Ethernet Cables in for evaluation

Wow. This thread continues!

Seriously guys... Despite the little details here and there with ethernet noise level and timing irregularities with digital transmission which can be resolved depending on the quality of the DAC, the bottom line is that these days, digital communications work well and unless one were to have a truly terrible DAC, "bits are bits". To claim that one needs better ethernet cables or USB cables, or weird "noise filters" is IMO an admission that whoever designed the streamer or DAC did such a horrible job that they let noise through at high levels or used such poor quality oscillators as to produce awful temporal performance!

For reference with graphs of noise, discussions of jitter, drift, and even some samples to listen to, here's my blog post for this week for those who want to think more about this and try things out themselves...

MUSINGS / DEMO: Why "Bits Are Bits". Let's not add unnecessary fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

IMO, there really is unfortunately much BS in the audiophile press and across the internet that simply does not jive with empirical reality. I believe the miseducation is intentional and generally promoted by those who have something to sell.

 

Multicast service discovery protocols used in distributed software systems use UDP, or at least I assume they still do.

 

Yes, but never stream music via wifi before conditioning your listening environment...



Expensive? Yes, but so worth it...

Not convinced? Here’s the proof!

 

I'm running Roon through wifi, from Core to Endpoint that is - the Core is cabled directly to the router. I tried to make a cabled connection from the Endpoint to the Core but that didn't work. Constant dropouts. I think it was about 4-5 months ago, so they probably had shifted away from UDP at that point? The cable was a long run of old Ethernet cable but I can stream video through it without problems. So in whichever way Roon sends data from Core to Endpoint, it doesn't seem to be a very robust method.

 

I'd say they ditched UDP years ago - possibly even before I began using it, my anecdote could be correct.

Your case seems interesting though. I can really only speculate, but my questions would be in the direction of how old your switches/cables are, what else is connected, etc. In my case, I actually use old and cheap powerline ethernet adapters to connect my main endpoint to the server, and it works without a hitch even with large DSD files. Of course, as a general rule, if WiFi doesn't introduce any problems then it's the best solution.

 

I believe some still do, or use it alongside TCP, but I'm not aware of anything that is actually transmitting non trivial amounts of data using UDP - it's probably great for a quick handshake though.

 

That's the beauty of UDP, using it for small connectionless packets to transmit metadata for service discovery.

 

That's the truth of it all

 

I don’t have anything to sell. I try to stay out of the conversations, but I get frustrated seeing people not using science or logic correctly. When I try to teach it usually gets shouted down, but I still remain hopeful that someday people will either understand physics, electronics, and the scientific method, or that they accept they don’t understand it. These threads have gotten deleted in the past so it’s hard to justify to myself putting the time in to really elaborate a lot on how op-amps and transistors work, much less about real world dielectrics and shields or Maxwell’s equations.

 

Is that a can of THC?

 

one place where I still run into UDP are long distance high speed transmission systems- Like IBM's Aspera service . . . or, something like this to speed up rsync: LabAdvComp/UDR
In this use case UDP makes sense because no matter how much bandwidth you have the time taken to send TCP ack packets over great distances can really slow down large transfers . . .and the software handling the transfers does the error checking itself. We used Aspera at Lucasfilm (at the time (2012-ish) aspera was the de facto standard used by the broadcast industry to transmit digital data from the studios to the networks for broadcast. i.e. that's how lucas was getting the Clone Wars animated episodes to the Cartoon Network) . . . .and I also used UDR with rsync at genentech quite a bit. worked really well to get data from SSF to madrid or shanghai.

 

Knowing current tendency in audio to move back to retro technologies (I am guilty as well) I wonder if ARCNET will stage comeback. Some reviewer will just write that soundstage became so much deeper, with liquid mids and tightest bass... and off we go!

 

I emailed Audioquest about the prospects of silver plated token ring cables, but they never responded. I've already given up on Roon for Netware.

 

My comment won’t sway any opinions (nor am I trying to) but I do notice a difference in USB cables in my setup. I was a skeptic and didn’t believe it would make a difference but when I went from the cheapest Wireworld cable to a Mapleshade usb cable there was a noticeable difference. I would not have believed this without hearing it in my system.

