I'm not an "audiophile". I like listening to music, and I write, play and mix my music in my spare time, but my day job is IT - I was a UNIX engineer for over a decade, a firewall and network engineer for nearly as long, and now I am technical owner of the trading platform of a major European bank. My point is that I understand ethernet and TCP/IP networks pretty well. I arrived at this forum via Mr. Majidimehr's YT channel, after I came across his video on so-called "audiophile" network switches and was intrigued: what could they actually do, I wondered? I couldn't see how they would change anything...
I read the review. It's fascinating. The sales chap from the company, a certain Mr. Bonotto, describes a fairly typical fabrication approach for switch ports as if it's some kind of unique technical wizardry. He also says "Apart from the connection between the power input and the PCB, there are no wires; everything else is surface mount" Well...yeah. Open up pretty much any cheap mid-size network switch, you'd see the same, it's the commonest way of doing it. He keeps talking about "noise", but never explains exactly how the noise gets from the switch to the DAC...somehow, it just does. Of course, it can't be part of the data packets at the transport layer, because there's no mechanism by which it could get in there. The only place it could be introduced, as far as I can see, is in the electrical connections, but, IIRC, the IEEE 802.3 standard includes proper shielding/grounding as part of the Ethernet standard; and I also would expect any streaming device to be properly isolated internally to prevent such propagation. If it's not, it wouldn't matter what kind of switch you had.
What I find so peculiar is that people criticising the review on technical grounds are being told by other commenters that they are simply wrong, but no explanation - even a summary one - of how they are wrong is forthcoming. They're just told that if they haven't heard the result of the device being in the datastream, they can't comment. Are we just expected to accept their word for the improvements without any clear explanation as to why they exist?
Welcome to audiophilia.
There is as far as I'm aware, one measurement posted on the stereo.net.au forum showed noise from a switch or something entering a Linn DAC/streamer, but my unqualified opinion is that the noise measured would not be audilble. It does suggest that noise could get into a badly designed DAC, or that if you have incredibly high noise it could cause an issue. How many of us run 60m lengths of cable in our homes though? I also had a bad cheapo switch go wrong on me and the result was a lot of noise. But that's way, way beyond what gets reported in the review.
The "you have to listen to it" argument is basic subjectivism, and assumes that "magic happens" in these components, or that the manufacturer is doing something that "can't be measured".
I went down the Ethernet rabbit hole a little way, blind tested an Audioquest cable against, well, a Cat 3 cable that was dropping multiple packets! - and found no difference. If a bad cable works, what do we learn from that?
People who search for "differences" between devices like this will all too often "hear" something. Often, lots of people who listen to the same change will actually "hear" similar "differences" - well, because while all audiophiles want to be special, most people react in a similar way. That influences things so that what subjective reviewers "hear" is what a lot of other people doing the sighted test will hear. They don't want to accept this, so they react angrily if it is pointed out to them.
I have little problem with people hearing differences that aren't there, in that the sound waves in the room are identical. We'll all do it sometimes no matter what we understand.
I have a BIG problem when companies take advantage of this - even if they are "hearing" the same things when they test themselves- charging huge sums of money for devices like this one, when they don't change the sound waves in the room. If they can prove that the claim they make for improvement is objectively true, by measurement or blind test, that's different. But they never do.
The really odd thing in all of this is that, even forewarned, if you go and audition this device, with all your knowledge, you too may hear a difference that you have to resort to fancy prose to describe. The reason is that your brain is interpreting the sound waves differently. If you blind test, that difference (as opposed to a genuine change of sound) goes away.
But we are told to "trust our ears", but at the same time the form of testing that subjectivists do, doesn't give "our ears" a chance. It's a problem, and an expensive one to suffer from.
(I checked out of that show some years ago, but I'll still watch it as it's been part of me so long).
www.stereophile.com
