Popular Post zettelsm Posted January 14, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted January 14, 2020 2 hours ago, kennyb123 said: An update on my earlier post on adding optical.. The highs continue to have a tendency to have too hard an edge. I've ordered some optical attenuators as it could be that the signal is too strong given the relatively short length of fiber I'm using. A friend is using a much longer length of cable with is Startech products - and he doesn't hear this issue. He's also not using an ER on the clean side, but I doubt that's the issue. I’m the friend Kennyb is referring to, and to test the equipment and the concept before crawling under my house to pull the CAT 6 copper and install the fiber I hooked everything up and put the fiber link in series with the existing 50’ of copper. Today, when Kennyb told me he was hearing some hardness with his fiber installation, I decide to hear what it sounds like with that 50’ of copper ethernet cable removed. I went ahead and laid out the fiber around the edge of the floor from office to the stereo in another room and bypassed the copper completely. I heard a hardness that I hadn’t heard before, as well as a loss of some of the liquidity and relaxed transparency that I value in my system. Luckily, I had four -5 dB optical attenuators and inserted a pair at each end of the fiber. Voila! Hardness gone, transparency and liquidity return. So, given the 80 km range of the specified FMCs, SFPs and fiber and the minuscule length of fiber in use, it seems a reasonable and prudent thing to knock down some of that optical power and avoid over-driving and saturating the optical receivers in the SFPs. It certainly sounds now like there is much less distortion. Steve Z kennyb123 and Maceear 2 VPI-HW40 Anniversary turntable, Grado Aeon3 cartridge; Teres turntable, VPI Fatboy gimbal, Dynavector XV1-S, Lyra Helikon mono; Taiko Audio Extreme server, dCS Vivaldi DAC, Upsampler Plus and Clock, Cybershaft OP21 Reference Clock; Playback Designs Pinot ADC; D'Agostino Momentum M400 amplifiers, Momentum HD preamp, Momentum phono stage; Wilson Audio Alexx speakers, 2X3 SVS SB16 Ultra subwoofers; Shunyata Triton v3/Typhon QR & Typhon, Shunyata Sigma NR & Alpha NR power cords, Sigma interconnects, digital and speaker cables; Stillpoints ESS grid system rack; Stillpoints Ultras and Ultra 5s, component stands and cones under everything, ASC Tube Traps . . . and lots and lots of music. Link to comment
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