I don’t understand why the naysayers go to great lengths to try to convince someone that what they are hearing is not real. These threads have the tone of a die-hard liberal trying to persuade a Trump supporter or vice-versa.

 

This may sound like a trivial distinction, but I don't tell people they don't hear what they say they hear. I tell people the explanation they present for why they claim to hear this is incorrect. I don't bat an eyelid at a person who says a network cable made a difference. But if a person says that a network cable is reducing jitter, a demonstrably false statement, I point out that this is a demonstrably false statement. Because this is how misinformation gets spread.

But as I said earlier, I have no qualms with the folks who present it like "I have no idea why I would hear a difference from a network cable, but I swear I do!". Right up until they feel a need to add the "....and if you can't, you must be deaf!" which is becoming more and more commonplace here.

 

I don't think anyone is saying that. Psychoacoustics and the placebo effect are very much a real thing. So, in your mind you are hearing a real difference -- just not one that the cable itself is actually making.

After all, at the end of many clinical drug trials where some portion of the people testing it were given placebo pills instead of the actual drug, a few of the people who are told they were taking placebo instead of the actual drug and nonetheless experienced beneficial results elect to knowingly continue taking placebo pills, because they are convinced that it must be doing something good for them, regardless of what the scientists and pharmacists say.

 

Audio over USB is a different animal that does not include error checking. Which I think is stupid considering USB3, or better, has been around for almost a decade and runs plenty fast enough to include error checking while still getting the data to the DAC on time with minimal latency.

However a USB cord in spec should not have many bit errors over the course of a day because it is a mature technology.

Sometimes I think the DAC manufacturers are in cahoots with the cable sellers.

 

Once I wondered why USB doesn't include error checking. Then I looked into how USB works, and concluded that wouldn't possibly require error correction in the first place.

 

As if there ever was scientific evidence of "sweeter mids" and "liquid highs" )) The hobby forums are the last place to look for reason or even common sense. I'm saying this as amateur audiophile, motorcyclist and photographer!

 

I blame digital for all this.
People want to fiddle around, but digital gives you very little to play with. Yeh, there some filters, oversampling, DSD, whatever - but the difference they produce is minute, especially if compared with record playing, where even type of cleaning liquid for your records actually makes audible difference.
So now we have audiophile switches and audiophile ethernet wires, along with audiophile SCSI cable (they do exist, and pricey) and discussions how much more smooth and analog is sound produced by Western Digital HDs vs Seagate (I have seen those discussions).
And as @Rolltide said, it is all OK as long as people who do not believe in this are not called deaf.

 

For what its worth, my Audio Note UK 2.1x Sig DAC measures very poorly, but sounds better to me than other DAC's I've had that measure great. How's that for common sense!

 

"Measures very poorly, but sounds better to me" is the exact opposite of common sense - it's personal and irrational (neither of which is a bad thing for a hobby, mind you) ))

 

How is the power transmitted through the Usb cable isolated from the data? Are there any differences between cables? It might be important if the dac is Usb powered.

 

Off topic, which was the point of the post you replied to. Audio over USB and ethernet do not operate the same. That was the crux of my post. So bringing up USB is a different topic because it doesn't do error checking and operates in real time. Where ethernet sends packets in advance and error checks them. It is faster than audio over USB so it can resend the packet if it finds an error and you won't even know it happened.
Which also lead to my complaint that audio over USB is stuck in USB2 when it could have gone to USB3 five years ago or more, and included error checking while transmitting via packets like ethernet. Cable problems solved.

None the less, if your USB cable is filtering then it is probably out of spec and not something I want. If there is something to be filtered, fix it upstream of the cable, or downstream with a better DAC, which sadly would probably be cheaper than a boutique cable.

You can't make the association that USB cable A sounds better than B, therefore ethernet cables must also have a sound. It is broken logic.

 

It's not irrational when it comes to THD. Harmonics are naturally occurring and are what give instruments their voice. You can end up with seemingly high THD but it may be a very pleasing sound. The challenge of an amplifier is to reduce added harmonics while preserving naturally occurring ones. This perfect balance can't be represented in a simple measurement that doesn't differentiate added harmonics from naturally occurring ones in an aggregated measurement such as THD. But yes, in many cases measurements certainly do matter!