Yes, ANOTHER wonderful item that will "improve" your digital sound!
$2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles From Cash:
Ever wondered if you needed an ethernet switch that has built-in power conditioning for the sake of better audio fidelity? You probably haven't, but Synergistic Research has. The company developed a wild ethernet switch that is designed to smooth out electric signals inside the switch in order to gain higher audio quality from audio streaming services, but the price point is dubious, to say the least.
The Ethernet Switch UEF costs a substantial $2,595, which will make it appealing to only the most diehard of audiophiles.
[...] The unit is equipped with Active EM Cell technology which claims to close the gap between digital audio quality and good old-fashioned analog tapes and LPs. To "further improve audio quality," the switch is constructed from a solid billet of aluminum and uses carbon fiber to eliminate chassis vibrations from making their way into the switch (which the company claims could interfere with the digital signal). There's even an optional SR Ground Block that serves as a ground for the switch.
It is important to understand that a bit value zero or one with low distortion conveys better quality information than a zero or one that is somewhat distorted but completely readable.
Previously:
Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
Related Stories
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles
If you thought a $2,500 audiophile-focused ethernet switch was strange, then you'll also be amused with this NVMe SSD designed specifically for audiophiles. Last known to be in the sampling phase, the new device was posted to the Audiophilestyle forums. Supposedly, the drive can increase audio quality and give you real 3D sound along with an experience that only comes from vinyl recordings, but don't look for this drive on our list of Best SSDs any time soon — its impact on audio quality is questionable, to say the least.
The developer claims to have designed and built the device from the ground up in close collaboration with an unnamed SSD controller manufacturer. The pictured device has a Realtek SSD controller, which is a company better known for its sound processors, though it began making SSD controllers a few years ago.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday December 24 2021, @10:59AM
It limits the dynamic range?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @11:10AM (4 children)
I should point out that, IF you're going to make this point, and we believe in physics, you ALSO have to make the point that all digital signals are analog at their root, and a noisy signal WILL cause the error correction pathways in circuitry/code to trigger, thereby reducing the maximum throughput. It SHOULDN'T be enough to degrade streaming audio samples, but it is physically possible for electrical distortion to deny effective service to a switch.
Just pedantry. I still agree with you, but let's not be too hasty in making overbroad statements that are technically incorrect.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Username on Friday December 24 2021, @01:28PM (3 children)
Qantas Flight 72, a pointer got corrupted and referenced a different memory address due to EMI. Almost brought down the plane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @06:06PM
That would make a good episode of Well There's Your Problem.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @01:40AM (1 child)
That's probably not what happened. There's a solid writeup on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and you can read the ATSB report [atsb.gov.au] as well. EMI is considered one of the least likely explanations. A manufacturing defect in the AOA sensor is considered most likely, compounded by the software in the flight control computer mishandling the error condition. Not exactly a bug, more like it is just hard to deal with hardware faults in software.
(Score: 2) by Username on Saturday December 25 2021, @01:35PM
I can see there being a defect, but why does it only create a problem when flying over a particular area? For multiple aircraft? Far more likely they were subject to jamming by military aircraft, and the government is covering it up.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @12:10PM
What they do to get that analog sound is obviously to modulate the amplitude of the bits and send them across with an AM overlay.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @02:03PM (2 children)
I've seen really amazing attention to detail in building audio gear that works really well.
Focusing on hum, michophonics, distortion, dynamic range, and matching were it matters.
To be clear that is in the audio analog signal path.
The whole point of a digital signal path is that its easy to make it good enough and there is NO better.
This switch appears to be selling low analog noise in it's power supply. I can see if you took a generic Ethernet switch and put it on top of your low level preamp, then yes you might hear noise where it should not be. But Ethernet is transformer coupled and can go 100 Meters, so a better way to eliminate this possible coupling would be to put a few feet between the switch from the low level equipment.
Where I though these folks were heading was timing. One could make a good digital audio system interconnected with Ethernet for the signal paths and use the Ethernet physical layer for a common timing reference. It's not clear that equipment works this way and doesn't appear that these folks did that. Guess they need to offer a more expensive improved version?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday December 25 2021, @03:31PM
The amateur radio and radio telescope folks I know have long since given up on UTP and only use carefully grounded STP with common mode rejection ferrite chokes and long copper runs near big metal conductors like antennas never live long anyway due to coupled in lightning so its optical for the long runs.
