Stack Audio SmoothLAN network filter

[ronorn]

Hi.
Does anyone have an opinion on the Stack Audio SmoothLAN network filter ?

Thanks.

SmoothLAN Network filter - Stack Audio

The Stack Audio SmoothLAN network filter is designed for one purpose; to remove crosstalk and interference from a network cable to eliminate a potential source for parasitic noise entering sensitive Hi-Fi via a music streamer.

stackaudio.co.uk

 

[voodooless]

Does anyone have an opinion on the Stack Audio SmoothLAN network filter ?

I have: it’s total nonsense!

 

[ronorn]

I have: it’s total nonsense!

Thank you for saving my money.

 

[amirm]

These guys never stop thinking of new ways for people to waste money. And Hans really needs to retire than spreading this nonsense in video after video.

 

[wwenze]

It makes your LAN smooooooooooth

 

[ronorn]

These guys never stop thinking of new ways for people to waste money. And Hans really needs to retire than spreading this nonsense in video after video.

Dear Amir. Thank you so much for your reply.
Love all your reviews and this forum
Learning a lot from you.
Starting the day with a smile

 

[fatoldgit]

If anyone must invest in something cause the boogie man of ethernet noise keeps them up at night then get this:

https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/dxe-iso-plus-2

Made by a serious company, for a real world issue for ham radio enthusiasts. $70 and done.

Peter

 

[ronorn]

If anyone must invest in something cause the boogie man of ethernet noise keeps them up at night then get this:

https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/dxe-iso-plus-2

Made by a serious company, for a real world issue for ham radio enthusiasts. $70 and done.

Peter

According to the manufactur , This product is not designed for cat8 cable.

 

[somebodyelse]

According to the manufactur , This product is not designed for cat8 cable.

Neither is the SmoothLAN - that's designed to handle up to 100Mbps according to your link.

 

[ronorn]

Hi again.
Any advice regarding this :

network isolator MI 2005

Network Isolator MI 2005

2.5 Gbit/s Network isolator for the isolation of medical equipment Safety: IEC 60601-1:2005/AMD1:2012/AMD2:2020 (Edition 3.2 Medical electrical…

baaske-medical.com

 

[voodooless]

That is rather pointless. Any device with a JR45 LAN connector already has something similar either in the connector or right after it. Maybe not the surge protection, but that seems superfluous anyway.

 

[ronorn]

That is rather pointless. Any device with a JR45 LAN connector already has something similar either in the connector or right after it. Maybe not the surge protection, but that seems superfluous anyway.

Thanks.
I have an expensive streamer .. Something to protect?
Or no danger from Ethernet cable ?

 

[DVDdoug]

I have an expensive streamer .. Something to protect?
Or no danger from Ethernet cable ?

Ethernet is already electrically isolated but probably nothing will protect you from a lightening strike (if it hits the "right" cables) or from an electrical fault that puts power-line voltage on your network, or other disasters.

 

[fatoldgit]

According to the manufactur , This product is not designed for cat8 cable.

cat 7/8 are designed for high thru put runs in datacenters ...not the piddly arsed data streams we need for home audio.

Cat 5e/cat 6 will support 112MB (thats mega bytes) per second...your qobuz/deezer/tidal stream will come in at < 1MB per second... local streaming < 3MB per second and even if you do DSD upsampling to some crazy limit < 5MB per second.

Secondly, few if any pc/audio/consumer router products support 10gbit.... its all 1gbit so how can a cable designed for high thru put (10gbit or higher) make a difference... its not the constraining factor... and as noted above there is no constraint even at 1gbit for home audio streams.

Thirdly, everything in the stack has buffers which makes the components highly immune to transmission issues.I could unplug the ethernet cable from my 2006 Slimdevices Transporter and it would play 30 sec's of music before its buffer was drained.

If you think cat 7/8 is some magic bullet to hifi Nirvana then you have been duped/have not applied criticial thinkng.

The people designing the filter I linked recognize that ham radio operators understand the technical aspects of ethernet (unlike most audiophiles) and so had no need to design a filter that supported a standard that makes no sense for domestics installs.

Next you will be telling us that reclocking a packetized protocol with some expensive audiofool switch provides benefits.

Peter

 

[ronorn]

I will not tell you anything.
Just asking. It’s a forum, in a forum you can ask questions.

