jean-michel6 Posted November 17, 2019 Share Posted November 17, 2019 I received my Etherregen Friday evening ( thank's) and it has been "cooking" on my home pc network for 24 hours . It was working fine and got not very warm . Last night I did put it on my headphone system ( focal utopia , and top notch audio technica amp ) . MY audio source is a heavy modified dual pc running on daphile Server( super micro x10sba)>Customised optical bridge>Player( super micro x10sba)>SOTM PCIE USB >SOTM TX USB >USB Lush>SOTM HD USB to SPDIF > DAC ( audiomat maestro 3) clocks for pc player and sotm accessories are coming from an sotm clock board . Power for PC's is done through the top Sean Jacobs level 3 power supply . SOTM accessories are all fed through UpTone lps 1.2 psu which are themselves powered by SOTM sps 500 psu . Optical bridge is quite special as the fmc that I use have been modified by sotm to change the power regulator to very quiet one and the clock quartz have been removed to have the clock signal provided by a sotm clock board . PC server ethernet> TPlinkFMC>Fiber>Optical switch>Fiber>TPlinkFMC>PC ethernet player PSU for optical bridge is very quiet psu with LT3045 regulators Recently I did compare my optical bridge to an aqvox SE loaned by a friend . The result is that the aqvox SE was a little bit better than my optical bridge mostly for bass and treeble . Of course the advantage is that the aqvox is much simpler than my optical bridge even if sq is slightly better Now to the etherregen . It was connected to the 2 pc's through 30cm regular Cat5e utp and using the supplied psu . Of course A side for server pc and B side for PC player . One additional ethernet cable was connected on A side to provide link to home network for control point . Again the SQ was a little bit better than my optical bridge , the most significant improvement seems to be a quieter background noise. I did listen a few pieces of music and the etherregen got fairly warm . To be honest I was expecting a bigger step in sq , since I was a little bit disappointed I experiment a little. I thought that may be some noise was coming from the cable connected to my home network even though that by design the B side should be fairly immune to noise coming from A side . What i did then is to select music and launch play and then disconnect the ethernet cable coming from my home network . The result a quite nice sq bump : quieter background , more natural voices , more details .... and then a smile on my face . Conclusions from these preliminary tests , the etherregen is a real nice tool to improve the sq of our systems . However careful set up to minimise noise is required ... the dream that what happened on A side has little impact on B side is still a dream . Eventhough extreme care has been done in designing this little gem , attention needs to be done to be sure that what's goes into A side is void of noise ! Probably using optical isolation for the control point input . On interesting feedback is the one give by @_JL_ a few posts ago as he experiment with the optical input on A side and it is where he got the best results . Next step for me will be to listen on my speaker system and then to experiment with the optical input on A side and next to experiment with PSU . PCserver Supermicro X11SAA under Daphile ,Jcat pcie net card ,Etherregen,e-red dock endpoint,powered by LPS 1.2 , SPS 500 , Sean Jacobs level 3 psu, DAC Audiomat Maestro 3, Nagra Classic Amp , Hattor passive preamplifier , Martin Logan montis Link to comment
Popular Post jean-michel6 Posted November 19, 2019 Popular Post Share Posted November 19, 2019 First a very warm thank you and congratulations to John and Alex for designing and putting on the market such a wonderful product at a reasonable cost for us. A few days ago I made a report after listening on my headphone system and I did hear some sq improvement but I was not really carried away. This evening I did listened on my main speaker system and it Is a different story. I am very impressed by the sq improvement brought by the etherregen. The first point I immediately captured is a very nice improvement of the soundstage , significantly better ( no wonder I did not caught that on headphone as they have no real soundstage ) The second point I heard was a reduced noise floor making all the fine line of the music heard much better. The third point is a much better bottom end. wow what a treat. This is the most significant upgrade I made in my system in a long time. Hats off to UpTone ! RickyV, jos, Narcissus and 3 others 2 3 1 PCserver Supermicro X11SAA under Daphile ,Jcat pcie net card ,Etherregen,e-red dock endpoint,powered by LPS 1.2 , SPS 500 , Sean Jacobs level 3 psu, DAC Audiomat Maestro 3, Nagra Classic Amp , Hattor passive preamplifier , Martin Logan montis Link to comment
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