$2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles from Cash
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
There's a certain ingrained assumption that the customers for these products are all "rich idiots," and many of them may well fit that archetype, but even so, the line between "can hear the difference between ethernet switches" and "affected by proximity to batteries" feels uncomfortably fuzzy to me.
I don't think that is their market. Their market is elderly retired people who don't really know any better. They'll use credit cards to pay for all this and it really messes with family dynamics.
At least this is my experience.
Spending the inheritance?
Not defending it, just seems weird to decry it for taking money away from people who can't afford it, when the whole positioning is "makes audio sound better". Decry it simply for the fact it doesn't work, not that people who can't afford it spend money on it.
Meanwhile pensioners see their pensions shooting up above earnings all the time.
Are you aware of any articles or research that documents these adverse results?
https://www.synergisticresearch.com/power/accessories/galile...
Just when I think I've seen the peak of Audiophile stupidity some "entrepreneur" comes along and raises the bar yet again. This isn't even an isolated grounding system, it's just tying a piddly little ground bar to the regular electrical ground through the power cord through some B.S. filters that have no chance of doing anything even remotely useful. I'm amazed that no one involved is being prosecuted for fraud.
How is such a substantial chunk of people delusional enough to fall for all this HiFi garbage? It's like finding someone in their 40s who still believes Santa Claus is real. No, your analog Rube Goldberg sound system does not sound better than a half-decent DAC playing an MP3 on $30 headphones, you're just incapable of rational thought.
When I make a song, I spend a lot of time listening for specific, subtle changes. Like I might be adjusting the EQ of a rhythm guitar in a mix by a couple dB, and trying to balance it with the hi hats. Making those kinds of decisions in a full mix, you'll notice lots of deficiencies in headphones that are supposedly high-quality reference headphones.
If you look at measured frequency response for headphones, even high end headphones, you'll see that the frequency response curves can really be all over the place. That's not even considering transient response (where you'd want to look at a waterfall graph).
IMO, headphone amps and DACs are where the real marketing woo is.
40 is also not so old, when you are talking about hearing acuity.
Meanwhile, you can see from frequency response curves, that high-end headphones might even be off by 5 dB in the high mids, something that should be audible even to 40-year-olds listening to Spotify over a congested network link.
Only good thing I saw there was the $350 bottle of snake oil!
https://highfidelitycables.com/products/nps-1260
“Through magnetic conduction, NPS-1260 works on a micro-level to bind the electrons in your connectors, improve their transfer of energy, and direct the current more fluidly. Put simply, NPS-1260 strengthens the chains that make your system, so you’ll have no weak links. As a result, you end up with a system that has higher clarity, less distortion, and better imaging.”
So amazing.
There is something about fluid frequencies, holographic frequencies and green frequencies. The kind of frequencies we do not hear about at school.
Together with the gold something digital transmitters of sampled signal (I think they mean HDMI) I am out.
What's next? A specially designed CPU and memory to decode "cleaner sounding bits"?
Why is it so hard to convince people that on the digital side of the equation, there's an objective right or wrong answer, and it's impossible to get any better than an exact copy of the bits?
They get all of that.
But could be bested by simply squeezing the bag with your dirty grubby hands.
Juicero is truly one of my favorite companies ever. The whole thing was a massive pile of extravagant hardware whose only reason for existence was to tell you "no, you cannot squeeze this particular bag of juice". It is the quintessential silicon valley echo chamber product. The fact that its founder went on to hawk "raw water" coming from spigots drilled into the hillsides along state highways only makes the story that much better.
The audiophile hardware on the other hand is being sold based on the promises that defy an objective physical reality.
I’m not a coffee “enthusiast” but we have a grinder at home, and I’m definitely not getting the same coffee as I did in the office when I used their grinders.
For these limited-run products, you're paying for the product development to a greater extent than you would for a product that sells in the millions. Software is very similar, someone could use Wordpress off the shelf, but they have a bunch of ideas for how their thing should be different, and so pay artisans $300 an hour to make their very own custom blog. The $1700 coffee grinder is the same effect at play.
