network streaming tweaks

French Rooster posted:

Obsydian posted:

musicfan51 posted:

Obsydian posted:

So sourced an Audioquest Vodka for demo £500 for 3M and very underwhelmed given general positive hype.

Overall I would say a slight detail improvement but the bass has become quite weighty if not verging on bloated.

Chrissu, Charlesphoto and Mr Rooster wondering what you guys use as thinking the fibre Bridge has maybe removed majority of the the noise so the cable from fibre bridge to Nova is not as important (normally use a Chord C stream).

The Audioquest Vodka does take awhile to burn in and on my system it did eventually sound a lot better than Cat6 Ethernet cable ! I did eventually replace it with Chord Indigo Aray Ethernet cable which was noticeably better and more musical ! That is my experience with my system ! 

Thanks but this being a demo cable I assumed it has done the rounds and well maybe too well broken in.

Even the dealer was like HUGE, wow improvement. Plan to leave it a day or so and swap back to the C Stream and see.

just to add to my comment : i said that i still heard improvement with better lans and fiber bridge, but it was between cheap lans ( not c stream) and vodka.  Anyway, you will not have this dramatic improvement as with fiber bridge, or you will have to pay much much more for the lan  as chord sarum ethernet, which  would be stupid with a nova. ( same price for 3 m as the nova i think).

The last lan is a bit more important, so perhaps try just this part.

 

Yes , from switch to Streamer makes the biggest difference in SQ With Ethernet Cables ! 

Thanks guys.

I think i will restore the Chord C Stream (just more natural for me). The addition of the fibre bridge was a big upgrade and i have just been enjoying my system as opposed to analyzing. The Vodka (seems out of character to me and a subtle improvement) got me interested purely due to the fact that efforts made to improve the signal (i.e. adding a cisco switch, better cables, fibre bridge and power supplies) were so big i thought finish the job.

I guess this has become along thread, but looking back the general advice has been sound and where i ended up.

All i would reemphasize based on the Vodka experience (£500 home demo) and advice here, is implement the fibre bridge first (£150) with power supplies, that really gives you the biggest bang per £. Maybe in an NDS full flight system the Vodka fairs better ...

Obsydian posted:

Thanks guys.

I think i will restore the Chord C Stream (just more natural for me). The addition of the fibre bridge was a big upgrade and i have just been enjoying my system as opposed to analyzing. The Vodka (seems out of character to me and a subtle improvement) got me interested purely due to the fact that efforts made to improve the signal (i.e. adding a cisco switch, better cables, fibre bridge and power supplies) were so big i thought finish the job.

I guess this has become along thread, but looking back the general advice has been sound and where i ended up.

All i would reemphasize based on the Vodka experience (£500 home demo) and advice here, is implement the fibre bridge first (£150) with power supplies, that really gives you the biggest bang per £. Maybe in an NDS full flight system the Vodka fairs better ...

I think you said earlier that you don't have a NAS and listen to Tidal HiFi and/or downloads/rips on a USB stick. So with that in mind presumably the 'sonic' benefits you are hearing from your upgrades (Cisco, fibrebridge, ifi psu's, cables etc) are only applicable to your streamed music from Tidal and have no effect on the USB source therefore your music on USB always sounded just as good as what you're hearing now streaming via your upgrades?

Mercky posted:

Obsydian posted:

Thanks guys.

I think i will restore the Chord C Stream (just more natural for me). The addition of the fibre bridge was a big upgrade and i have just been enjoying my system as opposed to analyzing. The Vodka (seems out of character to me and a subtle improvement) got me interested purely due to the fact that efforts made to improve the signal (i.e. adding a cisco switch, better cables, fibre bridge and power supplies) were so big i thought finish the job.

I guess this has become along thread, but looking back the general advice has been sound and where i ended up.

All i would reemphasize based on the Vodka experience (£500 home demo) and advice here, is implement the fibre bridge first (£150) with power supplies, that really gives you the biggest bang per £. Maybe in an NDS full flight system the Vodka fairs better ...

I think you said earlier that you don't have a NAS and listen to Tidal HiFi and/or downloads/rips on a USB stick. So with that in mind presumably the 'sonic' benefits you are hearing from your upgrades (Cisco, fibrebridge, ifi psu's, cables etc) are only applicable to your streamed music from Tidal and have no effect on the USB source therefore your music on USB always sounded just as good as what you're hearing now streaming via your upgrades?

Yes 99% Tidal.

So in many ways a high quality file on a USB stick or drive could be used as a reference as to how anything streamed should really sound. I run my Atom solely on Wifi, it's a robust signal with no dropouts etc and the router sits about 10ft from the Atom, there is no other traffic on the router bar my phone & ipad. I have done back to back tests with the same track (London Grammar Truth is a beautiful thing) ) coming from (a) Tidal (b) CD ripped to WAV on a stick and (c) Qobuz 24bit on a stick, there was absolutely no difference to my ears between Tidal WiFi and the WAV on USB and a slight improvement with Qobuz. This makes me think there is no real advantage with my current setup to buy a switch, bridges and fancy ethernet cables. I have also tried the same test connecting my router via a normal CAT5e cable to the Atom and again heard no discernible difference. Perhaps with a Nova it might be different!

https://www.audiostream.com/co...your-networked-audio

vtpcnk posted:

https://www.audiostream.com/co...your-networked-audio

What a logical setup ... you isolate your streamer using fibre, then contaminate it using a basic Netgear switch.

