UpTone Audio EtherREGEN Listening Impressions

[watts]

Listening impressions part II: 

 

I first posted my listening impressions here 2 years ago, only 2 pages ago (page 57). Not much action since then I see. I have made many changes in my system last year: I since acquired a newer better built version of hypex amplifier, a better power conditioner, a higher resolving DAC, and have some more expensive and better sounds cables. 

 

Additionally, regarding the streaming/etheregen I previously simply had an Amazon cat 6 cable from router to etheregen, then cat 6 direct to DAC. I now have cat 5 to Cisco 2960 from the router, then optical to etherregen, then Audio Sensibility Supra ethernet to my Weiss 501. The etherregen is also powered by a Plixir BDC connected with an Audio Sensiblity copper DC cable. 

 

I had the Plixir LPS kicking around after selling my exasound player, so I decided to keep it and try it on the etheregen before selling it. I most recently added optical line as many have claimed it improving SQ. The DC cable that came with the Plixir didn't fit in the etheregen, so I ordered one from Audio Sensibility. 

 

With my new DAC I thought possibly it does a better job filtering compared to the older DAC, as this higher-end DAC has its own in house built power supply and renderer, so anything else in front of it might not be needed. So I just decided to unplug the etheregen/Plixir/optical/AS cat cable and go direct from the Cisco switch with the cat 6 cable to the Weiss and compare. 

 

Well turns out I'm keeping everything. I am shocked. The difference is HUGE. I just read my post from 2 years ago, I stated yes it made a difference, but it wasn't huge. I have since thought to myself over the past 2 years for the $700 US yes it made a noticeable difference, perhaps significant in how it smoothed out the treble, but I always thought a $700 upgrade in cables may have been money better spent. 

 

Keep in mind I didn't just buy this and post 2 hours later saying "OMG, this is night and day!" like we read from posters many times. I have owned this etherregen and it has been plugged in my system for 2 years,  🙂 But I will restate- it is unbelievable what a difference it makes. 

 

Track: LIberty by Anette Askvik: it takes about 3 seconds to hear the difference- with the etheregen (etc.) the song begins with there is swirling of sounds, finely resolved drums and various other percussion, in 3d space, and then her voice is beautifully and naturally rendered in space. The sax sounds sublime. Exceptional recording. With ER and everything removed the whole soundstage collapses- it becomes 2D-  the swirling is gone, there is just so much less to hear- her voice is sibilant and much less realistic. The sax first seems like it has more air, but the 'air' is distortion-poorly resolved air, and it no longer suspends itself in its own space, it falls flat. Seriously, it is obvious in mere seconds. If anything I thought it would be much harder to discern any differences. Now, it is not just a layer of grunge getting removed, but the whole soundstage undergoes a massive change, and with the ER/attachments my DAC goes from sounding like a $1000 player to the $10000 player it is supposed to sound like. 

 

Here is another way to define the difference: that track Liberty, using just Amazon cat 6, I listen, and about half way though I have the desire to stop it and put on a more familiar track. With the ER/Plixir/fibre I listen from start to finish, and then have the desire to listen to the track again. And again. So much more music is gained- so much more engaging. 

 

I am not inclined to see which part contributes to what particular percentage of overall improvement (etherregen 70%, LPS 20%, optical 5% Cisco 5% etc. ) I just wanted to know that this money spent for these streaming "tweaks" or components positively affect the sound quality compared to not having them. Yes, unequivocally! 

 

So I am happy! First because my ears are better than I thought they might be, and because I trusted many in this thread and bought this switch. Like we all know, the higher the quality and more resolving one's system the easier it is to hear differences. And I keep reading from those with much more experience than I, when it comes to streaming "everything matters".  

[Superdad]

15 hours ago, watts said:

So I am happy! First because my ears are better than I thought they might be, and because I trusted many in this thread and bought this switch. Like we all know, the higher the quality and more resolving one's system the easier it is to hear differences. And I keep reading from those with much more experience than I, when it comes to streaming "everything matters".  

