Do Audiophile Network Switches Make a Difference (video)?

[respice finem]

Amir 2024!

Russ

Make Audio Great Again
/scnr

 

[Chrispy]

Make Audio Great Again
/scnr

Not those letters, please. Besides, it's arguably greater now than its ever been.

 

[respice finem]

It's called humour (sorry for the m in it)

 

[Chrispy]

I'm still in recovery.....

 

[phoenixsong]

Slightly unrelated, but does anyone know what happens to distortion and other measurements if I play two audio tracks simultaneously? Say, two youtube tabs or two different audio players (Windows Media Player and Groove or something). Also, would it matter if the sampling rate is altered under such conditions?

 

[voodooless]

Slightly unrelated, but does anyone know what happens to distortion and other measurements if I play two audio tracks simultaneously? Say, two youtube tabs or two different audio players (Windows Media Player and Groove or something). Also, would it matter if the sampling rate is altered under such conditions?

What does any of that have to do with network switches? The two sources just get mixed. Usually there is one system sample rate, everything gets converted to that.

 

[amirm]

Slightly unrelated, but does anyone know what happens to distortion and other measurements if I play two audio tracks simultaneously? Say, two youtube tabs or two different audio players (Windows Media Player and Groove or something). Also, would it matter if the sampling rate is altered under such conditions?

Windows audio stack resamples every audio source into one constant (set in Advanced properties in your sound card control panel), converts the streams to floating point, mixes them, and then converts back to integer with dither and sends it out to the sound card. So yes, the bits are transformed. What impact it has is complex but results are very good most of the time.

 

[Billy Budapest]

This is a good watch. “You don’t know what you don’t know” accurately describes all of Hans Beekhuyzen’s videos, not just the ridiculous one torn apart here.

 

[Matsuo Mayu]

Thanks Amirm！
Almost believe & buy this one https://nuprimeaudio.com/product/omnia-sw-8/?v=69e1aafeccc5 , as it claims that jitter is much lower (396 ps) against others making at the level of 705 ps though I don't even sure I can hear the difference. Now I know that we aren't listen the signal of a Network Switch but a DAC, then whatever Jitter or noise it can reduce is just white elephant~~~ Appreciate your scientific lecture again！

 

[Billy Budapest]

Thanks Amirm！
Almost believe & buy this one https://nuprimeaudio.com/product/omnia-sw-8/?v=69e1aafeccc5 , as it claims that jitter is much lower (396 ps) against others making at the level of 705 ps though I don't even sure I can hear the difference. Now I know that we aren't listen the signal of a Network Switch but a DAC, then whatever Jitter or noise it can reduce is just white elephant~~~ Appreciate your scientific lecture again！

It might or might not do what it says, but as Amir demonstrated, noise and jitter on an Ethernet network do not matter as long as the cables and switches are performing to spec. Any dropped packets will be re-sent, and noise and jitter are not issues as they are dealt with at the input of the music server and/or DAC.

Quite simply, “audiophile” network switches are a solution in search of a problem.

 

[Matsuo Mayu]

noise and jitter on

Can't agree more. Plus 499EUR added on buying a top-notch Amp(with a built-in DAC ) will surely do the trick on improving the 'HIGH-END'.

 

[somebodyelse]

Any dropped packets will be re-sent

People keep trotting that one out without looking at the details. It depends on which streaming protocol you're using. For protocols using TCP it will happen, but may be too late. However many of the streaming protocols end up using RTP over UDP under the skin, and that doesn't do retransmision - it was intended for low latency use so the re-sent packet would arrive too late to be used anyway. In practice dropped packets are rare enough to be a non-issue unless you've got bigger networking problems.

 

[Jinjuku]

People keep trotting that one out without looking at the details. It depends on which streaming protocol you're using. For protocols using TCP it will happen, but may be too late. However many of the streaming protocols end up using RTP over UDP under the skin, and that doesn't do retransmision - it was intended for low latency use so the re-sent packet would arrive too late to be used anyway. In practice dropped packets are rare enough to be a non-issue unless you've got bigger networking problems.

How many music services use UDP though? I setup networks for Shoretel, Avaya, Vocera, GetWell. I setup IGMP / PIM Sparse, DSCP, most of this type of traffic uses UDP due to the realtime nature.

Music isn't realtime and the data is at rest somewhere which means we can resend it. You don't get that with voice or video conferencing because real-time is real-time.

Depending on the buffering it isn't too late as long as the error is detected and corrected at less than the buffer thresh-hold. Roon has a 10 second buffer, Tidal will buffer entire 10 minute tracks, JRiver will buffer up to a GB (entire 16/44.1 albums).

I don't think RTP is used as much as you imply. Also there is RTP/TCP.

 

[Mnyb]

LMS ( the server software for squeezeboxes ) uses tcp and have 30s of buffer at 16/44 flac .

I helped archimago to try some small test some years ago regarding network and audio .

I hosted the test files on my LMS server in Sweden and he is in Canada and gave him remote access so he could both test and listen to music and browse my collection .
Lag and ping was a bit terrible and the LMS system is not made for this . It's designed for local playback on your Lan. so there whee some issues for him.

But it worked anyway and performed the same when the bits where coming in.

 

[somebodyelse]

I found UPnP using RTP/UDP as transport when I was looking into using it some time back. I know it also supports TCP based transports too - perhaps it's become more common since I looked, or it was just outliers that I looked at deeply enough to find it, but UPnP seems to be in common HiFi use still.

 

[Jinjuku]

I found UPnP using RTP/UDP as transport when I was looking into using it some time back. I know it also supports TCP based transports too - perhaps it's become more common since I looked, or it was just outliers that I looked at deeply enough to find it, but UPnP seems to be in common HiFi use still.

From wiki:

UPnP assumes the network runs Internet Protocol (IP) and then leverages HTTP, on top of IP, in order to provide device/service description, actions, data transfer and eventing.

 

[somebodyelse]

Wikis tend to paraphrase. See for example http://www.upnp.org/specs/av/UPnP-av-AVTransport-v3-Service.pdf "A.2Application to RTSP/RTP/UDP Streaming"

 

[Andysu]

This guy is funny at bashing the audiophile snake oil

 

[Billy Budapest]

This guy is funny at bashing the audiophile snake oil

I found that video really annoying. I couldn't stand all the stopping, pausing, and restarting.