interprets what's a 0 and what's a 1.
• Hardware designs and communication protocols are designed specifically with fault tolerance in mind.
• Until it hits a DAC, nothing else matters in a digital signal, as long as the signal is interpreted correctly.

I liken this to saying using Helvetica is objectively better than using Comic Sans, despite that fact that most people can read both fonts just fine, so objectively speaking, they both do their job.

 

[Chris Rock]

I think several of you are missing the point of this news post. We're here to point out the idiocy of claiming an "audiophile switch" can do something to a digital signal. We didn't get this for review, but the headline should clue you in: $2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles From Cash. We are NOT recommending anyone spend $2500 on this switch. If that wasn't clear, we apologize, but give the text a second read with the knowledge that we at Tom's actually do think this product and the "review" are highly suspect.

I work in Hi-Fi. Most of you don't have gear good enough to hear the difference so I recorded it for you on my iphone. The aforementioned switch doesn't modify the original digital signal obviously. No one said it did. What these folks are trying to solve is the problem of network noise that one can hear just above the noise floor on a very high-end system. A power conditioner won't solve the problem of noise coming from components connected to the network. Now, while I haven't made any claim of this product working or not, I can say with certainty that a high-end audiophile system can pick up & amplify EMF and other electronic noise, especially noise that's on the network, coming from a network switch or even router. One may expect the DAC filters this noise but the reality is that it doesn't. Case in point: The Maestro X9 has the very highly regarded Saber DAC and network noise is very audible.

View: https://youtu.be/oMjeGHMdY_s

 

[Sluggotg]

Same here, the holy grail should be perfect reproduction of the source material.

In the audiophoolery world though, an A-class tube amplifier with 1% THD adds "warmth, fullness and presence to sound" only because the amplifier's characteristic distortion profile is something favored by that particular reviewer. By strict scientific/engineering standards, it is technically hot garbage compared to decent hi-fi semiconductor amplifiers that typically do better than 0.05% THD+N.

Exactly!
I have had a subscription to Sound and Vision, (formerly Stereo review), for decades. They are a great Audio and Home Theatre Mag. I did have a Subscription to Audiophile Magazine. Where you read about the $50,000 speaker that is a great "Budget Speaker" that compares to a MidRange $100,000 speaker. The Snake Oil is everywhere. Tube Amps and vinyl record players that touted as the end all in Audio. So many people think Vinyl is literally THE most accurate Audio Reproduction ever created. The same with Tube Amps. Not even close. Like you guys point out. It distorts / clips / smooths out the signal changing it. I want the original.
Digital is Digital, all of us THG fans know that. I love that they put up the article. Because we get to make fun of IDIOTS who think this switch will make your sound better than a $40 switch.

 

[JamesJones44]

Well, some people have reported that there is in fact a difference. The question is only "where" this difference comes from. Of course you are correct and this does not come from affecting the digital data as is. Some ideas:

a.) Inside the switch for 2500 USD you could have a bunch of DSP logic, to recognize audio, unpack the network packets, modify the audio and repack it back. Maybe there is some typical fault in the streaming audio, which can be fixed algorithmically. For example:

• Increasing sampling frequency by 2x by using bandlimited (perfect) interpolation. Many audio receivers do 96kHz or more up-sampling before playback.
• Use a harmonizer to introduce higher harmonics from existing audio in to the new higher frequency range. (above16kHz)
• There could be any number of algorithms that can take the mp3 and aac faults and try to mitigate the problems and improve something.

Why to put that in to a switch rather than a special driver? Maybe its not possible to do on all devices?

b.) There is also this thing called "power supply". You can affect the performance of any device on the power grid, by plugging in one more device. Each new device and even every power plant which is on or off the grid will have an influence on the power supply and the frequency spectrum of the 50/60Hz signal. You can tell exactly which power plants are online and which devices in your houshold are working or not, just by looking at the power grid voltage signal. It is possible that some of the power supply issues (1 or 2 bits) could leak in to the D/A converter (the soundcard) of the computer, which is playing back the audio. The source of that can also be the ethernet connection.

This does not mean that the 2500 USD switch does any of this. As much as the internet is overwhelmed with false information, you could have hustlers selling anything.

