10 ms·

My favorite is audiophile network switches. Never mind the fact that two devices connected with RJ45 ethernet have no direct electrical connection since signall

My favorite is audiophile network switches. Never mind the fact that two devices connected with RJ45 ethernet have no direct electrical connection since signalling is done via transformer coupling, so it is impossible to have a ground loop. Never mind the fact that it is a digital signal and audio streaming has robust error correction via TCP. For the low, low price of $3800, you can be the proud owner of an audiophile grade, 100Base-T network switch: https://innuos.com/phoenixnet/ https://innuos.com/phoenixnet/

mister_tee 4y ago
And to go with that you can use $500 ethernet cables, with directional arrows painted on. ACK, and that's not talking about TCP (sorry). https://www.wired.com/2008/06/snake-oil-alert/ https://www.wired.com/2008/06/snake-oil-alert/ (unfortunately this was from Denon who I've had great luck with an entry-ish-level AVR from for years)
- The_SamminAter 4y ago
  https://archive.is/k3Miw https://archive.is/k3Miw
outworlder 4y ago
> Never mind the fact that two devices connected with RJ45 ethernet have no direct electrical connection > For the low, low price of $3800, you can be the proud owner of an audiophile grade, 100Base-T network switch That buys you a seriously good piece of switching gear with 10GBe (or even higher) fiber optic links to whatever devices you could possibly want in a home. Heck, even a little over $100 buys you a switch with 4 SFP+ (Mikrotik CRS305). I guess audiophiles will claim that the optical transceivers introduce latency and _they can hear it_
- acje 4y ago
  The absolute pain when the entire song is delayed by 10ns or what not. If only I could compensate by pushing play a little bit faster.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    The issue is not constant latency, but jitter i.e. latency is changing between bits
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Jitter matters in very specific cases in very specific pieces of equipment. Jitter on the Ethernet transferring the file will have no effect.
    - whstl 4y ago
      Like the sibling poster said, this won't cause jitter. The audio isn't played directly from the ethernet packets. It has to be decompressed, decoded, buffered. In the end of it all the audio goes into a ring buffer and it is played very precisely by the sound card. The playback itself is a hard-real-time process that needs time guarantees. Failure to fill the ring buffer by any reason can cause audible skips, but not jitter. But most players in practice will simply stop the playback.
    - pezezin 4y ago
      The maximum jitter allowed by the IEEE specifications is 1.4 ns for 100-megabit Ethernet and 300 ps for Gigabit Ethernet. The bit time for a 48 kHz audio signal is ~20 000 ns. It is absolutely impossible that you can hear the Ethernet jitter.
m463 4y ago
The thing is, there's this plausibility factor that makes it hard to filter out BS You could 100% design a network switch to be good for audio. - ensure periodic packets like say arp don't introduce jitter - do qos on audio streams vs other data - favor latency over throughput - maybe tune things like MSS to keep packet sizes smaller, but no fragmentation etc..
- ChymeraXYZ 4y ago
  Yeah, no because "streaming" is just transferring a chunks that can then be played. You are not sending bits from the network card straight to the audio out. Even if you have a certain % packet loss, there is 0 impact on the playback as long as the next chunk arrives before the previous one has finished.
  - m463 4y ago
    You know, streaming isn't really just getting bits across the wire intact. For one thing, timing is important. A simple example would be getting video in sync with audio. You could go deeper and manage timing for speakers side to side or front to back. It would get lots harder if a microphone was introduced - then latency would be a big big deal. These sorts of things are probably why bluetooth isn't used as much with a/v systems. (lol, here I am arguing the merits of an audiophile network switch)
    - com2kid 4y ago
      > For one thing, timing is important. So long as the amount of audio sent in a packet is larger than how long it takes the next packet to get there, you'll be transfering audio data faster than it is playing, making minor fluctuations in timing between packets irrelevant. Bluetooth isn't used because BT audio transmission is lossy, audio gets recompressed. Newer BT standards have good quality compression, but you are still recompressing the audio. BT isn't meant to be a high bandwidth protocol. BT's latency around audio is because 99% of BT implementations suck. Latency can be as low as 50ms or so, but it is often in the 100s or even 200s of ms.
chaboud 4y ago
It looks like the big spend (besides avoiding Gigabit being a feature… wow) is the power supply being linear. Having taken scopes to power lines in homes, I can grudgingly attest to the non-zero impact switching power supplies have in audible frequencies. But it’s comically small and solvable much more easily than spending this kind of coin. I was expecting an AVB switch with locking connectors and redundant power. You know, like a pro audio mission-critical device. Instead it’s basically like using stacks of hundreds to vibration insulate your CD player. It might technically improve things, but the return on investment is poor.
- doubled112 4y ago
  > having taken scopes to power lines in homes, I can grudgingly attest to the non-zero impact switching power supplies have in audible frequencies I haven't used a scope, but I have had some laughs plugging things into the same circuit as high gain guitar equipment. Yes please, let's amplify those audible frequencies to audible levels. A good PSU goes a long way.
  - chaboud 4y ago
    By the way, if you are ever tempted to measure AC with an oscilloscope, please use differential probes to reduce the risk of damage/electrocution. It is very easy to create a pretty significant voltage potential across your probe and reference when poking around with high voltage.
switchbak 4y ago
I've heard the following mind numbing phrase used by one person to describe their vinyl music listening experience: "uninterrupted magnetic chain" (ie: from the production all the way to their speakers). The absolute lack of understanding of: electrical engineering, acoustics and signal processing is on full display with these folks. To me it really highlights the difference of those who seek to understand deeply, and those who interact with the world only in superficial and aesthetic ways. The latter really want to depend on the "magic" within the machine, and can get upset if you try to shed light on how these things really work.