This seems pretty subjective. iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android. Similarly, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck gets you drunk the same as a $25k Romanée-Conti.
The photo quality on the iPhone will be of objectively higher quality due to the larger, superior lenses. There's simply more light information to work with.
But yeah, homemade sugar solution and wine yeast would be your most efficient per dollar.
Replace «iPhone» with “Samsung Galaxy” and your argument stays true. It’s just that manufacturers created a market for phones with giant screens, 3+ cameras and CPUs that can fly you to Oort cloud.
Look I spent probably eight years deriding iPhones with some stupid sense of techno-superiority with my Android until I actually tried one. They are so much better holy shit, the speed of Safari alone is worth the price of admission.
A laptop can be bought by someone who says, "Ooh, Apple, new, shiny, cool," and the next person to buy the same laptop might say, "This is the objectively better device for my use case."
The most characteristic Apple customer experience is persuading themselves that they can learn to live without the feature deleted in the latest software update.
Apple might be qualitatively better than most, but I wouldn't call it quantitatively "insanely good". The product design often has major "bugs", like "you are holding it wrong" iPhone 4 or the macbook pro keyboards that stopped working a lot.
I myself had a screen replacement once on a mbp 2015 model because the "protective coating" peeled off... a known problem and Apple replaced it for free even tho I was a few months outside of my warranty.
And the power cable had a tendency to shed off the outer isolation layer and/or "fray", which is by no means a problem only I had given the many "how to fix" DIY youtube videos. Same thing with other cables, like the Lightning ones, I am told.
Cooling in the Intel macbook pros and airs also was a constant problem, and the engineering seems ridiculous at times[0].
That was the product design side... the manufacturing... not really what Apple does itself. The same manufacturers who work for Apple usually work for a lot of other companies as well. It might be that Apple insists on better quality (and maybe even pays a premium). But the iPhones I saw do not look like they had a lot better manufacturing quality than the phones I was using (I am not talking about better/more expensive components, that's a design decision).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh-TdgfSNLs
Or more recently the 2019 MBP where plugging in the charger on the left side of the machine would cause it to thermal throttle whereas the right side was fine.
- “Luxury good” is objective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_goods: “a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending” (luxury goods need not be expensive, either, especially if they only become useful in combination with other items that are expensive. Many people can afford to buy golf balls, but I think they still are luxury goods because golf clubs, club membership, and the ability to find time to play golf all are luxury goods)
- “Status symbol” is subjective, with groups of people deciding whether something is a status symbol. Status symbols need not even be expensive. Cultural or legal norms can prohibit the “don’t haves” from acquiring them (in Rome, not everybody was allowed to wear a toga, for example).
- “Overpriced” is subjective, with each individual deciding for themselves whether they think something is overpriced. Because of this, arguing whether an item _is_ overpriced is useless.
I see “overpriced” as 100% distinct from “has high profit margin” That’s objective, but a consequence of the value users see in a product (either as a functional item or as status symbol)
I don’t have the numbers, but chances are that iPhones are luxury goods. Whether they’re the other two depends on context. If you work at the Free Software Foundation, they may not be status symbols, for example.
Guess how well that phone sells?
Not very well. It sells so poorly that the manufacturer's announced they're going to stop making them. It's even from the same manufacturer but the paucity of its sales is what makes me believe a lot of people are iPhones for status symbols. I'm talking, of course, about the $400 iPhones SE (vs the iPhone 13 Pro which clocks in at $1,000). There are other differences too, but you will get made fun of, either to your face, or behind your back, for having a 'phone with a button'.
Just own up to the fact that you have a luxury phone.
You are allowed to aim a little higher than rice and beans for dinner without fear of it being called gourmet. It's been a decade since anyone cared what kind of phone you have. My four year old used iPhone with a cracked screen makes me look rich AF I'm sure.
