Router and Ethernet Switch suggestions

[Confused]

Having read much on this forum about the delights of direct Ethernet connection of the mR and sMS-200, I have now started looking into the adding an optimised Ethernet switch into my system. In my case I'm running a Windows 10 PC, router, switch mR. Without going into too much detail, this set up suits me absolutely perfectly, and the direct connection set up would not. So my thinking is, why not optimise what I have? Initially I have been looking at getting the Paul Pang Ethernet switch. Whilst looking into the Paul Pang on the 'net, I stumbled across this:

 

http://www.myhifishop.de/Devices/AQ-SWIT...anguage=en

 

At first glance this looks like a similar concept to the Paul Pang, one obvious difference being that it is twice the price! Does anyone know anything about this item, or any idea if it might be worth the 400 Euro asking price?

[Confused]

Total Blue Smoke. Many reasons. One is, it's a "shielded metal case" that is no doubt supposed to eliminate EMI, but the box has no ground connection. Duh.

 

Then, they're specifically telling you what to expect, what you will hear. That's forced perception bias. And, there's no good way to ABX the thing.

 

Pass.

 

It may indeed be 'blue smoke', time will tell, although I think it would be possible to do some kind of back to back test.

 

Looking at the pictures, it does actually have a ground connection.

 

[Confused]

pulled this morning my trusty, good, old 10/100 PaulPang switch from the chain

was good 'till I only had a NAS and Mac mini plugged into it but since I started using Roon and an Aries as endpoint... it wasn't holding up anymore

 

replaced, for the moment, with a plain vanilla Netgear GS105E gigabit but, even though I'm powering it from a good LPS (as everything else)... must confess I'm feeling "a bit nervous" LOL!

so while leaving everything the way it is... I'm looking around

 

Paul Pang now makes a gigabit switch and I've also seen this one by Jcat which looks the same as the AQVox

re the Jcat vs AQVox it's not about price, just... so far my "don't buy from companies which go a long length about describing how their stuff does sound but say almost nothing about how it is made and why" has always proven right and both AQVox and Jcat's "technical description" look exactly the same

 

Paul Pang too now says quite a little about his mods plus... the switch he is using looks an old and discontinued model

 

oh, and... all of the above are 8 ports but 5 is more than enough for my needs (and available space)

more ideas/suggestions?

A great post. It does beg the question, does anyone know how the AQVox & Jcat switch compare? They do look similar, although the Jcat is half the price. Maybe the Paul Pang is still the switch of choice. Has anyone got any hard facts or insight here?

[Confused]

I received my Aqvox switch earlier this week and today had some time for a bit of A/B testing. For the record, the setup was an i5 PC running Roon, this runs to a Virgin Media Superhub, about 10 meters of cat 5 Ethernet, the Aqvox, microRendu, Mutec MC3+USB, AES/EBU to a Devialet 1000 Pro and KEF Blades.  I ran through a selection of music with the Aqvox, then listened to the same playlist via my cheap and cheerful TP Link switch. After listening to about 45 minutes Aqvox and 45 minutes TP-Link, I was thinking that maybe there were some very subtle improvements, but to be honest I was not sure. I was taking some notes regarding anything I noticed that was particularly good or bad, and then moved on to listening to some key sections of music, and swapping between the Aqvox and TP Link switches. One observation here, it says something for the stability of Roon with the microRendu that I could get up, swap the Ethernet cables between switches, sit down, hit play on the iPad, and music played, somehow I was expecting more hassle!

Another point to note is that with the set-up mentioned above, you can remove the Ethernet cable feeding the microRendu, and music continues to play for a second or so.

Anyway, switching back between the Aqvox and the TP-Link with the key sections of music I think I did start to pick up some benefits from the Aqvox, but I have to say these are very small. One aspect was in terms of 'hearing the room', those tiny little sounds that give you some insight into where the music was performed, this seamed to be slightly improved with the Aqvox. In a couple of areas I felt that the sound stage was more robust and a very slight 'digital edge' was removed. I have to emphasise though that these differences were tiny, I am pretty confident that I would fail to separate the Aqvox and TP Link in a blind test. To give you an idea, after the two full runs through of the playlist, I did have some thoughts of checking the return policy for the Aqvox, although I thought that maybe I was picking up some improvements, I really was not sure. After the later rapid A/B swaps between the two switches, I did then start to think it was maybe worth keeping. To sum up, I would say that in terms of my most recent 'tweaks', I'd put the Mutec MC3+USB as a clear number 1 (if you can consider the Mutec a Tweak, it is perhaps more of a source component), the Uptone Audio LPS-1 to power the microRendu would be next up, then the Aqvox. To sum up, I've decided it's a keeper, but if I'm brutally honest I am not 100% sure how much of the improvements are real or in the range of expectation bias and placebo effect, it's a subtle one!