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  The thing is, some original Vinyl recordings really do sound better than recent heavily compressed "remasters" on CD. Perhaps this person just doesn't know how to explain why the Vinyl sounds better when all the techies say CD is superior (e.g. higher dynamic range, in theory).
  - harvey9 4y ago
    'i can hear a difference' is much more honest and plausible than making up a technical sounding phrase to pass for explanation.
Night_Thastus 4y ago
I know this sounds stupid, but I actually had something like this happen to me. It was due to the cable. My PC is very electrically noisy on account of the GPU. This noise was coming out of all the ports, including the Ethernet port. It was making it through that port, by CAT-6 cable, to my switch. The switch then sent it to my Raspberry Pi I was using as a streamer, then into my DAC, amplifier and finally speakers. You could hear it, it was loud when a game started up. The solution - swap out the CAT-6 with CAT-5 cable which doesn't connect the ground planes. Instantly solved.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  I have a computer that will sometimes crash hard, frozen screen and mouse, awful static on the speakers and, interestingly, something coming over the ethernet port too. This interference goes up to the next device on the line, my network switch, and brings that to its knees too. Nothing can move through the switch while that computer is having a seizure. I can disconnect the wire at the switch and the network comes back to life within a minute. I'm considering putting a sacrificial switch from my junk box inline to that one computer so maybe the rest of the network can survive its crashes.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    That is probably the nic in said machine still being alive and unable to pass any received frames up to the os. When its buffer runs full, it starts spamming pause frames, which dumber switches just blast out every port effectively paralyzing the whole network segment. You could verify this by running Wireshark on another machine, or try disable sending pause frames on the machine before it crashes via eg ethtool
    - darkwater 4y ago
      Mmmmh interesting. In my case just a few weeks ago I had an AP that went bananas, and was directly connected via ethernet to a RPi4, and made the Raspbian kernel panic on the Broadcom driver, randomly. Not long after the AP stopped working completely.
RicDan 4y ago
Whilst I agree on it, this is partially true. shielded cables can create current flows between switches, have seen it previously, and had to fix it as it was inducing problems on the traffic over that cable
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ao7bei3s 4y ago
To be fair, there's Ethernet switches with AVB support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging AVB is a set of IEEE standardized 802.1 extensions that provide better control over bandwidth and latency. This is important when you're playing multiple audio and/or video streams to multiple endpoints connected at different points in the network and they need to be low latency and still kept synchronized. I've seen professional switches from a large vendor where the AVB license cost as much as the rest of the switch.
siffland 4y ago
I hate the network switch debate. Most center around noise shaping the sound. It is a one or zero, it will checksum and TCP either gives the correct packet or drops it. Also I do not know many audio streamers that do not buffer since TCP works way faster than a song can play. Plenty of time to make sure the packets are correct. I have no idea why the audiophile network switches irritates me the most. At least with audio cables I guess you can do measurements that show the signal is cleaner, even though there is zero chance of you hearing a difference most of the time (I just make sure cables have good shielding and if the cable has to be seen it better look cool too, haha). Ya know there are even audiophile USB cables.......not a joke google it.
- pelorat 4y ago
  Both USB and Bluetooth use a connectionless protocol without any retransmit for real-time audio.
trelliscoded 4y ago
I know these products sound stupid, but Ethernet can insert a DC bias and repeat AC-coupled noise from other sources. This includes its own PSU. There are industrial Ethernet products that specifically address both these problems, because in a factory environment, both phenomenon can have practical consequences when there's motors and power electronics throwing around big magnetic fields. I imagine being near speakers with big drivers can also cause some of the same problems that would never be found in a typical desktop or datacenter computing environment.
- eru 4y ago
  Just use wifi?
- darkwater 4y ago
  But that would trigger error correction, not degrade the sheer quality like it would happen with analogical signals. Ok, if there are enough errors it would make the playback problematic, but it would be the same for any kind of data transmitted.
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    I think they're saying that the noise from the Ethernet circuit will leak into the analog speaker connection.
    - trelliscoded 4y ago
      Yes.
      - darkwater 4y ago
        Ok, then I misunderstood the big speakers magnetic field issue, sorry. I thought it was the big speaker interfering with the switch, and not the other way round.
ZiiS 4y ago
As with everything we cannot deal in absolutes. Whilst I in no way want to defend ripof garbage like the linked product you should consider Ethernet for live streaming. TCP correction can very much be audible and UDP is often used.
- rhinoceraptor 4y ago
  If your ethernet switch needs snake oil on your home network to sound good, I have bad news about your ISP, your cable modem, your ISP's transit provider, and your audio streaming app's data center connection.
  - ZiiS 4y ago
    I am not talking about snake oil. I am saying _LOTS_ of (most?) networks are installed with AliExpress wall sockets etc. and tested by loading google.com once. If you want trouble free audio streaming it is worth checking the network.
    - aforwardslash 4y ago
      That actually sounds a lot like snake oil. Electrical noise from outlets is irrelevant for digital package relay. Your big ass tv switches 100x more data each frame flawlessly, identifying way more channels than traditional 2-way signaling; when was the last time you heard someone saying "I bought a true filter for my wall socket and my led tv gives me better colors"? Is that level of stupid we're talking about.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  How can it be audible on TCP when TLS doesn’t break on the same network equipment? Or when you can read documents without typos or parsing errors. UDP is another story and it’s normal to hear things.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago
jnsaff2 4y ago
Yea, linus did a roast of one of those that was just rebadged COTS switch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQ3YvR3Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQ3YvR3Eo