 

Wow! Terrific follow-up review! Many thanks.

So glad (but not surprised) to know that you are enjoying the benefits of EtherREGEN even more as your system evolves and becomes more revealing. 

[watts]

2 hours ago, Superdad said:

 

Wow! Terrific follow-up review! Many thanks.

So glad (but not surprised) to know that you are enjoying the benefits of EtherREGEN even more as your system evolves and becomes more revealing. 

Thank you Alex, and you're welcome. And/or it might be due to the increase of noise on the internet highway! 

 

I need to do this experiment again today. I still can't believe the difference, and it is so easy to do- easier than a power cord swap- Turn off DAC, pull out one ethernet cable and insert the other, turn on DAC, sit and wait about 10 seconds for Roon to kick back in, and listen. Yes those 1's and 0's sound so much better with this stuff inserted. All your friends at ASR don't know what they are missing. 😉

[jamsquirrel]

I was puzzling whether wired or wi-fi should/could/was the better option for streaming and I couldn't find a clear answer. Hopefully this will be of some use to anyone who has the same question. I'll try to be succinct.

 

A little context first.  I had a semi- wired set up....Roon running on a windows laptop that was hardwired to a google wi-fi point that connected via wi-fi to the next point in another room that was wired to a streamer. After some rabbit holing on the etherregen, I took the plunge. However. Not one hour after making payment, I decided on a whim to remove all CAT cabling from the set up and....everything that I didn't think there was too much wrong with to begin with.... got much better.

 

And I thought I'd maybe parted myself from a good chunk of cash for nothing. (I have no neighbours and very solid wi-fi that just doesn't drop out). And then I got to wondering whether wi-fi could in any way transmit noise in a similar way to ethernet cables. And that was what I couldn't find a ready and clear answer to.

 

Anyway. Etherregen arrived and I hooked it up. Straight out the box it seemed to be on a par with wi-fi.

 

Long story short. When I shut off the wi-fi within the streamer (and managed to have the streamer recognised!) things jumped up a number of notches despite the newness of the unit.

 

So the laptop is still communicating via wi-fi and the only cables are from the streamer that's wired to the Regen that's wired to a wi-fi point.

 

So I'm guessing the answer to the question around wi-fi/wired SQ, should anyone be wondering, at least by my (perhaps faulty) reasoning, comes in a touch 'left field' and suggests the wi-fi implementation within the streamer is key rather than wi-fi itself.

 

 

[audiobomber]

7 hours ago, jamsquirrel said:

I was puzzling whether wired or wi-fi should/could/was the better option for streaming and I couldn't find a clear answer.

I tried wi-fi, ethernet cable and fiber optic cable in my desktop system and my main system. In both cases, wi-fi had the poorest sound quality, fiber optic the best. 

[tgb]

Hi,

Can someone be kind enough to post the an eye-diagram of the Tx Ethernet signal at the output RJ45 socket, please ?

 

I didn't find the info is somewhere in this thread...

Just to see how nice it looks (and to compare with my tiny lost cost experiments 😃 )

Thanks

[Superdad]

On 3/8/2024 at 2:17 PM, tgb said:

Can someone be kind enough to post the an eye-diagram of the Tx Ethernet signal at the output RJ45 socket, please ?

 

We have done them, but they are quite meaningless for Ethernet--aside from seeing ramps and openness. And even those can not be compared between differing test set ups/equipment.

An eye pattern won't tell you a thing about jitter in the range that is meaningful for the ground-plane effects that are caused and propagated by phase-noise in data interfaces.

In fact, there really do not exist any test instruments--even those costing $200K--which will directly do phase-noise analysis on packet data.  The PLLs in even the best analyzers completely miss all phase-noise that falls under about 12KHz. It is complicated--and despite @JohnSwenson explaining it to me several times I paraphrase him badly--but it has to do with the PLL needing a stable signal to trigger from. Maybe John will publicly explain sometime why:

a) the big analyzers don't care about the low frequency stuff--which is the most important to us;

b) it would take enormous amounts of storage to capture the massive number of data points needed to do real phase-noise analysis of Gigabit data streams at low frequency.