[Confused]

3 minutes ago, plissken said:

The question becomes: If you can play back without any Ethernet connection what does the switch have to do with the SQ?

 

 

Logically, nothing whatsoever.  I'm wondering if the switch might afford some benefit with respect to reducing noise / EMI, but the 'reclclocking' aspects leave me somewhat baffled.

[Confused]

20 hours ago, plissken said:

Noise floor can be easily measured. It's trivial actually.

To be honest, I'd love to measure the noise floor for the Aqvox.  The trouble is it is not trivial for me, I do not have any test kit.

[Confused]

2 hours ago, Cornan said:

 

Do not forget to try to ground the AQVOX switch. Atleast two whom I know about have said it improved the sq on their AQVOX switches. I am expecting my AQVOX to arrive in a couple of days time and will surely ground it right away. My current plain vanilla D-Link DGS-105 switch improved vastly by external grounding. A floating ac ground connection is another thing that almost any network devices improves upon IME. Just a couple of friendly tips!

An interesting point.  For the record, my earlier observations re the Aqvox were made with it NOT connected to ground.  When I get a bit of time I'll make up a ground cable, give this a try, and report back.

[Confused]

2 hours ago, Cornan said:

 

Please do, it will be interesting to hear your impressions! ? Another thing that I forgot to mention is to make sure to use port 1 for input and port 8 for output. D-Link switches are using QoS and have the highest priority on the last port. Please report back with that one too if you have'nt connected it that way already. ?

I used ports 1 & 3.    (Port 1 for the input, so not a total fail!)

[Confused]

19 minutes ago, Cornan said:

 

Luckily it is extremely easy to change and see if it improves in your setup. It did with my plain vanilla switch and my guess is it will on AQVOX as well! ?

Yes, both this and the grounding 'tweak' are very easy to try and more or less cost free.  Due to many commitments at the moment it will probably be a week or so before I'm able to carefully evaluate the potential improvements, but when I do get time I will report back.  Thanks for the input, suggestions such as this are appreciated, especially when they are cheap to implement!

[Confused]

As an update of my experience of the Aqvox switch.  Taking the earlier advise in this thread, I had given it some time to bed in, in case that might make any difference.  I tried connecting it to ground, tried connecting it port 1 in, port 8 out.  I again tried some back to back tests with my old switch and was still unsure if I could detect an improvement.  There were times when I felt an improvement in the 'little things', such as being able to sense the ambience in a room.  Maybe this would have been enough for me to be happy with the Euro 400 cost, however, there was some occasions when swapping between the old switch and the Aqvos that I was not 100% convinced that I was not picking up something negative with the Aqvox, in terms of a little 'digital fizz' in the high frequencies.  To be clear, this was all absolutely on the margins of what might be imagined or the result of expectation bias.

 

So in conclusion, I eventually decided the Aqvox was not for me and returned the switch. I think you can sometimes learn more about a company when things are not going so well, rather than when they are going fully to plan.  I sent the Aqvox switch back last week and yesterday I received a full refund, which included the original cost of postage from Germany to the UK. OK, I had to pay the postage for return, but all things considered I think this is excellent service.

So if anyone else is considering the Aqvox switch and is not sure due to my rather negative posts versus some other very positive posts, I can at least confirm that the refund policy is fair, so nothing to worry about in that regard.

So I am now wondering about the JCat alternaive, which at Euro 195 is a lot cheaper than the Aqvox, until you consider that they advise that you use it with a high quality LPSU, which makes it much more expensive that the Aqvox. The trouble is, I can find very little information on the JCat at the moment, so I think I'll sit back and wait for a while.

http://jplay.eu/jcat/#manual12

 

Has anyone tried the JCat?  Can anyone think of any reason why the the JCat may offer something that the Aqvox did not, for me at least?