Article: SOtM sNH-10G Network Switch Review

[JohnSwenson]

19 hours ago, PeterSt said:

No wait, ... but it was the stance that pulling that cable/Switch would change sound ?

YES. Because in real-time the noise influence (Phase Noise if you want) signature is changing. The digital data stays the same (0's and 1's don't interpret differently). So envision that nice analogue very low level test signal, think 30uV), and when the cable is pulled that noise becomes 25uV. This really isn't hard to imagine, I'd say. This is because this is analogue noise and it may come along with the connection to the Switch and be gone when that connection is pulled.

Now, did that change anything to the digital data ?

 

PS: It is not allowed to claim that 5uV is not audible because it is about the principle. The analogue signal has changed and thus that could be audible. And now I didn't even talk about jitter, which actually is ahead of that analogue output signal, and where the noise in the digital signal (which in the end is electrical analogue) influences jitter. Peaks and valleys (1's and 0's) don't trigger at the same time when noise is added (a peak of noise triggers early). So pulling the Switch will lower jitter.

And the recorded data (or data in the buffer) will still be 100% equal in both pulled and not-pulled situations.

 

More clear now ?

 

 

The pulling the plug thing is what actually got me looking into this.

 

A while back I had a prototype of one the streamers on the bench feeding a little inexpensive DAC ($110) feeding some inexpensive Senheiser headphones($69) when I accidentally unplugged the Ethernet cable and the increase in sound quality blew me away. There was about 1 minute of music stored in the streamer so I got 1 minute of REALLY good sounding music.

 

So yep, pulling the plug DID make a big difference, but it wasn't a "test", there was no expectation involved.

 

John S.

[JohnSwenson]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

How many years has it been?

It's been over two years now.

 

I actually had everything all built, FPGA code written and started trying it out about two months ago and found out the system as a whole did not work. The system consisted of 7 boards tied together with a forest of coax and board to board connectors. I deliberately made the system highly modular so many different tests could be performed.

 

Well that was a BAD idea! All those connectors proved very problematic, I could never get the whole system to be working together at the same time. Some connector or other was always working poorly, I just could not get it all working together.

 

So back to the drawing board. I replaced 5 of the boards into one board, getting rid of almost all the connections, did the highest quality connections I could come up with on the board etc. I just finished the layout of this board a few minutes ago, so now its get the board fabricated and solder all these parts on. Then I try again.

 

John S.

[JohnSwenson]

8 minutes ago, mansr said:

Yeah, right. Did your wife in the kitchen notice it too?

I was listening to headphones, how could that happen?

 

John S.