 

All the big excursions of in phase-noise of a clock are at low frequencies--and ALL that gets ignored by the PLL in even the best test gear.

John has sketched out an ambitious measurement system--using a LOT of RAM and a really large, high-speed new FPGA--that he hopes to build. [But not until AFTER EtherREGEN Gen2 is done! ]

[Mops911]

Makes a lot of sense. If it would be easy it would have been done already. ;-)

 

I am serious.... so much noise out there (pun intended) and its hard to distinguish for "normal" people. I guess why I like uptone is, that they dont charge 50k for their switch ;-) makes these guys real!! Just my 2 cents ;-) 

[Savolax]

Just a reminder for myself when I had to "downgrade" my EtherRegen power supply solution earlier this week due to some unknown instability issue with the ER, only for a few days, being originally powered by a UpTone LPS-1.2 with a UpTone AC-DC adapter to a 'UpTone AC-DC adapter only' I lost some of that blacker background, cleaner less grained/-grayish sound and larger sound stage in every direction that LPS-1.2 had provided earlier.

Downgrade time was a let down but it's all good now after reintroducing LPS-1.2 back to my audio system, working 100% again. 

[JHG]

On 3/16/2024 at 5:40 AM, Savolax said:

Just a reminder for myself when I had to "downgrade" my EtherRegen power supply solution earlier this week due to some unknown instability issue with the ER, only for a few days, being originally powered by a UpTone LPS-1.2 with a UpTone AC-DC adapter to a 'UpTone AC-DC adapter only' I lost some of that blacker background, cleaner less grained/-grayish sound and larger sound stage in every direction that LPS-1.2 had provided earlier.

Downgrade time was a let down but it's all good now after reintroducing LPS-1.2 back to my audio system, working 100% again. 

Would you please let me know what your symptoms were regarding the "instability issue" with your LPS-1.2?  Also, what did you do, if anything, to correct the issue?

Thanks

[tgb]

On 3/16/2024 at 4:12 AM, Mops911 said:

Makes a lot of sense. If it would be easy it would have been done already. ;-)

hi Mop911 (& Superdad too !),

"done already" ?... it is not so obvious... because electronics is full of "straight-forward" designs, and innovative designs like the EtherRegen

 

To be clear, I'm not bashing Uptone here.

Uptone : "if it didn't exist, it should be invented" (I guess you get the meaning of that French common quote)

I don't have any product from Uptone, because I do DIY experiments (etherRegen like), but like I go on doing my experiments because I get a cleaner SQ, I guess Uptone would have last a few months only if their product didn't improve the SQ.

 

To Superdad,

I agree, to do a proper measurement can be tricky, and as you said : my test fixture is not yours, and thus comparison between your results & mine are tricky (or close to : complete mismatch) 😀

but... if you could provide a eye-diagram of the Etherregen ouput, it could help... to understand... "better SQ" 😀

all the best !

[JohnSwenson]

4 hours ago, tgb said:

 

😀

but... if you could provide a eye-diagram of the Etherregen ouput, it could help... to understand... "better SQ" 😀

all the best !

The problem here is that eye diagrams are designed for binary signals, Ethernet is not binary (two voltage levels), 100Mb has 3 voltage levels and Gigabit has 5 voltage. What would an eye diagram for that even look like? The test equipment certainly isn't designed to do it, there is no standard on what a 3 or 5 level eye is supposed to include. Gigabit is about10 times worse because each pair has both directions AT THE SAME TIME on the same wires. This results in receive and transmit (5 voltages) overlaying on top of the other, this can beover 10 voltage layers, and how do you distinguish receive from transmit to include in the eye.

