Ethernet cable extension upgrade

[Clive]

Epistemologically, knowledge is defined as "justified true belief". Unfortunately, the majority of audiophile wisdom fails to satisfy this definition on the account of being neither justified nor true. Instead, to understand what's going on, we have to go back to the 5th century BC, when Protagoras famously declared that "a man is the measure of all things." In other words, the accounts offered by members of the audiophile community are mostly of anecdotal nature and so tainted by individual perception as to be entirely meaningless in the context of wider search for truth.

 

It occurs at the both ends of the spectrum. 

It sounds better but there’s no scientific proof.

Vs

It doesn’t sound better because the theory doesn’t allow it to.

There are plenty of other permutations but let’s not enter this worm-hole.

[KariFS]

It occurs at the both ends of the spectrum.  

It sounds better but there’s no scientific proof.

Vs

It doesn’t sound better because the theory doesn’t allow it to.

There are plenty of other permutations but let’s not enter this worm-hole.

A third one, and my favourite is:

”Whatever floats your boat”. Without any sarcasm or irony whatsoever.

Hi-Fi is about illusion after all, not only about what your ears tell, because most of it happens between the ears. If something makes it sound better to you, that’s all what matters.

About the tweak in question, I wouldn’t know, as my hifi has no Ethernet cables. Well, there is one between my cable modem and the mesh Wi-Fi thing, I doubt it has much effect on how the occasional spotify stream sounds played over Wi-Fi, using my iPad and its headphone output

[Johnjc]

The trouble is that this has measurements to back up the findings. You can argue semantics as much as you like but this has been evidenced. You can dispute the findings, talking about century old mentalities is not helping the debate.
 

[TransFi]

The trouble is that this has measurements to back up the findings. You can argue semantics as much as you like but this has been evidenced. You can dispute the findings, talking about century old mentalities is not helping the debate.
 

Didnt really want to get this involved. Had no idea this would cause controversy. Maybe on the Wiim Forum, but not here.

To clarify, these are the measurements John is referring to. Personally, I dont care that much about measurement, just what I hear:

[stratokaster83]

Funny, because these measurements do not point at sound reproduction issues anyways. They are totally worthless for the aspect you are discussing 

Agree 100%. Noise and jitter on the Ethernet line are completely meaningless as long as they don't affect data transmission, which in this case they don't.

Data packets don't care what kind of payload they carry. It could be video, text files, audio data — it's either transmitted or lost.

If anyone thinks that their streamer sends raw data received over the Ethernet to the DAC, they're seriously deluded. First of all, there is a whole software and hardware stack extracting data from individual packets, the data is written to a buffer, after that it is decoded (since it's transmitted in a format that the DAC chip itself does not understand), the decoded data is buffered again and only after that the PCM (or DSD) stream is sent to the DAC. The part of the streamer that deals with the network is very much the same as a regular PC. Do you think that YouTube videos suddenly look and sound better if you use a silver-plated Ethernet cable to connect to your router? 

If the minuscule amount of noise on the Ethernet line (which should be 100% galvanically isolated from the rest of the device anyway) somehow affects the sound coming out of the DAC chip, then there is something physically VERY wrong with the streamer. But then again, I know a person who is absolutely convinced that their wireless streamer sounds much better when they have an AudioQuest JitterBug plugged into the USB port on their router, so sometimes you simply have to choose your battles carefully   

[Johnjc]

If anyone would like to come over and blind test in SW London I be happy to oblige
Just the only things I ask is you report your own experience and not be rude.

[TransFi]

Eric & the guys on the German forum have nominated the throttle cable as best tweak of the year for 2024.

However, for 2023 the best tweak was this:



Just putting this together to feed the trolls 

[Johnjc]

Just to confirm my thoughts on how this works.
WiFi from the router to a WiFi extender. So air gapping the signal.
Then power bank to the extender. Throttle cable from the extender to the streamer.
I have quite a few friends that air gap, but by a 5g broadband network. This for me would be a simpler approach in my living situation.

[TransFi]

Yes...this is how it works John:



Interestingly, I am at the moment toggling between the battery & Temple Audio Supercaps Power Supply. Bass seems to have more authority & definition with the supercaps. Still testing.