mister_tee 4y ago

And to go with that you can use $500 ethernet cables, with directional arrows painted on. ACK, and that's not talking about TCP (sorry). https://www.wired.com/2008/06/snake-oil-alert/ https://www.wired.com/2008/06/snake-oil-alert/ (unfortunately this was from Denon who I've had great luck with an entry-ish-level AVR from for years)

The_SamminAter 4y ago
https://archive.is/k3Miw https://archive.is/k3Miw

outworlder 4y ago

> Never mind the fact that two devices connected with RJ45 ethernet have no direct electrical connection > For the low, low price of $3800, you can be the proud owner of an audiophile grade, 100Base-T network switch That buys you a seriously good piece of switching gear with 10GBe (or even higher) fiber optic links to whatever devices you could possibly want in a home. Heck, even a little over $100 buys you a switch with 4 SFP+ (Mikrotik CRS305). I guess audiophiles will claim that the optical transceivers introduce latency and _they can hear it_

acje 4y ago
The absolute pain when the entire song is delayed by 10ns or what not. If only I could compensate by pushing play a little bit faster.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  The issue is not constant latency, but jitter i.e. latency is changing between bits
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Jitter matters in very specific cases in very specific pieces of equipment. Jitter on the Ethernet transferring the file will have no effect.
  - whstl 4y ago
    Like the sibling poster said, this won't cause jitter. The audio isn't played directly from the ethernet packets. It has to be decompressed, decoded, buffered. In the end of it all the audio goes into a ring buffer and it is played very precisely by the sound card. The playback itself is a hard-real-time process that needs time guarantees. Failure to fill the ring buffer by any reason can cause audible skips, but not jitter. But most players in practice will simply stop the playback.
  - pezezin 4y ago
    The maximum jitter allowed by the IEEE specifications is 1.4 ns for 100-megabit Ethernet and 300 ps for Gigabit Ethernet. The bit time for a 48 kHz audio signal is ~20 000 ns. It is absolutely impossible that you can hear the Ethernet jitter.

m463 4y ago

The thing is, there's this plausibility factor that makes it hard to filter out BS You could 100% design a network switch to be good for audio. - ensure periodic packets like say arp don't introduce jitter - do qos on audio streams vs other data - favor latency over throughput - maybe tune things like MSS to keep packet sizes smaller, but no fragmentation etc..