Atmapuri

For a.) to work it would have to have the certificate to decode TLS traffic before it got to the host device (All the streaming services I'm aware of these days are not steaming over "plan text" protocols) . If it can do that, you don't want this thing in your house as it becomes the perfect place to steal anything you want from the devices connected to it 😉

 

[JamesJones44]

I work in Hi-Fi. Most of you don't have gear good enough to hear the difference so I recorded it for you on my iphone. The aforementioned switch doesn't modify the original digital signal obviously. No one said it did. What these folks are trying to solve is the problem of network noise that one can hear just above the noise floor on a very high-end system. A power conditioner won't solve the problem of noise coming from components connected to the network. Now, while I haven't made any claim of this product working or not, I can say with certainty that a high-end audiophile system can pick up & amplify EMF and other electronic noise, especially noise that's on the network, coming from a network switch or even router. One may expect the DAC filters this noise but the reality is that it doesn't. Case in point: The Maestro X9 has the very highly regarded Saber DAC and network noise is very audible.

View: https://youtu.be/oMjeGHMdY_s

Thank you! This make more sense to me than the way it was explained in the article. It didn't occur to me that noise on the ethernet lines could be picked up by the single processors/amps.

Cheers.

 

[Chrys]

Finally the product I've been looking for. My music usually sounds fine, but every now and then you get the 2 that comes in on the binary signal and it messes up the audio frequency for 10-15 seconds. It's even worse when I get a 3, nearly fried my receiver last time. If they just engineered the binary signaling correctly, such as only allowing 1's and 0's then this wouldn't be a problem. All they would have to do would be to have some cutoff voltage and anything above it was a 1, anything below a 0. It's so simple it should have been done decades ago.

 

[InvalidError]

Case in point: The Maestro X9 has the very highly regarded Saber DAC and network noise is very audible.

I seriously doubt this noise has anything to do with Ethernet itself. It is more likely that there are design flaws that let noise from whatever controller manages network traffic and feeds audio streams to the DACs get coupled into the audio path.

You are most likely hearing noise from SoC activity bursts on network packets or some other frequent source, not actual "Ethernet noise."

 

[blppt]

Exactly!
I have had a subscription to Sound and Vision, (formerly Stereo review), for decades. They are a great Audio and Home Theatre Mag. I did have a Subscription to Audiophile Magazine. Where you read about the $50,000 speaker that is a great "Budget Speaker" that compares to a MidRange $100,000 speaker. The Snake Oil is everywhere. Tube Amps and vinyl record players that touted as the end all in Audio. So many people think Vinyl is literally THE most accurate Audio Reproduction ever created. The same with Tube Amps. Not even close. Like you guys point out. It distorts / clips / smooths out the signal changing it. I want the original.
Digital is Digital, all of us THG fans know that. I love that they put up the article. Because we get to make fun of IDIOTS who think this switch will make your sound better than a $40 switch.

I long ago stopped trying to tell people what 'sounds good'. People have personal preferences to what they perceive sounds good. Its why many people can find the technically flawed "Bose" sound as pleasurable, whereas to others it sounds like a soundwave filled with holes. "What sounds good" is highly, highly subjective.

You can recite frequency response and distortion figures to people until you're blue in the face, but unless they are extremely vulnerable to suggestion, they're going to like what they're going to like.

Personally, I prefer the character that a good vinyl setup provides. Would I spend $40,000 on a super-isolated deck and tonearm? Heck no. A decent deck and decent cartridge will yield fine analog sound for under a grand. But I like the sound. It is definitely different from digital audio. Its not objectively better, but to me it is (subjective).

 

[diablodanny]

I can't wait to get one and see how much better YouTube and Netflix look on my 8K monitor. Maybe they'll look almost as good as my Betamax hooked up with a low oxygen, gold plated connector s-video cable to my Sony Trinitron. Shoot, I bet the fonts on my Tom's Hardware pages will even render more clearly with this switch on my network. Do you think it needs a double ought ground wire? I know that made my downloads faster and my firewall more secure.

 

[oxygenz]

It is literally impossible for this device to improve sound quality, thanks to the magical power of checksums.

TCP payload checksums give 1 in 65535 chance of allowing a bad packet through and no retransmission will occur.
AES decrypting won’t care and because of a single bit flip will incorrectly decode an entire block and keep it.

That’s if you TCP at all.
Some streaming services are on UDP, especially some live ones (radio broadcasting).
Like in telephony where latency matters.

Some network devices just skip the checksumming.

The only stupidity about the super expensive switch is the assumption that every ISP on the path from the server to the user’s home is top notch - also, there isn’t a single streaming service out there checksumming stream packets with sha256 to ensure perfect delivery over the entire data path - not to mention 99.99999999999999% of packets always arrive unaltered when using any 10€ home equipment, anywhere.

 

[closs.sebastien]

lol lol lol...
1- the signal is digital, so it is the same at the arrival than at the start..
2- even if... if he think that a switch can improve the digital signal, does he ask himself by how many switches, copper-lines, optical-lines, hard-drives, signal-transformation has the audio-file crossed? the final devices at home of the user is peanut.

