Hi,
I am new to the RS130, well it is on back order. I traded my 150B plus some cash at TMR waiting on fulfillment. I am using a synology NAS and wonder if using the SSD in the RS130 will improve the sound? I have about 3.5 TB of music and now 4TB SSD around $200.
THANKS
I have three copies of my music stored on 1) Roon Core, 2) RS130 and 3) Synology NAS.
Since I play music via Roon mainly, I found 1) is slightly better than 2) and 3). But the difference is very little.
The objective answer is that a) RS130 has no sound at all whatsoever, lacking DAC, and b) if its output were affected by location of music files it would have mean that it is significantly worse design and build than some no-name toy you’d get from Temu.
Some “audiophiles” claim to hear the difference, but they also hear fuses and magic stobnes you need to set on your device “just so.”
Could also be that a power line or other poorly designed device is injecting some emi into one of the devices creating the perceived or measurable variance. Ground loops suck, every house and system varies based on setup and location. Also why sometimes simple = better and why fiber > copper. This is not audiophoolery it’s just physics. Ferrite cores can help.
Magic stones, expensive fuses, and cables are just strawman arguments.
But… you do not get ground loops with UTP copper Ethernet.
EMI, sure, is possible. With well-designed network implementation, it does not happen in realistic circumstances. And for some pretty obvious reasons, SFP module produces quite a bit of it.
Simple is usually better. Copper NIC is about as simple as it gets. Certainly easier than getting switches with fiber support and SFP modules. Fiber is certainly better than copper if you need to move data across miles of wire at multi-gig speeds. For home audio, it does not hurt anything, but also makes no difference either. Rather unsurprisingly, if you look at real professional level gear, the kinbd studios would use, like that Trinnov Nova discussed in a neighboring thread (and you’d think Trinnov does know what they are doing) they do not bother with SFP for their network audio support. If it works for professional studios (that have more EMI noise than your home is likely to ever get) it is more than good enough for your home use.
From the physical POV, they aren’t that different from SFP modules, people seriously claiming that different bgrands of fiber sound different, or that single mode is better than multi mode.
100% wrong, based on my experinece laying miles of ethernet cables across the globe.
You could do this, OR:
Ethernet cabling needs to cross power lines at 90 degrees to minimize electromagnetic interference (EMI) and inductive coupling. Here’s why:
OR, you could just use fiber!
This is all correct, when you are running hundreds of meters of enterprise networking infrastructure in an industrial environment. It does not apply when you are running some meters of cable for a home audio setup. If you are getting enough lost packets to affect playback (and the only effect is dropouts, which are quite noticeable) there is something very wrong with your setup. Sure, you could fix it with fiber, if the problem is with cables picking up interference somewhere in the first place. It just won’t improve “soundstaging” or lift any veils or do any of those things.
I do have very long cables run through the house. Some passing close to power lines. Let me pull up switch statistics… Oh, right. Zero packet errors in weeks of uptime. No difference between fiber and RJ45 ports.
Pretty much the same as when I was test running some obnoxious amounts of PoE cables across a warehouse with heavy machinery to test my video surveillance server code…
Boris does your wife put up with this attitude at home? Or are you one of those passive aggressive, all bark online, but can’t look anyone in they eyes kinda developer?
I would humbly say I think you know some stuff, but you don’t know it all, and your advice is clouded by your ASR/Amir worship. Every assumption you’ve made about me is dead wrong and your undestarding of physics and electrical engineering is clearly lacking. There is plenty of audiophoolery to go around here but not from me.
Please stop the trolling behavior as it detracts from the forum and will just get more users to silence your posts.
There is a very simple way to prove if there is any problem with an ethernet cable / switch. As every streamer has a pretty big buffer you just need to disconnect ethernet cable and listen to the difference. If there is no difference in the sound (or in the noise when listening on high volume without sound) then better cable /switch /optics / spf will make no difference too.
I have Ethernet ran under the house from my router to my audio room about 30 feet which I cannot replace with fiber. Would a Gigabit Single-Mode LC Fiber to Ethernet Media Converter / Ethernet to Fiber make any difference? Instead of connecting Ethernet to rose I would convert to Fiber.
A definite yes. It is what I am doing with an FMC converting ethernet signals from copper to fiber. The background, for one, is much darker.
None whatsoever. @Burle had posted a way to prove it above. Or switch to WiFi (no wires at all) for a bit.
We have an agreement. I don’t teach her about international relations, and she does not teach me physics.
I am soooo sorry that I had a good education in hard sciences and pretty much grew up listening to conversations about speaker design.
And that’s why, unlike some people, I do not offer Very Important advice about things I am not familiar with.
Funny, being that I even learned about its existence from here.
Sure. I can either believe that one guy with 8Gb of something (complete Diana Krall collection?) hears things that nobody had ever heard under controlled conditions. And everyone around is deaf. Or I can go with what people who design these things for a living… Tough choice!
Yeah, we need more posts about sonic differences between brands of fiber.
Do you really think that being muted by some blathering idiot like unicycle or tom turkey is something I would lose any sleep over?
Just don’t reply to him and ignore him. That’s what I did on one of my posts. When he gets tired of talking to himself, maybe he’ll stop bothering everyone.