JCAT Net Card Femto

[asdf1000]

On 24/12/2017 at 8:50 PM, Marcin_gps said:

Installing NET Card in either PC brings improvement. 

 

Hi Marcin

 

I understand this card doesn't work with an Intel NUC since the NUC only accepts mini PCIe

 

Are there plans to develop a mini PCIe NET card for the NUC?

 

 

 

[asdf1000]

Interesting video and observations.

I'd be interested to know if he'd hear similar differences with the music server far away from the HiFi setup, in a different room (where a music server should be)....

 

...where the music server sends raw PCM or DSD (from either HDD/SSD/cloud streaming) over the network to a renderer like a Sonore Rendu...

 

I used to hear differences when my music server was direct USB connected to my USB DAC but from my own experience and observations (not any expertise) these differences get much smaller when the server is far away.. 

 

 

[asdf1000]

Just now, Marcin_gps said:

But then how do you explain the differences with TIDAL stream? Tidal servers are far far away

 

The decoding of the FLAC is still done the music server - which in his case is still next to all his HiFi gear (analogue components in particular)..

 

As I mentioned, when I moved the music server far away, then all decoding is done far away and only raw PCM and raw DSD is sent over the network to a renderer like a Sonore Rendu. And this is where the differences between Tidal and HDD/SSD disappeared for me.

 

Only my observations and as I mentioned I'm not pretending to be an expert.

 

It's all interesting and love reading everyone's observations ?

 

 

[asdf1000]

I should also add that John Swenson has talked about the importance of signal integrity even applying to ethernet physical interfaces, so even in the setup I describe where a music server is far away from all the HiFi gear and feeds something like a Sonore Rendu, I actually would expect things to sound better with this JCAT net card femto fitted to the music server.

 

I only mentioned the above to share how difference between Tidal and HDD/SSD reduced for me when moving the server away. I'd still expect a very nice boost overall (to both cloud streaming and local drive) with something like this JCAT card fitted to the music server.

 

If only you could make one compatible with Intel NUC @Marcin_gps ! ? Maybe?

 

[asdf1000]

4 hours ago, Marcin_gps said:

@Em2016

Exactly

 

The card is compatible with NUC. You just need to use a M.2 to PCIe riser cable, sth like this:

 

And probably a bigger enclosure... Otherwise, it will look like this

 

 

But it works. 

 

BTW - I don't believe that a music server should necessarily be away from the main hifi system. Only if it's noisy it should.   If it's a relatively low TDP, powered by an LPS etc - it can sit right next to the system as another hifi component. 

 

Best regards,

Marcin

 

Oh cool. Now does it all work with Linux on the NUC? Do you have any clients using it with a Linux based OS / distribution on Intel NUC?

 

Any special drivers required or it works straight out of the box?

 

Cheers!