Ethernet Cables

Yes, and It was the ethernet cable that originally tipped all those ones and noughts into the buffer, so it must have some impact on how neatly that are arranged before they get sucked into the DAC, right?

BTW, I got a C in 'O' Level Physics, so don't tell me I don't know my stuff!

Listening to Anders Jormin now in FLAC on Tidal it’s hard to fathom that the amazing sounds I’m hearing now on my Nova are all coming through 2 tiny wires courtesy of my isp / phone co. Those  2 wires run externally down the length of my house and are connected to a junction box and off it goes again to god knows how many other dodgy krone type connections eventually ending up in a fibre cabinet about a mile from my house, and prior to that who knows! The nett result is I get only 10mbs but it works just fine for all my needs and the jitter specs are good. Interestingly all the fancy Ethernet cable manufacturers obviously focus on the cables that you can change and that are under your control - for obvious reasons €€££! the inference being that nothing downstream (that you can’t upgrade) could have any bearing on the sq end result, which clearly is not true presumably. 

ChrisSU posted:

Obsydian posted:

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Oh yes and if you do.. playout a single track say 3 mins long.. after 60 seconds pull the cable out.. the track should still play to the end... do you hear any difference?

The track will keep playing what's in the buffer does it not, that being from when the cable was attached ?

Yes, but the point is that with the cable removed, it can no longer be introducing anything that adversely affects the sound (or even subjectively improves it.) So with the larger buffer of the new streamers, it becomes easier to assess the effects of cables, switches etc. 

Exactly - that was precisely my point......

Mercky posted:

Listening to Anders Jormin now in FLAC on Tidal it’s hard to fathom that the amazing sounds I’m hearing now on my Nova are all coming through 2 tiny wires courtesy of my isp / phone co. Those  2 wires run externally down the length of my house and are connected to a junction box and off it goes again to god knows how many other dodgy krone type connections eventually ending up in a fibre cabinet about a mile from my house, and prior to that who knows! The nett result is I get only 10mbs but it works just fine for all my needs and the jitter specs are good. Interestingly all the fancy Ethernet cable manufacturers obviously focus on the cables that you can change and that are under your control - for obvious reasons €€££! the inference being that nothing downstream (that you can’t upgrade) could have any bearing on the sq end result, which clearly is not true presumably. 

Fancy Ethernet Cable-Experiment with the last 1 metre

MErcky, I started the thread above a few months ago . It covers my subjective experiences with 1 meter of fancy ethernet cable at the end of basic Cat 5 cable. I found it made a difference, but perhaps it is expectation bias.

Looks like a Slim Devices/Logitech Transporter?,had one for a while before i changed over to the Linn Akurate DS streamer.

still got two Squeezebox Radios

Kiwi cat posted:

Mercky posted:

Listening to Anders Jormin now in FLAC on Tidal it’s hard to fathom that the amazing sounds I’m hearing now on my Nova are all coming through 2 tiny wires courtesy of my isp / phone co. Those  2 wires run externally down the length of my house and are connected to a junction box and off it goes again to god knows how many other dodgy krone type connections eventually ending up in a fibre cabinet about a mile from my house, and prior to that who knows! The nett result is I get only 10mbs but it works just fine for all my needs and the jitter specs are good. Interestingly all the fancy Ethernet cable manufacturers obviously focus on the cables that you can change and that are under your control - for obvious reasons €€££! the inference being that nothing downstream (that you can’t upgrade) could have any bearing on the sq end result, which clearly is not true presumably. 

Fancy Ethernet Cable-Experiment with the last 1 metre

 

MErcky, I started the thread above a few months ago . It covers my subjective experiences with 1 meter of fancy ethernet cable at the end of basic Cat 5 cable. I found it made a difference, but perhaps it is expectation bias.

Hi Kiwi Cat, as I have tried to point out severeal times before, many cables will sound slightly different on certain platforms because of the RF loading effect.. however this isn’t necessarily related to the cost of a cable.. severeal types of 50 pence a metre cable will sound different.. Now whether these differences and subsequent noise profiling  differences are perceived as improvements or benefits is subjective and possibly influenced  by subconscious bias / expectation bias.

Yes, Simon, I suspect having an expensive luxurious piece of equipment , along with expectation bias and self justification bias having spent a fortune on 1 meter of cable, enough for 3 new wells in Malawi, does have an effect. Still it’s nice to have.

Exactly.. if you feel positive and satisfied about it.. then what is there to be critical about, there is nothing wrong with that all. even if the cause and effect becomes psychological rather than physical ..

In my case the expectation bias does not play any role. I have demoed (NDS + pretty revealing system) Chord C-stream and AQ Diamond to about ten persons. Every single time there was a difference. It does depend which one people like but the main thing is that there is a difference. Maybe I have a bad RF situation then? No, I have dedicated switch, separated isolated power rails (house other HW cannot impact) , linear power supplies to switch and NAS etc...

Interesting case it to understand is the case still same with ND555 ??? Naim have done a lot of isolation improvements. So far I have not seen any serius reviews, DB commented a bit and uses bulk cable. Anyone, compared high end Chord or AQ with ND555 ???

Steve w posted:

But...didn’t the sound originally travel down / along the Ethernet cable ? ????

That was my point, flawed logic.

Obsydian posted:

Steve w posted:

But...didn’t the sound originally travel down / along the Ethernet cable ? ????

That was my point, flawed logic.

Wow, I had no idea it worked like that. So I could flog the HiFi and just shove an Ethernet cable in each ear ????