 

[fatoldgit]

I will not tell you anything.
Just asking. It’s a forum, in a forum you can ask questions.

You are telling me something.

You bolded your post ("This product is not designed for cat8 cable")... and this emphasis told me:

(1) I could infer with a high degree of probability that you use cat 8
(2) that you were then denigrating the design of the filter I linked because of this.

If you were in fact to ask a question (as you plead you are) it might have been "I see this filter doesnt support cat 8... why is that?... do I need cat 8?.. how does cat 8 differ from cat 5e/cat 6?"

My response gave you the basics on why you dont need cat 8 outside of what others had mentioned regarding grounding/electrical isolation.

Peter

 

[fatoldgit]

For those of us in the IT industry that have some knowledge of ethernet and tcp/ip it just pisses us off that audio companies prey on the fears of audiophiles and sell them expensive products they dont need.

Sorry if I came over too aggressive.

Peter

 

[fatoldgit]

I mentioned a "packetized" protocol which you might not understand.

Many transmission standards (say SP/DIF for connecting audio components) are serial in nature which does make them susceptible to timing errors.

The design of the internet was originally spec'ed in the late 60's by DARPA (a US defense research lab) to get a network that could connect military installations with an infrastructure that was immune to a single point of failure (unlike say a telephone line)

The basic design is built on the concept of routing, where multiple devices (routers) spread across the US (at that point) could all see each other and if the Ruskies took out say router A then it made no difference because network traffic could automatically continue transmission via alternate paths/routers.

Obviously now the internet is worldwide but routing is still the basis.

Data is transmitted by the most optimal path through the available routers but should a router in the current optimal path have an issue, the next most optimal path is then used.

Aligned with this physical infrastructure (routers, switches, ethernet etc) is the transmission protocol which also needed to support this routing concept. Thus data that travels across ethernet/internet (the physical layer) is encapsulated inside the TCP/IP transmission protocol whose core concept is that data isnt serial/point to point but is instead sent out in sequenced packets (chunks) of data.

What this enabled is the retransmisson of a small slice of the data that is sent: If for whatever reason one of these packets failed to arrive at any endpoint (say your PC or streamer) due to an outage in one of the internet routers, then the packet will be resent via an alternate path and still get to you.

This is why all the devices in the physical chain have buffers to allow time for the sender and receiver to tell each other (via a continuous handshake) whether they received the required packets and allow time for rerouting/resending such that your endpoint wont get its transmission interrupted.

So the senders TCP/IP layer busts up say your qobuz stream into smaller data packets, each designated with a sequential number, these are sent over the internet and arrive at your streamer BUT its entirely possible that packets 1000, 1001 and 1002 will arrive before packet 999. No issues cause with the buffer, the TCP/IP protocol will wait and re-order the packets into the correct sequence and if one packet doesnt arrive within a specific time it will ask the sender to resend it again.

There are also checksums involved so malformed packets can be detected.

Thus by the time your audio playback software needs the next bit of qobuz FLAC data to continue playing, the "output end" of the buffer it reads the data from will all be correct and any transmission issues from the sender resolved due to the buffer shielding the player from these issues.

NOW... when you are streaming local files (basically your PC/NAS to your streamer..which is now a simple point to point network)... all the resiliency thats baked into ethernet/tcpip is "wasted" given these standards were designed to keep data flowing seamlessly in the case of a nuclear attack... which isnt an everyday event.

And due to the use of packets and buffering, reclocking ethernet makes no difference.

Wifi doesnt use ethernet (thats cables) but still uses TCP/IP but with wifi it is obviously possible (due to wifi channel congestion, weak radio signals etc) that you get transmission issues because the transmission interruption exceeds the TCP/IP retransmission timeout value and so a packet is lost (which then causes say a video or audio dropout).

To complete the picture, on top of this you have the "userland" protocols. Many people, for example, confuse the WWW for the internet. The WWW (and ftp [file transmission], smtp [e-mail] etc) are seperate protocols that leverage the internet.... they are not the internet itself. But obviously the internet is just an empty bus going nowhere without some passengers (these userland protocols).