What? We must be living in different worlds. Being made fun of is bizarre.
There’s an iPhone SE 2 as well. I have it.
Apple sells products which are, in the main, at very similar price points to its competition, and it has won because it simply. makes. better. products. I'm not sure why there is still delusional thinking about this—apparently the last 20 years have not proven the point well enough?
Must we mention monitor stands again?
Please.
[0] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi... [1] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...
Or more generally Elitism. If there is much difference between the two, anyways.
Those folks would be embarrassed to mention those rooms contained things as goofy as this. It's excessive and unreasonable.
"A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive"
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles
> pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry."
Wow, that's incredible. Mmm yes, I love digitally encoded music to be slightly thicker and resistant to... hearing?
It seems like this would be easier to sell as a line item on an already six figure home theater install (or seven figure house build), rather than individually. But I honestly have no idea.
There is a gigantic multi-trillion dollar industry built around convincing people to trade their money for shit they don't need. Advertising and marketing are diseases, and what you're looking at is a severe infection.
A/B testing audio reproduction components is extremely difficult. The human perceptual mechanism is a pattern detector, not a fine-grained measurement device — it's impossible to preserve sounds in memory long enough to make a informed distinction, all you have are the impressions the sounds left behind. You can improve with training, allowing you to recognize more patterns and thus capture better impressions, but only to an extent — recalling what something sounded like is still very lossy.
Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches.
Source: I was a mastering engineer for a couple of years, and I had to help build a good monitoring environment for the studio. It was hard.
There is a very clear line separating expensive audiophile equipment that might have some hard-to-measure non-placebo benefits, and expensive audiophile equipment that cannot possibly do anything.
That line is the digital-analogic conversion. Any piece of equipment operating purely on digital information is either performing very straightforward redundancy checks and error correction, or it's snake oil. Tertium non datur.
I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.
The standard HiFi stance is that source should have no effect on DAC and vice versa, but some weird or old hardware does not do it right. Likewise DAC and amplifier shouldn't affect each other. Amplifier and transducer is a bit more complex due to analog electronics involved.
Of course the source can be garbage too (e.g. bad resampling or compression), but reasonable sources are all the same if digital. Except when we're talking vinyl or something, where there's another transducer and amplifier involved.
Part of me envies the fools, everything must be magical for them.
(The difference is that we're doing clever things with class D amplifiers to get the best sound possible out of a mobile phone, and charge a few dollars per chip. While it's technically a "specially designed CPU", really it's a proprietary DSP with the analogue front end on the same die)
A single power supply 5 port unmanaged switch though? Hilarious. Make you you get the right ethernet cables that run in the right direction
https://forums.whathifi.com/threads/directional-ethernet-cab...
Only £629 for 1.5m cable.
Only for the record the historical coat hangers test: https://web.archive.org/web/20081104211239/https://consumeri...
and a 2019 re-make:
https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathange...
/S
Some pseudo-reference, JFYI:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/154863-the-meta-sata-pataphysic...
I wonder if ADSL over wet string helps the guitar sounds really reverberate in my spotify streams.
Glass fiber, are you kidding? These are sapphire fiber. The bits flow more fluidly.
Synergistic is a flag bearer for this nonsense.
"I can't believe that a $2500 power cable can possibly produce a benefit, so I went with the $500 power cable instead."
Bingo, you just paid $490 more than necessary because the $2500 item created an aspiration in your imagination.
anchoring is used everywhere, from bleach to handbags to wine to cars and everything else.
"This wasn't a subtle improvement and yet I did a fair few Volcano on, Volcano off comparisons before I could really accept what I was hearing. In all honesty despite hearing the positive effects the Vibradome Blue star had made to my other system I was still shocked and surprised this item could make such a difference by just sitting on the amps case. Its not heavy enough to damp it and yet it was making a difference and a positive one; frankly I don't know how."
[1] http://www.audioreview.com/product/accessories/others/audio-...
In the old times, the musical signal was analog and any impairment was a degradation. Audiophiles went to great length to avoid this.