[Clive]

Yes...this is how it works John:



Interestingly, I am at the moment toggling between the battery & Temple Audio Supercaps Power Supply. Bass seems to have more authority & definition with the supercaps. Still testing.

Thanks for posting and sharing your results.  Keep it coming!

[wer]

With respect, your posts on this thread are totally worthless to this discussion. Since I started this thread, I would appreciate if you refrain from commenting on here. I am fully aware you are repeating the ASR/Amir mantra ad nauseum and I dont want to hear it. Thanks....

Same goes for Stratokaster.....thanks!

You can always click the Ignore button if you do not like what other people have to say 

[willbewill]

I'm quite happy to hear both sides - as long as the posts are respectful, there are no winners or losers, it isn't a competition and cases for/against don't need to be repeated ad nauseam.

From my point of view - over the years I've tried many whacky hifi ideas/tweaks, many haven't worked for me, but some have in spite of not having a logical scientific explanation. Science (as yet?) can't always explain everything - known principles are continually being challenged by new discoveries.

I wonder what Galileo would say...

And anything is possible in Discworld

[aboos]

It's always interesting but also disapointing to see responses in these matters and the upcoming fight who is right and who is wrong. There are always two groups: the ones who claim that they hear a difference and the ones who claim that it is physically impossible to hear such difference.
And it' also disapointing to see the intolerance against each other.
What if both are right? Nobody seems to try to find an explanation by thinking out of the box.
Now coming back to Ethernet cables and transmisions:
- yes, ethernet transmissions ensure correct data. If data is corrupted, the protocol performs a retry until data is correct
- if many retries are required (many transmitted packages are corrupt), transmission time takes longer
- now, depending on the buffer sizes and transmission speed, in a streaming application, received data is converted and send to the DAC. If the buffers are small (and they are in cheap equipment as everything is integrated into one chip), it may lead to running low and thus delay available data for the DAC for some microseconds.
And voila, there could be an explanation (I don't say that this is definitely the cause here, but it could be)
But what I can say is that reducing common mode noise will reduce bit errors and thus retries.

[stratokaster83]

It's always interesting but also disapointing to see responses in these matters and the upcoming fight who is right and who is wrong. There are always two groups: the ones who claim that they hear a difference and the ones who claim that it is physically impossible to hear such difference.
And it' also disapointing to see the intolerance against each other.
What if both are right? Nobody seems to try to find an explanation by thinking out of the box.
Now coming back to Ethernet cables and transmisions:
- yes, ethernet transmissions ensure correct data. If data is corrupted, the protocol performs a retry until data is correct
- if many retries are required (many transmitted packages are corrupt), transmission time takes longer
- now, depending on the buffer sizes and transmission speed, in a streaming application, received data is converted and send to the DAC. If the buffers are small (and they are in cheap equipment as everything is integrated into one chip), it may lead to running low and thus delay available data for the DAC for some microseconds.
And voila, there could be an explanation (I don't say that this is definitely the cause here, but it could be)
But what I can say is that reducing common mode noise will reduce bit errors and thus retries.

Well, if you look at the measurements helpfully provided in this thread, you'll see that the original noise level was 81.6mV peak to peak max/7.1mV RMS, which is not enough to affect transmission even for PAM-5 encoding used by Gigabit Ethernet. However, on the screen of the oscilloscope we can clearly see the MLT-3 eye pattern which means that the cable in question is operating at 100BASE-TX speeds with 1V steps between logic levels. This network should be operating far below the maximum permitted bit error rate of 10^-8.

it may lead to running low and thus delay available data for the DAC for some microseconds.

In this case, the DAC would lose sync and the listener would hear drop-outs.

Anyway, I'm out of here for good. There's only so much fun to be had while discussing audiophile equivalents of healing crystals 

[Johnjc]

I don't have a issue with someone who has a different thought process. I do object to the rudeness above, however tongue in cheek it my seem to be.

As I said I might not need a choke/throttle cable when I get my new streamer (Hopefully at the weekend)as will have a built-in FMC.