ChymeraXYZ 4y ago
Yeah, no because "streaming" is just transferring a chunks that can then be played. You are not sending bits from the network card straight to the audio out. Even if you have a certain % packet loss, there is 0 impact on the playback as long as the next chunk arrives before the previous one has finished.
- m463 4y ago
  You know, streaming isn't really just getting bits across the wire intact. For one thing, timing is important. A simple example would be getting video in sync with audio. You could go deeper and manage timing for speakers side to side or front to back. It would get lots harder if a microphone was introduced - then latency would be a big big deal. These sorts of things are probably why bluetooth isn't used as much with a/v systems. (lol, here I am arguing the merits of an audiophile network switch)
  - com2kid 4y ago
    > For one thing, timing is important. So long as the amount of audio sent in a packet is larger than how long it takes the next packet to get there, you'll be transfering audio data faster than it is playing, making minor fluctuations in timing between packets irrelevant. Bluetooth isn't used because BT audio transmission is lossy, audio gets recompressed. Newer BT standards have good quality compression, but you are still recompressing the audio. BT isn't meant to be a high bandwidth protocol. BT's latency around audio is because 99% of BT implementations suck. Latency can be as low as 50ms or so, but it is often in the 100s or even 200s of ms.

chaboud 4y ago

It looks like the big spend (besides avoiding Gigabit being a feature… wow) is the power supply being linear. Having taken scopes to power lines in homes, I can grudgingly attest to the non-zero impact switching power supplies have in audible frequencies. But it’s comically small and solvable much more easily than spending this kind of coin. I was expecting an AVB switch with locking connectors and redundant power. You know, like a pro audio mission-critical device. Instead it’s basically like using stacks of hundreds to vibration insulate your CD player. It might technically improve things, but the return on investment is poor.

doubled112 4y ago
> having taken scopes to power lines in homes, I can grudgingly attest to the non-zero impact switching power supplies have in audible frequencies I haven't used a scope, but I have had some laughs plugging things into the same circuit as high gain guitar equipment. Yes please, let's amplify those audible frequencies to audible levels. A good PSU goes a long way.
- chaboud 4y ago
  By the way, if you are ever tempted to measure AC with an oscilloscope, please use differential probes to reduce the risk of damage/electrocution. It is very easy to create a pretty significant voltage potential across your probe and reference when poking around with high voltage.

switchbak 4y ago

I've heard the following mind numbing phrase used by one person to describe their vinyl music listening experience: "uninterrupted magnetic chain" (ie: from the production all the way to their speakers). The absolute lack of understanding of: electrical engineering, acoustics and signal processing is on full display with these folks. To me it really highlights the difference of those who seek to understand deeply, and those who interact with the world only in superficial and aesthetic ways. The latter really want to depend on the "magic" within the machine, and can get upset if you try to shed light on how these things really work.

grumpyprole 4y ago
The thing is, some original Vinyl recordings really do sound better than recent heavily compressed "remasters" on CD. Perhaps this person just doesn't know how to explain why the Vinyl sounds better when all the techies say CD is superior (e.g. higher dynamic range, in theory).
- harvey9 4y ago
  'i can hear a difference' is much more honest and plausible than making up a technical sounding phrase to pass for explanation.

Night_Thastus 4y ago

I know this sounds stupid, but I actually had something like this happen to me. It was due to the cable. My PC is very electrically noisy on account of the GPU. This noise was coming out of all the ports, including the Ethernet port. It was making it through that port, by CAT-6 cable, to my switch. The switch then sent it to my Raspberry Pi I was using as a streamer, then into my DAC, amplifier and finally speakers. You could hear it, it was loud when a game started up. The solution - swap out the CAT-6 with CAT-5 cable which doesn't connect the ground planes. Instantly solved.

