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Oh... the insanity! (audiophiles switches)

PierreV

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stunta

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Pricing starts at $800 for the plain Jane model, $1500 with sCLK-EX clock board and the full blown $1700 with sCLK-EX clock board and master clock input with your choice of 50 Ohm or 75 Ohm connector.

Too cheap to maintain my audiophile street-creds.
 

Blumlein 88

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Well everything is always more natural and flowing and calmer. Shoot compared to when CD was introduced Megadeath albums should now sound as smooth as Perry Como. :)

At least they don't discuss the plankton. But there is synergy. Always synergy to make sure you don't think this one product will do all the filtering. You'll probably benefit even more to combine it with other similar products.
 

BillH

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It's so unfair. I want the ultimate sound but I can't afford all this s****
 

Jinjuku

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Unfortunately a lot of people don't understand they are listening to a buffer and nothing is real-time off the cable.
 

pierre

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Too cheap to maintain my audiophile street-creds.
You can easily fix that: buy 5, and connect them with an expensive cat25 internet cable (or maybe 2 to 8). Being switch that should work. Imagine how good the chest/throats improvement would be !
 

DuxServit

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Oh dear, all those PHY layer packet collisions in CSMA/CD is creating all those awful interference in audio quality ;) :facepalm:
 

NTomokawa

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I've heard people talking about how their power is generated affects music reproduction.

That's right. Apparently some people believe that a wall socket fed by hydroelectricity plant somehow sounds different from one fed by a coal-fire plant. Or a nuclear plant.

Some would even go on to say that the water quality of the river on which the hydro plant is built also affects sound quality.

I'm not even surprised anymore.
 

M00ndancer

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As a MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) I'm used to interesting marketing stunts. But this is one of the best. Even more interesting is the comments. Haven't laughed this much in a while. If this was even remotely true, then we would have to transfer the Ethernet packets in the correct order from Tidal with a dedicated cable. Just to avoid timing errors.

o_O
 

Jinjuku

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As a MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) I'm used to interesting marketing stunts. But this is one of the best. Even more interesting is the comments. Haven't laughed this much in a while. If this was even remotely true, then we would have to transfer the Ethernet packets in the correct order from Tidal with a dedicated cable. Just to avoid timing errors.

o_O

Welcome to the boards. The current argument the subjectivist is proposing isn't about the actual data anymore. That was their argument perhaps 6/7 years ago but they've been taken to task and they no longer trot out that dog and pony.

Now it's about 'phase noise' or some other, as yet, un-measurable but they think quantifiable, phenomenon.
 

tomchr

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"The frames get rebuilt from the ground up." Really? Does that include the data? I could not believe I was reading a "review". It read like marketing babble from the company that make the switch. I loved the bit about how turning the LEDs off resulted in better sound quality. Of course it did... :)
I think they forgot a huge marketing opportunity, though. The switch clearly needs a separate linear power supply with a huge R-core transformer. You know... For maximum audiophoolery.

Regarding phase noise: As someone who spent seven years for National Semiconductor and TI chasing the last dBc of phase noise, I can tell you that phase noise is very real. That doesn't mean that low installing the latest femtosecond clock source will do anything for audio quality, however. Most (all?) modern DACs include some form of clock jitter cleaner or clock/data recovery circuit on their inputs. I know for sure that's the case with the ESS DACs, for example. Now the name "clock jitter cleaner" is a bit misleading. A jitter cleaner is more of a "jitter replacer". It synchronizes a known clean clock from a VCO to the incoming dirty clock using a PLL. The PLL forms a lowpass filter for the incoming clock and a highpass filter for the VCO clock. The bandwidth of the PLL is low, which means that the DAC will see only the VCO phase noise within the bandwidth of interest (i.e. the audio band). Thus, the internal clock in the DAC has exactly the same jitter regardless of the cleanliness of the incoming clock. That's probably a good thing as I doubt the various femtosecond clocks out there actually meet their specs. Femtosecond noise floors are hard to reach and without $150k to blow on an HP/Agilent/Keysight/Nom d'Jour E5052B, we won't know if they meet their specs.

Tom
 
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