Mercky posted:

So in many ways a high quality file on a USB stick or drive could be used as a reference as to how anything streamed should really sound. I run my Atom solely on Wifi, it's a robust signal with no dropouts etc and the router sits about 10ft from the Atom, there is no other traffic on the router bar my phone & ipad. I have done back to back tests with the same track (London Grammar Truth is a beautiful thing) ) coming from (a) Tidal (b) CD ripped to WAV on a stick and (c) Qobuz 24bit on a stick, there was absolutely no difference to my ears between Tidal WiFi and the WAV on USB and a slight improvement with Qobuz. This makes me think there is no real advantage with my current setup to buy a switch, bridges and fancy ethernet cables. I have also tried the same test connecting my router via a normal CAT5e cable to the Atom and again heard no discernible difference. Perhaps with a Nova it might be different!

Mercky - then just sit back and enjoy : )

i actually beg to differ. i think on both my unitiqutes, upnp from my laptop sounds better than usb. on usb i have tried mp3 320 kbps, flac and wav. flac by upnp is better. usb is fatiguing.

i was just chatting with a tech guy regarding switches, routers etc and according to him usb is way slower than ethernet. not sure if thats the reason i find usb a strain to listen to in comparison to (hardwired) upnp. maybe usb is good for lower bitrate?

vtpcnk posted:

i actually beg to differ. i think on both my unitiqutes, upnp from my laptop sounds better than usb. on usb i have tried mp3 320 kbps, flac and wav. flac by upnp is better. usb is fatiguing.

i was just chatting with a tech guy regarding switches, routers etc and according to him usb is way slower than ethernet. not sure if thats the reason i find usb a strain to listen to in comparison to (hardwired) upnp. maybe usb is good for lower bitrate?

USB 2.0 can handle up to 480MB, compared to 100MB on a Naim Ethernet port. Both much higher than needed for an audio data stream, even at 24/192.

>USB 2.0 can handle up to 480MB, compared to 100MB on a Naim Ethernet port. 

"The theoretical throughput of a USB 2.0 connection is 480 mbps or 60 MB/sec and the theoretical throughput of a gigabit Ethernet connection is 1000 mbps or 125 MB/sec. So (theoretically) the gigabit Ethernet connection should be slightly more than 2x faster than the USB 2.0 connection."

All Naim streamers use 100MB Ethernet, not Gigabit, because they don’t need it. 

Eloise posted:

vtpcnk posted:

https://www.audiostream.com/co...your-networked-audio

What a logical setup ... you isolate your streamer using fibre, then contaminate it using a basic Netgear switch.

This has been an interesting thread.

Some questions:

I have a refurbished UsedCisco Cisco 2960 8tc bought from Germany at a cost of 64€ recently that I am very happy with. I have been demoing a 6 year old UnitiServe SSD which I have decided is not quite as good as my CDX2 into my nDAC+XPSDR without more network tweaks.  Also I can’t see the point of doing better linear Power Supplies for the NAS and UnitiServe when the TV media player can do almost as well via a fibre toslink cable. 

1. So with the Humax satellite box being plugged into the switch am reducing the SQ (I did the UnitiServe tests without unnecessary connections)?

2. How much would the fibre bridge improve SQ given I have a really good Cisco switch?

3. For such a ‘low fi’ media player as my Panasonic Viera TV connected via toslink is it worth spending money on a better power supply for the NAS?

As I said the TV route is nearly as good as the CDX2 - on some recordings it looses fine high frequency detail and the bass is slightly lacking detail.

My NDX demo found that TIDAL sounds as good from the iPad into the nDAC. 

Phil

Answers...

1) no, unless your Humax is creating vast amounts of common mode noise to anything connected to it....unlikely

2) will probably make connection more digitally noisy, though you might prefer this. Some Cisco 2960 have SFP ports so you can have ‘proper’ fibre connections if you really want though I think unnecessary.

3) no I don’t think so...

Hope that helps.

cisco 2960 with fiber optic :

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cisco...4:g:ARMAAOSwuk1Z1MBT

vtpcnk posted:

cisco 2960 with fiber optic :

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cisco...4:g:ARMAAOSwuk1Z1MBT

but there is no fiber optic output on naim streamers.....?   how use this?

with a media converter as you have pointed out.

btw there are tp link media converters with mini gbic as well.

https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link...V7SQ0HT8Q8FEZZAQV8JK

Its a windup Monsieur Rooster,  there are no fibre ports on that switch.   

Mike-B posted:

Its a windup Monsieur Rooster,  there are no fibre ports on that switch.   

it was a joke ?  a sort of dream ?

https://supportforums.cisco.co...-module/td-p/1086433

even this one has a fiber optic port :

https://www.ebay.com/itm/302433766710?ul_noapp=true

There are SFP ports, which can take either fibre or RJ45

ChrisSU posted:

There are SFP ports, which can take either fibre or RJ45

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...luggable_transceiver

vtpcnk posted:

with a media converter as you have pointed out.

btw there are tp link media converters with mini gbic as well.

https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link...V7SQ0HT8Q8FEZZAQV8JK

have you tried this components, cisco fiber or 2 tp link with fiber optic ?   just curiosity, because you seemed to be interested.

>have you tried this components, cisco fiber or 2 tp link with fiber optic ?

nope. not yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuu0gjWEORg