I suspect the post from "jasond" was in response to my own deliberately blank post, not to you... fair cop, I do indeed tend towards a Reiki Audio switch!
https://www.synergisticresearch.com/digital/ethernet-switch-uef-mk2/ Can try before purchase. Not quite 50% the price of those. Not saying it is the best. The Grimm MU2 streamer/DAC is known to be fairly immune to upstream noise, so perhaps just needs a bit of help. My UEF is version 1. It is sensitive to power cords. Not sure about the MK2.
www.whatsbestforum.com
Great! Maybe they try to achive the same in different ways. Apparently the EAhibrid is built into a solid, CNC‑machined aluminum enclosure with multi‑layer shielding, also multiple shielding layers for the ethernet cables. The case even ties into the design’s ‘star‑grounding approach’ for less noise and they talk about ‘analogue, warm sound,’ which may just be a translation quirk; think natural and flowing rather than colored (just read on).
I'm not sure why you say "surprisingly". Analogue, warm and flowing are meaningless in ethernet; all a device can do in this domain is let more or less of the noise coming in go out. It's either marketing or as you say a translation quirk. Your earlier "designed purely to block/attenuate noise riding on Ethernet cabling" is spot on.
You are absolutely on point!
Designing a filter that has no unintended consequences is very difficult to do. Downstream devices can react to filters in ways that are detrimental to sound quality. Such as what your friend described. The tricky part with them is that they might sound great at first. It can take later pulling them to hear the harm they were doing.
and it can get tricky later if one adds another cable, tweak, etc. It is all one large circuit and sometimes one variable needs to be removed after a variable is added. Over time, we get to know our setup and what might cause which sound signatures. That may give us an indication of which piece to remove to verify our assumption.
You made an excellent point. I will just add that a well designed filter can work across more systems without the need to perform this balancing act to the same degree that as one would with a filter that wasn’t as well designed. A great example of a well designed filter is the NR filter found in Shunyata’s noise reducing power cords. They claim that their latest generation “is more compatible across a broader spectrum of electronic component types” and I suspect that’s true because it was even true of their previous generation, which I’ve used in both my systems. They been at this for years and that’s part of the reason that I wrote above that ‘designing a filter that has no unintended consequences is very difficult to do.’ Their much earlier filters were no way as good.
Fair point and I agree the mechanism is noise reduction, not some kind of tonal “tuning” of Ethernet packets. My “surprising” comment wasn’t about expecting that, but more that the manufacturer uses terms like analogue/warm/flowing, and I thought Beekhuyzen might echo that. Instead he described it as very clear and transparent, which stood out to me. For my own part, I see those analogue-like descriptors more as shorthand for how lower noise can sound in listening terms.
Switches come from all over the world, and marketing language often misses the mark (lots gets lost in translation). Same here in the thread. So best is: read, read, and above all, listen for yourself before judging, like you do!
Agreed. The Shunyata products have matured greatly as the designer continues his experiments.
Oh wow, where can I read up on that? Been looking to get a Muon Pro. Perhaps I should wait
It was obviously very long in the making and they invested a lot of time into the new model to make it a new long time milestone again. Maybe you contact NA directly about more details.
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