 

100Mb might be possible to do (separate RX and TX pairs and"only" three voltages to deal with but it is not going to look like any eye diagram you have ever seen. I'm not even sure eye diagram software on my scope can even deal with it. The three voltage levels are going to confuse the PLL clock recovery system. who knows what that is going to produce. And as is the case with every test instrument made it is going to ignore all the low frequency components which is where most of what we are trying to deal with exists. So even if you could actually make one, it probably wouldn't show much of any different, it's not that the ER doesn't do anything but that all the test equipment out there designed to measure such things deliberately completely ignores the aspects we are trying fix.

 

John S.

[Markus8]

@JohnSwenson Excellent summary why things are far more tricky than they appear to most people out there. 
Understandably there is a desire to measure/explain but I guess that will still take some time until this can be done properly. 

[Savolax]

9 hours ago, JHG said:

Would you please let me know what your symptoms were regarding the "instability issue" with your LPS-1.2?  Also, what did you do, if anything, to correct the issue?

Thanks

All I know and can guess, my LPS-1.2 was never the culprit. As for this "downtime" I tried LPS-1.2 powering my Wifi router for the time without any problem and came to conclusion it's not the either LPS-1.2 or ER in fault here. 

 

This instability issue I had was, or at least it did show up as repeatedly disconnecting/connecting network in ER. Power LED did stay on but both side RJ45-port leds did go off simultaneously for a quick moment. A kind of reboot-loop what comes to my mind.

As a guess of main culprit it most probably had something to do with my BG7TBL-clock and it's affected clock signal output. 

This happened few weeks after installing Minicircuits BLP-10.7+, related or not.

 

[audiobomber]

3 hours ago, Savolax said:

As for this "downtime" I tried LPS-1.2 powering my Wifi router for the time without any problem

Are you sure about that? Any router I've looked required at least 2.5A. The LPS-1.2 maximum guaranteed output current is 1.1A.

[Savolax]

35 minutes ago, audiobomber said:

Are you sure about that? Any router I've looked required at least 2.5A. The LPS-1.2 maximum guaranteed output current is 1.1A.

I only had WAN-cable attached and the router served it's main purpose as a for that day and a half or so. 

Goes within the requirement of Asus RT-AC53 though. 

Anyway, I think this is getting in wrong direction..

I just wanted to express my appreciation of having a LPS-1.2 with EtherRegen 😄

[JohnSwenson]

11 hours ago, Markus8 said:

@JohnSwenson Excellent summary why things are far more tricky than they appear to most people out there. 
Understandably there is a desire to measure/explain but I guess that will still take some time until this can be done properly. 

I just had an intriguing change in this. My scope had been having some functionality missing recently and I have been working with the manufacturer on it. They finally concluded it was a conflict between two of the the software options installed. By disabling one I could get the other to work. After we got that working they sent me an option key for a brand new serial analysis option that is way better than what was already on the scope. The manual says it supports PAM3 and PAM4 (but not PAM5) so it should be able to work with 100Mb Ethernet! I don't have it running yet, I have to download the software THEN install the key. But maybe just maybe it might be able to do an eye diagram of 100Mb Ethernet. It will be some time before I can get it up and running.

 

John S.

[Markus8]

Oh that is exciting to hear @JohnSwenson !! Keep us updated - and fingers crossed. That would be an industry innovation as well as eye opener for those still believing things are just the same. 

[Superdad]

26 minutes ago, Markus8 said:

That would be an industry innovation as well as eye opener for those still believing things are just the same. 

Not really. And as explained before, an eye pattern of Ethernet is never going to reveal very much of all the stuff we have been talking about—the stuff that is resulting in what everyone readily hears with changes. 
I’m chilling at the top of a ski mountain right now, so I can’t elaborate. 

 

[Markus8]

Amazing!! Enjoy the slopes 😍

[R1200CL]

18 hours ago, JohnSwenson said:

The problem here is that eye diagrams are designed for binary signals, Ethernet is not binary (two voltage levels), 100Mb has 3 voltage levels and Gigabit has 5 voltage.

Sounds like these 10GB eye patterns then only make a selection of a certain voltage level. Correct ?

Why are they only defined in a standard for 10GB, and not for 1GB ?