Ok ..wrong word ! ..please replace “sound “ with “signal”...wouldn’t like to be adding confusion to the thread .????

Gazza posted:

I always ask the wife to listen, as she is completely honest, with no expectations or knowledge of the cost.....just likes it or not.

My wife has a very good ear, and thus I do the same.  

Gandalf_fi posted:

.. to understand is the case still same with ND555 ??? Naim have done a lot of isolation improvements. So far I have not seen any serius reviews, DB commented a bit and uses bulk cable.

I tried a couple of expensive 'HiFi -grade' Ethernet cables to link my music database Melco to ND555 and did not get on with them. I was ready to spend the money - one sounded 'ok' but on a reckless thought I put in some old stock floppy non-screened non-special Ethernet instead and suddenly all the Magic was there and it is there now still.

Ethernet uses 100 Ohm twisted-pair transmission line tech that I used to play with 40 years ago at work designing high-speed digital equipment. It works well to very high frequencies as long as you preserve the impedance-matching at the send and receive ends. If you look-up Ethernet design pics you will see pairs of near 50 Ohm terminators each side of the pair (100 Ohms). The reason I mention this is that when you put a screen around the cable you change the cable impedance from 100 Ohm Transmission line - nobody ever mentions it, but it has to.

This means, since nobody is changing the Equipment termination loads, that you will not have a match anymore on your cables and the waveform will bounce back and forth down the Ethernet cable forever-ish and inject a lot more HF noise into your sensitive HiFi box with the D to A. The fancy cables to me sound 'bright' and I don't think they are working right as Transmission lines - unless specially designed and tested into Ethernet loads. There probably are some good ones better than the cheap cable I use, but at present the cheap cable does the job.

DB.

...if the 'HiFi Ethernet' cable is well designed and load-tested for good transmission line quality, meaning no refection, then other things like 'do you really want all the sent signal to enter your ND555 or whatever?' Generally you want to maintain the timing edge quality required to remove any jitter frequencies close to audio-band or near sample-frequencies riding into your box, assuming the sending equipment has low-jitter noise, but you then don't want any super-hf extra entering that is not needed, so having some loss at very HF may actually sound better.

At very high frequencies you are already on the edge of losing control of the situation if you can't maintain the data-link totally within the connector and termination. As soon as more spills into the box the power-supply and everything is going to have a component of it entering and no matter how good the design it will have an effect, as there are no perfect solutions.

So a cable that just does the job you want and does no more than needed may be the best solution.

Fortunately you just have to try it and listen to decide.

Just some thoughts.

DB. 

I agree, yet again with DB, with a similar high end system. I use a cheap ethernet cable, I have tried 8 of the Carlos Fandango £1000+ cables and they all took the life of the music away. I also agree, as I wrote before, hidef is not doing it for me either, all my favourite sounding rips are standard cd. Better leading edge and more real.

Good to hear at least one person has similar experiences to me.
Not tried the Fandango cable yet but it sounds like fun!

If you look at why screening and special treatments are needed in Ethernet cables it is for very long runs in hostile environments. I'm using less that a meter in my lounge.
I'm very eclectic on these things - by which I mean if I hear something is better I first see if it can be achieved free, then more cheaply and finally buy it if it adds a significant enjoyment to my replay enjoyment of music - and I can afford it at that time.
Once I hear something do better in a significant way I will have it - I'm sure such things exist as if enough effort is put in - and you listen to what you are doing with an open mind - you can generally achieve great things.

DB.

DB, curious to hear with your new ND555 which uses the new Naim architecture that is designed to be largely decoupled from the network... when you spool a single track, and then say after 30 seconds you disconnect the Ethernet lead... as it this point it should no longer be required for the media to playout assuming it’s completely spooled and there will be now relatively few  transmitted and received frames.. with likely quite large gaps between them (ie there is no clocking in the gaps) , can you say what happens to the audio from the ND555... Naim were wanting separation so there is no difference, or do you hear one still?

Simon

Simon - at some point I will try, but the problem that stops me at present is the Naim App.

Disconnecting loses the 'room' that forces me to re-register the App, as there is a fault with it used in wired-mode - and that whole process is annoying to me, so it is not just lifting the wire and all is well and easy in my case.

Also the wire sounds different - and I need a wire there - I'm not going to keep pulling the wire out and in every few tracks. What else is going-on I don't know - I do understand your point that if all the data is perfectly loaded in an identical way every time from whatever way it loads into the ND555 it 'should' all sound the same.

Again - I'm not trying to be an authority here and to declare any 'right' or 'wrong' onto what people experience, just reporting what I experience in the configuration I have to run the ND555 in for best results.

If I pull-out cable and it sounds the same as the cable inserted - does that mean all cables are the same? Perhaps it means I've found the least-bad cable so far. In many ways I don't want to know - as I can't use the system that way so it is pointless to find-out a cumbersome way to get best performance. I'd rather find the best way to run my system all the time and get used to that - that is where I'm coming from here.

I'm not sure that is really understood. I'm not trying to deliberately annoy anyone by not jumping through loops I don't want to that don't provide a solution for me and may just annoy me.

DB.

Ahh, I see that doesn’t sound good... I hope it gets resolved then you try that little experiment out... your findings will almost certainly tell me a lot..

if you pull the cable out and there is no sonic change, then indeed you can confirm your cable is having no influence on the sound.

If you pull the cable out after the track has spooled and there is some sort of change or shift, then it points to some sort of earth loop or RF loop that is not related to the network data or the transmitted data or crosstalk , but perhaps more related to the coupling with the switch port at the other end...

Good game... ????

Cheers