So you run optical out to the dish positioners and then inside the grounded steel case you only use STP with common mode chokes.
Still interferes sometimes with moonbounce, planetary radar, and whatever radio telescopes are used for. I got involved in an argument about network causing noise vs dish positioners causing noise and it was proven to be network by me doing some pingflooding and comparing that to interference in the scientific data. Annoying, but easier to fix than the positioner electronics; I think?
Also, note that "noisy innards shielded from the outside" works both ways. I got paid a lot of money by network consultant standards to manipulate a long ethernet run into working at a welding shop a long time ago. I ended up playing around with protocol settings in the end; whatever crazy combo of 00s switches and cards worked when aggressively forced to 10 meg ethernet instead of the then new (ish) 100 meg variations.
So if you're having trouble either getting or creating interference, aside from a better shielded switch try a forcing different ethernet speed modes and not relying on autodetect, if its marginal.
There were other options I don't remember and I need to tend to a roast before guests arrive I'll post later if I remember. Some Cisco specific config nuttiness, at least 10-20 years ago, did nothing to prevent interference directly but it made recovery so fast the users felt like the port wasn't dropping even when it was for an instant.
Oh yeah, geometry games, almost forgot about that. Like the arc welder held parallel to the ethernet switch power cable made the switch crash so I wound the ethernet power cable into a coil AND added ferrite cores and that stopped it rebooting, forgot about that. I think the RF from the arc welder coupled into the switching power supply pissing it off so much that it powered down. That was another annoyance. Mounting the power supply sideways helped because the welders worked mostly on a flat surface but it didn't eliminate it entirely until I tilted the power supply WRT the mostly horizontal welder cables.
Industrial stuff is a whole world of crazy pain. Oh yeah and I remember ordering a "220" line for a UPS protected 3com switch and the electricians thought it would be funny to give me a 208 volt single phase off a 3-phase line and the UPS was VERY unhappy at 208 input. Now a days its all universal any random shit AC from 100-377 volts will probably work on most supplies but theirs was "smart" and the software measured 208V as an outage in progress. Then again lots of money in industrial...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday December 25 2021, @03:39PM
Oh that's what I was trying to remember.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_Ethernet [wikipedia.org]
I had a quote request on setting this up. I gave the client a quote that was about as much as my house. They said they'd prefer to keep using NTP. Some quick googling shows its dropped in price a lot and you can get switches capable of this as cheap as $2K now.
Its a good idea and in theory it should cost about nothing but in practice you have all the "big company" overhead combined with low demand resulting in ridiculous prices.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @02:36PM (1 child)
This is simply snake oil unless they include the requisite framistat
(Score: 2) by gznork26 on Friday December 24 2021, @09:41PM
Any idea when the framistat was invented?
Back in about '70, my Space Coast college town hosted a competition to build the best pfluggerhagen. No explanation was given, but the winner would get to keep theirs. We made some parts that might be needed: screws that could only be loosened.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @02:53PM
I bought one of these for my daily reading of SoylentNews and I'm impressed with how clear and compelling all the comments on today's posts are compared to the usual noise. Of course, it could just be the gallon of spiked eggnog I had for breakfast.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @03:15PM (1 child)
Have they seen the prices of enterprise networking equipment? Audiophile-marketers aren't the only ones who know how to take their audience for a ride.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @02:43AM
Enterprise network gear has never corrupted my data as home shit has.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday December 24 2021, @03:51PM (3 children)
The obsessions of audiophiles has always made me curious. It's a strange combination of compulsively addressing minute details while not understanding basic, physical world concepts.
Then I met a guy that bought and drove a Prius to save the environment. He would constantly gently step on the brakes everywhere he went, even on the highway, "to regenerate the battery and save fuel". When he wasn't distracted by his phone.