 

[closs.sebastien]

yes, it isolates very much the buyer from its own cash-money, yes,.. 2500$-amount is very efficient for that

 

[Endymio]

Front-page coverage for two days ... for an item which likely interests not one Toms' viewer, and the article author himself advises you to avoid like the plague.

Slow news week?

 

[drinking12many]

I mean you can buy used enterprise-level gear for way less than that and I would trust that to deliver a better performance than some tards who don't make billions on networking equipment for the big boys. I mean I got a used Cisco 3650 (48 port x1GB) a few years back for 130 dollars on ebay...lol. You can get some older 10Gb Nexus switches for super cheap as well.

 

[danlw]

In addition to the $2k ethernet cable and $8k power cable, please don't forget to purchase a 3" thick marble slab to set the device on. This will help dampen vibrations by coupling it directly to the earth. PLEASE don't use a granite slab. This would induce subspace interference which would cause alien transmissions to be audible in the music at -420db. (Your system does have at least a 690db signal to noise ratio, right?)

 

[Soaptrail]

What kind of expensive snake oil do I need if I use wifi to my receiver? 🙁

 

[xyvyx]

Thank you! This make more sense to me than the way it was explained in the article. It didn't occur to me that noise on the ethernet lines could be picked up by the single processors/amps.

Cheers.

While this does provide a more reasonable explanation of how a switch/device could isolate "network noise" from a media player device, it makes some assumptions & omissions that basically negate the whole argument.

In a nutshell, if you have a processor/streaming-DAC that allows noise to pass from the ethernet interface to the analog outputs of the DAC, you are in possession of either a defective or poorly designed product.

The youtube video posted by Mr. Rock above offers little to describe the circumstances in which this noise is generated. Was the volume set to 100%? It sounds almost like cel-phone radio noise. The AudioControl processor is indeed very expensive, but extensive tests have shown that the THD/Sinad characteristics of most A/V processors is significantly inferior to that of a quality external DAC.

Further, he stated "nothing was plugged in"... but almost every processor I've ever used requires at least SOME input source to be selected. What was that source? Odds are, it was some open-ended analog input.... which is basically a radio antenna.

The "Most of you don't have gear good enough to hear the difference " argument is equally laughable. As I type this, my PC is playing music from Qobuz via an RME ADAT soundcard connected to an RME ADI-2 PRO FS which is sending an AES signal to a pair of JBL 708P monitors. (or my humble Senn HD660s headphones for gaming). Everything is dead-quiet when I hit pause. As it should be.

 

[InvalidError]

Further, he stated "nothing was plugged in"... but almost every processor I've ever used requires at least SOME input source to be selected. What was that source? Odds are, it was some open-ended analog input.... which is basically a radio antenna.

Even if all analog inputs are properly terminated with shielded resistors, you would still get some noise from the controller periodically waking up to do periodic checks such as whether a network cable got plugged in or checking whether the WiFi connection is still alive. Whenever the CPU is active, there will be fluctuating load on the power supply and that noise can make its way into the audio path, same for the EMI bursts from the CPU, everything it accesses and all related support components.

Put enough gain on any DAC with any relationship to a CPU power/ground plane, you will find CPU-related noise as bursty activity covers spectrum down to DC which is practically impossible to filter out short of using full shielding and optical isolation between the CPU and DACs. If the CPU is fully isolated from the analog path, then no amount of noise on the Ethernet side can make its way across the optical isolation driving the DACs.

 

[hotaru.hino]

On that note, if we're talking about any potential EMI coming from your network setup to your hi-fi setup or whatever, why not just build a product that uses fiber optic to transmit the packets over?

 

[InvalidError]

On that note, if we're talking about any potential EMI coming from your network setup to your hi-fi setup or whatever, why not just build a product that uses fiber optic to transmit the packets over?

What is going to be on the receiving end of that fiber? An optical receiver which is going to generate electrical chirps (EMI) whenever a packet comes in or goes out, a GMII PHY that generates chirps whenever a packet comes in/out, a CPU that generate chirps whenever a packet comes in/out or anything wakes it up for any reason, etc.

It would be far simpler and cheaper to optically isolate the DACs from the CPU and shield the heck out of the analog stuff including its power supply, then electrical noise from anything on the digital side of things would have no way to get into the audio signal in any meaningful amount.

Optical isolation of the DAC bitstream is much easier since the DACs operate at a constant bit rate (37Mbps for 192k/24b/8ch) which can be encoded to shift most of the digital noise beyond 100kHz and whiten whatever is left in the audible range.