 

But then fiber shouldn’t need voltage levels and eye patterns, but fiber to my knowledge has eye patterns. So maybe the measurement is taken somewhere else on the PCB ?
 

I assume in the end these voltage levels use same clock anyway. 

[JohnSwenson]

On 3/18/2024 at 6:27 PM, R1200CL said:

Sounds like these 10GB eye patterns then only make a selection of a certain voltage level. Correct ?

Why are they only defined in a standard for 10GB, and not for 1GB ?

 

But then fiber shouldn’t need voltage levels and eye patterns, but fiber to my knowledge has eye patterns. So maybe the measurement is taken somewhere else on the PCB ?
 

I assume in the end these voltage levels use same clock anyway. 

Do you have a link to the 10G eye diagram you are talking about? It is most likely the electrical side of an optical link, that IS binary and has a standard eye diagram. You can certainly do the same thing gigabit fiber. The problem is with the copper twisted pair interface. The actual cable pairs have pretty low bandwidth over long distances so they use multiple voltage levels to increase the data rate then use 4 pairs to get it up to gigabit. THAT is the interface that is going to be hard to do an eye diagram for.

 

John S.

[tgb]

On 3/18/2024 at 8:03 AM, JohnSwenson said:

it's not that the ER doesn't do anything but that all the test equipment out there designed to measure such things deliberately completely ignores the aspects we are trying fix

hi,

could you please elaborate ?...

because the way you wrote it, it looks like you have a cheapo scope (70MHz BW / <1kEur)... and it sounds weird...

.. and especialy the "the aspects we are trying fix" : what do you mean here ? (1)

 

Back to subject :

- an 100Mb ethernet signal, from the ER (100MB for the ER is a smart choice)

- it is a easy signal to trigger using any scope, cause signal freq is 125M, thus any cheap 00M BW scope will do the job (3kEur max)

- anyone can tweak a switch or a FMC-bridge and measure the signal using a fairly cheap oscilloscope, and check which tweak is OK or KO vs SQ. So what ?

Ethernet is cheapo to measure vs USB ! lol ! (although I can measure USB 2.0 signal thanks to a "vintage" scope I bought at 3kEur only)

 

Strange exchange... 

an answer to (1) would help....

 

[Superdad]

2 hours ago, tgb said:

could you please elaborate ?...

because the way you wrote it, it looks like you have a cheapo scope (70MHz BW / <1kEur)... and it sounds weird...

 

The 6GHz, 40GS/s Teledyne LeCroy SDA-760zi Wavepro @JohnSwenson uses had a retail price of $69,000 when new. He bought his several years ago for about $19K.

I'll let John address your other questions.

But as explained before, an eye pattern reveals only limited information--and does not at all reveal close-in phase-noise--no matter how costly the gear.

[Mops911]

@tgb

 

I translate all this in my "brain" so I can make sense... ;-) 

 

we transmit digital data using analog signals and transfer the digital data back to analog signal ONLY. Mixing these two domains (analog and digital) and translating from digital to analog, seem to render complex (not mere complicated) but actual complex (unpredictable? non-linear? hard to predict?) results and changes the output of the DAC itself. Its not the data which changes (otherwise, obviously a word document would alter as well), but something else (ground plane?) Our ears hear it, theories exist,  hypothesis seem to be confirmed, but we lack proof and can't measure ... 
 

Our digital world does NOT rely on an accurate D-to-A process. Its all in the digital domain. Audio is one of the few areas were the translation back to analog REALLY matters...ok, a printed picture is a translation back to analog, but as I use to say, our ears are much better than our eyes ;-) it sounds facetious, but I do think that our ears have a better resolution from 50-15000 Hz than our eyes in the visible spectrum...

We forget, how we actually dont know anything. I was the other day in a IBM Innovation studio and saw the presentation of a robot dog. People were stunned and applauded...and made pictures...As stunning as it is as an engineering feat, I would submit that a 2 year old baby has much great skills and pattern recognition....
:-D