And they keep on applying this approach to the digital part of a modern system, in completely useless ways. For example, here, it seems they use a marker to prevent light to leak from the side of the CD. I guess it's a misguided way to try to increase the SNR of the laser detector while reading the disc.
What they don't get is that the digital part of the system doesn't carry a musical signal. It's information, that is used to reconstruct a musical signal at the DAC. And this information is very robust. As long as it can be reconstructed error free, SNR and the like do not matter. As long as it arrives on time at the DAC (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's easy to get the idea) any previous jitter is irrelevant.
If you're an audiophile, keep on caring about the DAC and the analog chain after it. And don't bother too much about the digital part, it's not audio it's IT!
Also would have been interesting to analyze the audio streams on an oscilloscope to see how "enhanced" (or not enhanced) they were when passed through this switch.
Instead this article just looks at a single review. I mean obviously this switch doesn't magically make audio better somehow. But demonstrating why that is would have been both entertaining and provided a good community service.
I guess somebody should fork over some cash and ship one of these to AvE, bigclive, or electroboom... at least they'd tear it down.
The trick here is that nobody is going to toss $2500 at Synergistic just to pull one apart and void the warranty to find out. Quite a clever scam.
Who knows? I'd like to know!
https://www.entreq.com/products/ground-boxes-17667704
Not only is it ridiculous, its potentially dangerous too!
> NOTE: We understand that for many, the ability of a switch to "alter" the sound defies what they know and/or understand about networks (cables, switches, protocols, etc.). With that in mind, we are not going to approve comments that attack the review or the reviewer
Which is true, the emperor has no clothes and they are paid to describe them in great detail.
I think its about feeling you have something special.
Of course now we've come full circle and records are the new best sounding thing.. I remember having to clean them and hearing pops and skips... but here we are.
but I'm old and my ears are happy with mp3s....
Professional wine tasters are like human spectrometers. They can tell you each component of the wine (aromas, sugar, alcohol, tanins, etc...), using that and their knowledge, they can identify characteristics of grapes and vineyards, process, and defects. The audio equivalent would be a sound engineer, who can listen for bad mixing, noise and distorsion. Both work with producers to improve their products.
Audiophiles have more in common with wine "connoisseurs", who have some knowledge but are sometimes influenced by marketing and the placebo effect and are mostly driven by enjoyment and sometimes social status.
The only sensible rule of audio gear “is this an upgrade in quality” testing of components upstream of speakers and headphones, is that you have to do a blind test with an A/B switch provided to the listener and ask them to decide which sounds better.
No such testing is done with this gear, so it’s impossible to support a statement about whether it’s better or worse. And the details of that test setup would be awesome reading, if they did it.
It’s probably not better, but let’s prove it. Come on, Toms.
First, Ethernet does not have a ground wire; and ground is the biggest source of electrical interference for analog audio.
Second, the Ethernet switch is a really weird place to try an address this. If this is your concern, I assume that you hold every peripheral that plugs into your computer to at least the same standards (especially almost everything else you might plug into it, as most connections attach directly to ground). You also need to deal with all of the noise that components inside your computer can generate.
If electrical interference in your analog components are a concern, you are better off spending your money closer to the analog circuit. An electrically isolated sound card with a digital input 100% solves any concern about analog noise in the rest of the system [0].
[0] Unless the noise is so bad that it interferes with the digital computation.
Or maybe I'm creative enough to consider designing gear for audiophiles.
c't magazine did one a long time ago comparing audio codecs, back then in 2000 they had the result that 256kbit/s MP3 sometimes sounded better than the original.
https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html
Unfortunately these tests are expensive to do and there is little money in unveiling that a product is not worth the money.
[1] http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/VPPD-01740.pd...
The product is complete pseudoscience, and looking at the site of the company that makes it, almost all their other stuff seems to be based on nonsense too.
EMI can be a real problem especially for things like recording electric guitars, because electric guitar pickups are basically antennas and have to be exposed to be able to pick up the strings.
