The middle switch

[TheFlash]

If you understand how ethernet works, you'll know a more accurate clock won't affect sound quality. In the streamer/DAC world sure, but not in moving packets of stuff around which then get unpacked by the streamer. IMHO, you'd be wasting your money with an ethernet clock upgrade.

 

Why do you have your two switches dasiychained? If you can plug both switches into your router, use one to feed audio and the other to feed non-audio. This should reduce the chances of noise from non-audio devices "polluting" the audio playback chain. Certainly it will cost nothing to try (apart, apparently, from the plugging and unplugging challenges!).

 

Report back 🙂.

 

[TheFlash]

On 1/10/2024 at 3:28 PM, Weerstandje said:

 

Sorry for the late response 

 

Recently I talked to a fellow audiophile about the fibre-optic connection I made between my switches with sfp modules. We also discussed timing. He to said something about moving packets around, sometimes even in the wrong order and them still arriving safely at the streamer. He claimed that timing faults in the audio stream would lead to dropouts sooner then jitter effects.

I wondered if audio-streaming is called streaming because, as opposed to file transfer, a pcm stream does not come in packages. For the same reason CD-s have to be ripped to an aif- or wav-file on disk because cd’s only contain the stream and have no checksum?

 

If the later is true, streaming over glasfiber would be more prone to jitter, due to the bending of the cable giving light-reflections inside the cable, than streaming over an ethernet cable. Just like spdif is preferred over toslink as a connection between streamer and dac for instance? 

 

That made me wonder in what format music is streamed over the internet before it reaches the streamer and the dac?

 

 

Basically, what @krass says. Dropout on a domestic network would suggest you have a terrible network; this is not a real world problem. Your friend is right if he is telling you not to worry about your fiber/fibre connection. Unless you are doing something silly with your fibre/fiber cable, the bend is irrelevant and has no bearing on reflections. You may be overthinking this.

 

If there is any "jitter"  (timing problem) in the ethernet space, it refers to packet delay which is extremely extremely unlikely (basically impossible) in normal domestic networks, and it won't (simply can't) affect sound quality anyway; ethernet jitter is a completely different thing from bitstream jitter which can affect sound quality. Ethernet jitter is therefore a thing, but not a thing you need to worry about umless you run an overloaded corporate network.

 

SPDIF is usually preferred to TOSLINK because the latter is bandwidth limited and the optical-electrical converters are often very noisy. This has no relationship to fibre/fiber optic cable in ethernet and has nothing to do with cable bend.