When I hear about these network experiments, I'm always curious why they would make a difference. Can anyone who understands this stuff propose explanations for:
-- Why would two M12's have a significant net sq improvement over one? And if going from one to two makes a large difference, as Bob reports, wouldn't it make sense to try 3,4,5 to see where it stops? (maybe when Bob's ears burst into flames?)
-- Given that, as I understand and have experienced, the EtherRegen doesn't bring anything special to a setup with the Extreme because of the 100 MBS speed, why would adding an eR into the M12 parade have any theoretical benefit?
In terms of hi-fi reproduction there’s a fundamental difference between analog and digital. In analog you start with the recording and everything that happens downstream, be it addition (of noise) or loss (of detail or resolution) cannot be distinguished from the original signal and is therefore played along with the signal. So if you start with the original performance at 100%, you lose detail and resolution and add noise at each step of the way to the final replay, so you start with 100% and maybe end up with say 50%. All you can do by upgrading your system is to minimize losses in components and cables so instead of 50% you get say 60%. Digital is different. While the actual signal is analog (voltages) the signal’s format is digital...so anything that’s added in the analog domain can be adjusted or removed, as long as the digital format is preserved.
Along the digital audio chain, analog HF noise may be introduced and timing errors (jitter) may occur that cause phase noise but as long as the digital format is preserved, we can add boxes in the chain to ‘recondition’ the analog side of the digital signal. Noise can be differentiated and removed, signals can be resynthesised and jitter and phase noise removed etc. What this means is that losses through things like digital streaming can be rectified and noise through RFI and EMI removed to ensure that the analog building blocks of the digital format are close to perfect. Remember that when a digital signal arrives at a switch its in fact a digitally formatted analog signal, the analog piece including noise and timing inaccuracies picked up along its journey. The switch uses the digital format of that signal to modulate the switch’s DC supply to construct a fresh analog signal following the same digital format. The cleaner the signal arriving at the switch, the more accurately it can modulate the DC into a new signal. When you cascade switches, all you’re doing is essentially passing the next switch a cleaner template to use in its synthesis.
So essentially the difference between analog and digital is that in analog, you can minimize downstream losses, whereas in digital you correct many upstream losses as well as minimising AND further correcting downstream losses.
The conclusion I would reach from the above is that its very likely indeed that excellent digital will end up outperforming excellent analog based entirely on our ability to correct faults and restore perfection from both upstream and downstream signals