The cool thing about ethernet/tcpip is that a programmer writing a TCP/IP enabled application doesnt have to worry about the "plumbing", just adhere to the OS level "sockets" interface to TCP/IP and they can develop in their garage with a couple of PC's knowing it can be deployed across the internet with no changes for 1000's of users (assuming of course they designed the overall app with the scalability required for the user base they need to support)

Finally, ethernet comes in two basic flavours: copper and fibre. Copper is used for short runs and fibre for long runs (think city to city or undersea cables between countries but this does involve, just like the old copper telephone network, repeaters stationed at regular points to boost the signal).

Commercial Fibre media convertors (copper->fibre->copper) can be used in home audio as a way to reduce POTENTIAL ethernet noise (ie. an alternative to filters). I do use this in my system (cost less than $60..no need to spend more). I do this because I have structured wiring in my house (48 runs of cat 6) so have the potential for house wide noise to hit my audio system as the seperate ethernet runs connect via a common switch.


Peter

PS. In my professional life I have on many occassions transfered 100's of TB's of data (in a single session) from say the west coast to the east coast and had zero packet retransmissons.

 

[fatoldgit]

lets talk about ethernet noise... the audio boogie man... by referencing ethernet in the real world... a data center.

Below we see a single row in a datacenter made up off individual racks...each 19" wide and typically 8ft high.

Servers/and or ethernet devices (switches etc) of different heights will slot into these racks and a datacenter building might contain 100's of these rows.

At the end of each row will typically by a very large UPS providing the localized power for each row.

Note the yellow, green and blue ethernet cables.

These racks are electrically very noisy... lots of emi/emf from the power being feed to the servers, the UPS's themselves, the servers themselves etc.

Above the rack row will be trays that hold all the ethernet cables and in the left picture you can see these being bundled off to serve each individual rack. The right picture is a top level view. The amount of ethernet cabling in a datacenter is mind blowing.

Finally at some point these cable bundles will concentrate together so they can all connect into switches and internet facing routers or to go between buildings etc.

So what does this tell us:

1- that ethernet and its associated devices are designed to work in exceptionally noisy environments (noting the voltage on ethernet is less then 5V)
2- much of the cabling in a data center wont be fancy cat 7 / cat 8 but the workhorse UTP cat6 from the rack rows out
3- the design of UTP ethernet (unshielded) is such that its noise suppression is so good there is no issue bundling it together or running it close to emi/emf sources
4- Thus it is not susceptible to the high levels of emi/emf in a data center
5- devices (rackable computers etc) dont have fancy "milled from a single block" cases.. just folded steel that needs to meet a minimum of emi/emf emission standards (i.e. they dont do ethernet runs any favours)
6- the cables will be made using commodity wiring/terminators... no fancy sheaths,connectors, 99.99999% copper etc... they need to be as cheap as possible but reliable.
7- no fancy reclockers needed cause TCP/IP is a packetized protocol
8- similarly network devices connected via 70m/80m/90m of ethernet dont need reclockers to allow the ethernet electrical signals to be reliably sent
9- and maybe most importantly, your FLAC stream is just data the ethernet/tcpip stack doesnt care if its a video stream, and audio stream or a cat photo, the data will be sent and received with the same level of reliablity and nothing more needs to be added to make it more reliable (noting that within datacenters, certain type of data might be given priority over other data, via QOS or quality of service configs)

So there is no way a short single run of ethernet from your router to your streamer (or PC/NAS to streamer) is going to stress the noise suppression of the end to end ethernet transmission line.

Only need to use cat 6, dont need reclocking switches but if you really want, spend less than $100 on a real world filter (as I highlighted) or say a pair of tplink mc200cm convertors and suitable fibre cable

Peter

 

[fatoldgit]

Finally lets review ethernet cabling... not my chart and not much to explain except to note that cat 7 and 8 are NOT used for connecting the 1000's of 1U servers in a datacenter but are instead, due to their bandwidth capabilites, used at the "core" between say high speed network devices (or specialized high bandwidth compute/storage devices) ...thus no need to waste money on any type of cat 8 cable for home audio.

Also note that cat 5 to cat 6a are all rated for 100m lengths, its just the bandwidth they can handle at that distance that changes. So cat 5e and cat 6 easily handle the bandwidth needed for home devices including your streamer (because home devices max out at 1gbit)

Finally its rare to see shielded cat 5e to cat 6a cables... they will mostly be UTP unless sheilding is needed for a special applicaton.