So, I’m going to draw a parallel with another market which I believe is very similar, IMHO of course, and that is the Espresso market. There are grinders and machines for several $1000s and I’ve been curious if people are indeed able to tell the difference or is it just that it has become a passion/hobby for many.
My friend has a Pharos manual grinder. I’ve come over to help his wife adjust the grind several times. I bring the same beans I’ve been using that week as a reference point. I’m always shocked how much better theirs tastes - even far-out-of-optimal shots - ones that are very fast or very slow. On my machine the unpleasant overextracted flavors creep in quickly. I chalk it up to consistency of the grind - and that’s observable. You can pinch grinds up and “smear” them across a white sheet of paper to observe size, and to a lesser extent, variability.
I’m still surprised that the grinder affects the espresso more than the espresso machine.
Note: the Pharos is a beast and I don’t recommend it unless you like armwrestling as part of you coffee prep every time.
https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...
I can't imagine there are more than.... 50 audiophiles out there that would pay for something like this. Or am I wildly off?
An audiophile buys music so as to listen to their hifi equipment.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to hear the details.
With regard to AVB/TSN and specialized hardware. Would the $2500 switch from OP's article provide any benefits here?
And I assume this switch isn't doing some absolutely insane decoding of some common unencrypted audio protocols to 'improve' audio in any way.
As everyone else has already said... what an insane money-grabbing audiophile-abusing product :D
And yes, most anything from the "audiophile" world on the digital side is hokum - the entire point of digital technology is all-or-nothing error correction. At least it's easy to ignore, unlike having to sift through all the harder-to-falsify hokum in reviews when shopping for analog gear.
> And yes, most anything from the "audiophile" world on the digital side is hokum - the entire point of digital technology is all-or-nothing error correction. At least it's easy to ignore, unlike having to sift through all the harder-to-falsify hokum in reviews when shopping for analog gear.
Haha yeah, indeed! :)
can i interest you in some coathangers ive just now artisinally soldered together?
https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=l...
Honestly because in many cases the people that blow their money on this stuff are people like our parents. This stuff is a scam that sucks in good people who aren't the most financially responsible. They rack up a ton of debt on their credit cards thinking they are buying good stuff. And it screws them over and causes grief in the family.
I mean yes, everybody in the room is an adult, but the fallout from a family member who is stupidly spending their retirement money on crap like this affects everybody else.
Also power supply hum (60hz it higher for switching supplies) can induce interference in the player's output signal. I'd use a filtered power supply for any player, but not necessarily the network switch. ("Ethernet offers galvanic isolation by design. All connections are transformed coupled.")
But even then, it sounds like a huuuge stretch from my limited IT/networking experience.
The DAC clock and the source clock need to be in perfect sync or else the quality of each sample will effectively degrade.
Higher end CD transports have a "clock link" that lets you sync their data stream with an outboard DAC.
Gets harder with audiophile-level sample rates (24 bit, 192Khz).
https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/KB/BitPerfectJitter....
Remember the endpoint of all of this is a DAC which isn't generally a buffered component - so it needs to process samples in real time.
If a packet arrives from the switch a bit late, the DAC doesn't have any leeway to catch up.
Jitter makes a measurable difference, even with Ethernet switches - and you'll see those numbers touted by manufacturers (ex: https://nuprimeaudio.com/product/omnia-sw-8/?v=7516fd43adaa)
On top of that, you can synchronize the DAC clock to the clock recovered from the digital signal. For example, I routinely record data (and monitor) from an S/PDIF link. The standard way this works involves clock recovery with a PLL. That way, you only need a stable clock on the DAC--as long as the digital source remains within tolerances, it's fine. Even though S/PDIF transmits digital audio one sample at a time at a fixed rate, you don't need to worry much about jitter.
We know it works this way because you can configure the gear to use internal or external synchronization. If you try recording S/PDIF with an internal clock, you get clicks and pops.