Fatnino 4y ago
I have a computer that will sometimes crash hard, frozen screen and mouse, awful static on the speakers and, interestingly, something coming over the ethernet port too. This interference goes up to the next device on the line, my network switch, and brings that to its knees too. Nothing can move through the switch while that computer is having a seizure. I can disconnect the wire at the switch and the network comes back to life within a minute. I'm considering putting a sacrificial switch from my junk box inline to that one computer so maybe the rest of the network can survive its crashes.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  That is probably the nic in said machine still being alive and unable to pass any received frames up to the os. When its buffer runs full, it starts spamming pause frames, which dumber switches just blast out every port effectively paralyzing the whole network segment. You could verify this by running Wireshark on another machine, or try disable sending pause frames on the machine before it crashes via eg ethtool
  - darkwater 4y ago
    Mmmmh interesting. In my case just a few weeks ago I had an AP that went bananas, and was directly connected via ethernet to a RPi4, and made the Raspbian kernel panic on the Broadcom driver, randomly. Not long after the AP stopped working completely.

RicDan 4y ago

Whilst I agree on it, this is partially true. shielded cables can create current flows between switches, have seen it previously, and had to fix it as it was inducing problems on the traffic over that cable

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Ao7bei3s 4y ago

To be fair, there's Ethernet switches with AVB support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging AVB is a set of IEEE standardized 802.1 extensions that provide better control over bandwidth and latency. This is important when you're playing multiple audio and/or video streams to multiple endpoints connected at different points in the network and they need to be low latency and still kept synchronized. I've seen professional switches from a large vendor where the AVB license cost as much as the rest of the switch.

siffland 4y ago

I hate the network switch debate. Most center around noise shaping the sound. It is a one or zero, it will checksum and TCP either gives the correct packet or drops it. Also I do not know many audio streamers that do not buffer since TCP works way faster than a song can play. Plenty of time to make sure the packets are correct. I have no idea why the audiophile network switches irritates me the most. At least with audio cables I guess you can do measurements that show the signal is cleaner, even though there is zero chance of you hearing a difference most of the time (I just make sure cables have good shielding and if the cable has to be seen it better look cool too, haha). Ya know there are even audiophile USB cables.......not a joke google it.

pelorat 4y ago
Both USB and Bluetooth use a connectionless protocol without any retransmit for real-time audio.

trelliscoded 4y ago

I know these products sound stupid, but Ethernet can insert a DC bias and repeat AC-coupled noise from other sources. This includes its own PSU. There are industrial Ethernet products that specifically address both these problems, because in a factory environment, both phenomenon can have practical consequences when there's motors and power electronics throwing around big magnetic fields. I imagine being near speakers with big drivers can also cause some of the same problems that would never be found in a typical desktop or datacenter computing environment.

eru 4y ago
Just use wifi?
darkwater 4y ago
But that would trigger error correction, not degrade the sheer quality like it would happen with analogical signals. Ok, if there are enough errors it would make the playback problematic, but it would be the same for any kind of data transmitted.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  I think they're saying that the noise from the Ethernet circuit will leak into the analog speaker connection.
  - trelliscoded 4y ago
    Yes.
    - darkwater 4y ago
      Ok, then I misunderstood the big speakers magnetic field issue, sorry. I thought it was the big speaker interfering with the switch, and not the other way round.

ZiiS 4y ago

As with everything we cannot deal in absolutes. Whilst I in no way want to defend ripof garbage like the linked product you should consider Ethernet for live streaming. TCP correction can very much be audible and UDP is often used.

rhinoceraptor 4y ago
If your ethernet switch needs snake oil on your home network to sound good, I have bad news about your ISP, your cable modem, your ISP's transit provider, and your audio streaming app's data center connection.
- ZiiS 4y ago
  I am not talking about snake oil. I am saying _LOTS_ of (most?) networks are installed with AliExpress wall sockets etc. and tested by loading google.com once. If you want trouble free audio streaming it is worth checking the network.
  - aforwardslash 4y ago
    That actually sounds a lot like snake oil. Electrical noise from outlets is irrelevant for digital package relay. Your big ass tv switches 100x more data each frame flawlessly, identifying way more channels than traditional 2-way signaling; when was the last time you heard someone saying "I bought a true filter for my wall socket and my led tv gives me better colors"? Is that level of stupid we're talking about.
speedgoose 4y ago
How can it be audible on TCP when TLS doesn’t break on the same network equipment? Or when you can read documents without typos or parsing errors. UDP is another story and it’s normal to hear things.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago

jnsaff2 4y ago

Yea, linus did a roast of one of those that was just rebadged COTS switch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQ3YvR3Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQ3YvR3Eo