EtherREGEN: All posts about firmware moved here

incus · November 29, 2019

8 minutes ago, Ehsu said:

Hopefully they will reconsider it. The way I see it, almost everyone praised about the original SQ but some including myself briefly experienced connection issues. I think only ONE person concluded there is no improvement in his system. Version 2 has quite a few of us finding the SQ less engaging. So clearly ER's sound signature is now more polarising/controversial.

This hifi business is all about preferences. We buy certain brand of hifi because we like its character. Some prefer McIntosh, some prefer Naim, Linn etc. So why not letting some of us keep the sound signature we LOVED? We paid for the original ER and was just hoping connection issue is fixed. Why fixing things that no one complained? This to me makes no sense.

A superior car does not mean it is a fun to drive car, right? Tesla is fast 0-100 but V8 is more emotionally addictive. Porsche 911 is technically flawed with the engine weight hangs out in the back but people love it for decades because of its character.

Can I please have my Porsche 911 back? 🙂

I see your point but must wholeheartedly disagree about the Tesla. Much more emotionally addictive to me. Which, I guess, undermines your point about the ER as well. Because there are many, including myself, who feel the V2 firmware is a step up from the V1. And if you recall the fixes were not implemented for sound quality reasons but rather to shore up the code and fix a technical issue. By all means you should be able to revert if you want - but understand why the changes were made and that there are many of us who love their new Tesla more...

incus · December 1, 2019

There are many things to take away from this episode in the ER's brief but already illustrious history. Yet there is one thing that hasn't been mentioned within this context very much which may help explain some of what is going on, and that is burn-in. It's a very real thing for this device.

Prior to any awareness of the bugs and the connectivity issues that the new firmware was created to address, I would say I possessed at least 3 and possibly even 4 different sonic iterations of the EtherREGEN. By this I mean that after about half an hour, the sound of my unit changed from being a bit lifeless and straightforward and not offering any special acoustic advantage over my old SOtM switch to quite suddenly blooming into life with a full-throated and detail-saturated tone that reminded me very much of when I first owned a Mutec REF10 and went through the process of burning it in. A "big pipe" someone called it and that was very accurate for me at the time in terms of where I found myself in the EtherREGEN burn-in process. I enjoyed the up-front presentation and increased depth of the sound-stage but I also harbored some quiet reservations about whether I could ultimately live with this addition to my playback chain long term. I ended up selling the REF10, after all, for much the same reasons; everything I listened to through the REF10 shared the sonic signature of that device, regardless of genre or quality of source, I could hear it. And this bothered me in the end, because I knew I was hearing the component and not the music.

Then after about 70-80 hours, the etherREGEN changed again. It was similar to going from a copper power cable to a silver one. Or from vinyl to tape. The bombast receded. The frequencies aligned better. The pipe was still big but it was smoother along the inside edges, like it had been polished. The details sparkled a little more. The soundstage stabilized. More ambient cues emerged. A kind of calm settled over the music. I wondered if this was source dependent but then noticed that this wasn't about the quality of the recording - that information was there no matter what; bad recordings were bad and good were good - but I felt a touch closer to whatever was there in that source, like there was less between me and the recording now.

Another interesting thing happened about this time, as well. I had another big revelation for my playback chain. I felt like things had become a little too smooth, what some might call "hifi" and I started to examine each component in my desktop system to see if the etherREGEN might be to blame. After much experimentation, I decided to try my Chord Hugo TT2 *without* the M-Scaler practically for the first time since I bought the pair together. And I was quite impacted by what happened. I realized that the M-Scaler, as great as it was, was very much imparting its own sound on the music. Very much in the manner as the REF10, although nearly the opposite in terms of effect. The M-Scaler had a way of dulling the inner edges of things, flattening and smoothing tones that at times was very agreeable but resulted in a slight homogenization of the signal. Put another way, without the M-Scaler, there was simply more difference between sources. I would hear the quality of the source better. I could discern the various components and cables in my playback chain better.

Finally, after about 120 hrs - right as I became aware of the connectivity issues with the etherREGEN and the subsequent fix - my etherREGEN entered a final stage of 'becoming' what it was ultimately to become. A final level of ease, openness, purity, calm, silence, accuracy of tone, and overall balance come out - to such an extent that the etherREGEN essentially erased itself. This is a very important point to stress. At that stage in the break-in process, listening to the same material again and again, I began to doubt my ability to "hear" the etherREGEN anymore. It was right around then that I made the switch to V2. And the process of burn-in was more or less complete. This is not to say that when I remove the etherREGEN I can't immediately tell it's not there. I can. But when it's in and I settle into listening for a while, each recording comes to me with so little adulteration, each musician, each producer, each venue 'speak' to me in such a clear way, that I could conceivably argue in that moment that the etherREGEN is doing "nothing." I could certainly say the etherREGEN is NOT doing what it did before.

So my point is - this process has made it VERY hard to pin down the "sound" of the etherREGEN. It has evolved - and evolved to the point where I have trouble describing what exactly it does - except allow me to hear better into the music. AND it's perhaps possible that this is at least in part what has brought some listeners to the conclusion that something changed with their units with the V2 upgrade. I would very curious, in other words, to know where people were in the the break-in process when they made the switch. The results of my personal experience also imply that the etherREGEN may, in some circumstances, force its owner to reassess even highly-resolving and highly-acclaimed components. In other words, the etherREGEN may reveal things about one's playback chain that are actually NOT what one thought they were and NOT actually to one's liking.

Anyway, the major take-aways are this:

1) Burn is very real with this device and took me through many stages before it more or less settled where it is now. During this process the sound of the etherREGEN changed many times and pinning down its 'sonic signature' is now very difficult for me to do.

2) The EtherRegen allowed to me get rid of my Hugo M-Scaler because it allowed to hear how that device was influencing the sound I was hearing.

I will follow up later with some other interesting observations about:

1) Using a Farad 7V PSU in place of an LPS 1.2 on the etherREGEN and how this further "erased" the etherREGEN from the music.

2) Testing of different servers and software to learn that the effect of upstream 'devices' through the etherREGEN still matters quite a bit, although decidedly less than downstream devices, which corroborates what I have said above because essentially ALL components are revealed more by the etherREGEN - whether upstream or downstream...