Best Ethernet Cards for Streaming

[tgb]

Hi TomJ,

I just see your research works yesteday : great !

This is true research we would like to see more often : we don't understand something, we look for explanations thru experiments. We end up to conclusions (expected / unexpected is not the issue there), and then we keep going looking for info / explanations & so on.
Congrats !
I'll follow up your work on the German site.

 

I want to recall here 2 things :
- a "famous" forum with "science" in the title is making a great damage to "science" by keeping saying weird stuff like "all DAC sounds the same", any electronic process in the digital chain that runs above the audio spectrum (the tiny 0Hz - 20kHz) has "no" effect on SQ ; all their statements based upon old-fashioned measurements (relevant on analogue audio signal, but irrelevant on digital signal).
- TomJ, you did a great job of investigation (basic & "common" research work), you spend time & money & use your brain (a bit too I guess 😊 ), although you take time to present nicely your investigations, you have to face posts that are pure bashing by people that don't have any idea how a basic "smps noise" looks like. Nice era...  Though era for enthousiast hobbyists, "easy era" for bashers. 
I know that "topic" since I've been "banned" recently from the 2 major frenchies audio forums for talking about "things we don't have to talk about" ("bits are bits", we don't have to say "it seems bits are bits is not so clear", since we have SQ improvement thru tweaks on the digital chain on : clocking & power supply (and PDN at PCB level by extend) (PDN = Power Delivery Network)

 

I made a lot of tweaks on my digital setup, leading to night/day SQ improvements.
I don't use NIC inside a computer, I prefered another way : a do-everything laptop (unmodified) followed by tweaked interfaces to "clean" the signal before reaching the end-point (active speakers with AES input, Dynaudio Core59, highly recommended, amazing gears).

 

I confess I use my measurements devices (scope Siglent SDS-2504X+, nanoVNA etc) only on the PDN issues at PCB level.
But by lack of time (or lazy) I did not do measurements on Ethernet interfaces (I use combination of tweaked FMCs & switches), nor measured the AES signal coming out of my heavy tweaked USB-to-spdif interface (Singxer SU-1) => I'll do that ! 
We'll see if my scope finds something 😀  For sure I'll have a big headache if, like you, the scope says that my tweaks higher the distortion on the signal path ‼ Although I'm more than happy with a night-day SQ improvement ! 😄
Rgds

[tgb]

On 7/30/2022 at 5:22 PM, TomJ said:

https://www-open--end--music-com.translate.goog/forum/privatforen/thomas-michael-rudolph-tmr/651284-messungen-von-ethernet-infrastruktur-nur-lesen/page2?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp#post658415

 

Hope this works now!

 

hi TomJ

Thanks for the link to your work.

 

I have a (stupid?) question : why did you perform jitter measurement (eye-diagram) using a home-made "music" sample ?

Why didn't you simply use a music track (you know as "good recording", high DR for instance) ?

 

My point is that by using your sample, the eye-diagram is the picture of "steady-state".

Steady-state because you sample is "simple" / very short in time, and replicated n times.

But using a "music" sample, you would have a fully random sample (thru measurements), closer to real streaming, because that way the UUT woudl be in constant transient-state (which is the state of its real life :-) )

What's your feedback about that clever (or stupid) idea ?  :-)