We criminally under-educate our children in sciences and math.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday December 24 2021, @06:33PM (2 children)
I partially agree. I can't call it criminal, aside from the fact that money is forcibly taken from us to pay for schools but we have zero say in what gets done with it. That aside, I was always a science nut as a kid (still am) but got ridiculed for it by other kids who just weren't interested in it. It's much too deep and philosophical (in general, and for me right now) to understand if 1) there is a way to get kids more interested in science, and 2) what's the benefit in the long-run? Maybe it's better that we each specialize in whatever it is we're interested in and good at? I definitely agree with well-rounded education and subject matters. Maybe educators need to show how things like math and science really will benefit them later in life...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @01:43AM (1 child)
Training in science helps you calibrate your bullshit detector, which is desperately needed these days. The right has no facts and the left has no logic. Both could benefit from basic training in how to not be a dumbass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @06:10PM
true true. all good.
however i would just like to add something abit ..uhm ..err... un scientifc. logic and science training is all good but i think we keep forgetting that we ourselfs are nature too and thus a part of it ... thus (hurray for logic) we cannot be totally dis-joined from it. ergo, nature (or the environment) shapes us too!
tho i guess, gently stirring a copper kettle with rainwater whilst gently singing a song under a full moon before watering the seedlings with it is a bit too much "nature" and too little "science" for some :]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snospar on Friday December 24 2021, @04:18PM (3 children)
Many years ago I worked in a Hi-Fi store, around the time CD's were going mainstream and the audiophiles were just starting to be opposed to all things digital. We sold various "gizmos" that would make CD sound better ranging from clip on plastic rings that went around the edge of the discs to "stop the laser light leaking out"; a metal platter that sat on top of the CD to stop it vibrating; all the way up to custom external DAC's for serious money. The middle option did offer some skip protection on the cheaper CD players but "sound better"... erm, no.
The real money back then was in the Monster Cables used to connect the equipment together and was outrageously expensive. Gotta get me some of that Oxygen Free Copper cabling so I can hear those bass notes perfectly!
As far as this Ethernet switch goes, if you are having enough variation on your mains supply that it is able to interfere with network data then you have more important issues to deal with than lousy audio. Hopefully if your supply is that bad you can't afford to waste your money on products like this.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday December 24 2021, @06:23PM (1 child)
I've heard of Monster cable (probably have some that someone gave me) and low-oxygen (WTF?), but not the CD gizmos you mentioned. It's possible the early CD players didn't have much error correction and the metal platter might have helped, I dunno. Better ADCs and DACs have always been a thing with audiofiles, and other audio circuit upgrades, hotrods, including replacing stock op-amps.
When I was a kid I remember a guy who had a reel-to-reel tape deck and he was replacing all of the standard (noisy) carbon resistors with much quieter metal film ones. I thought he was crazy, but at the time I didn't realize how noisy carbon resistors were.
Obviously company's product is a huge ripoff (only 5 ports? not even 8?). What I could agree with would be an Ethernet switch with a very quiet power supply, and good ground points to then use shielded Cat5e (or 6 or higher) wire. You would then use shielded RJ45 [google.com] connectors. Company sells shielded cable and connectors for insane prices, like $3,000 for 1 meter. https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/galileo-sx/galileo-sx-digital/galileo-sx-ethernet/ [synergisticresearch.com]
And then if you really have too much money that you can't figure out how to get rid of, you can buy a power cable for $10,000 [synergisticresearch.com]. The specs are truly impressive, but I strongly doubt all the insanity will buy you better audio.
Point is: Ethernet, WiFi, and other digital circuitry radiates RF energy that will end up as noise in analog electronics, and could even cause noise in digital circuits (switching threshold false multiple triggering). Better shielding and simple correct grounding would go a long way. Heck, a simple linear power supply (as opposed to switching ones) would greatly "quiet" things like Ethernet switches.
If you really want to improve audio quality, replacing clock oscillators with better more frequency-stable ones (less "jitter") will help and is often the best bang for the buck. There are companies who specialize in doing this, and they have good reference information of the various weaknesses in audio gear, from microphones to speakers and everything in between.
As I mentioned before, using balanced audio interconnections, rather than "single-ended" (single conductor with shield) would do wonders to quiet most noise in audio equipment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @03:38AM
Yet there are millions and millions of people willing and able to drop kilodollars on this kind of junk, even in hard times.
Would be a shame to let idiocy go to waste.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday December 24 2021, @07:24PM
Ah, yes. I remember a salesman spending minutes patronizingly explaining over and over how they "clean up the wave form".
And the place is still in business decades later.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Friday December 24 2021, @08:03PM
10Gb? Managed switch? 24+ ports? A couple of SFP+ ports?
Could be a good deal...
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Friday December 24 2021, @10:25PM (1 child)
I run all my audio through my Retro Encabulator.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday December 24 2021, @10:48PM
Sure helps filter out the occasional "crunching" [youtu.be] noise.