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UpTone Audio EtherREGEN Listening Impressions


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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

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