English Electric 8Switch

MCRU might have a refund policy on the EE power supplies. Might be worth checking.

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Well, not really, the Etherregen works perfectly well with its stock power supply.

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Can you say which LPSs these are?

Naim did borrow an EE at the Bristol Show.

Keith

The stock wall wart Uptone supplies is very good, and has the ground connected in order to shunt low impedance noise (or something like that). I use one to charge my LPS 1.2, and another one just straight up to power an opticalModule. Better and much less expensive than the iFi wall warts imo.

I know this thread is on the English Electric 8Switch. I don’t run one but use the Silent Angel Bonn N8 switch (thread here). It suites my system very well. I bought it since the vast amount of Naim shops around BeNeLux use it as well. Last week, Silent Angel announced their new Silent Angel Forester F1 power supply that is designed to feed into the N8 as upgrade to the original PSU. Review is here: just use Google translate. It ships at some 400€. I bought one without auditioning and tested yesterday. What a nice surprise: separation of instruments bettered quite a bit, and there seems to be more detail. I don’t know what it is with PSU’s but they really seem to make the difference in every part of a system. Iver

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I generally like to keep things as simple as possible so I have approximately 60 foot run of standard cat-6 from my 16 port Pakedge switch In the basement directly to the ND555 in the HiFi room upstairs.
I have been following the various switch and Ethernet cables threads with some interest.
The posts on the EE switch have been generally quite positive so I ordered one and got it today.
Listened to 3 tracks I know very well without the switch and then with the switch.
I ran the long run of cat6 to the input on the EE and then short run with the provided Chord C stream Ethernet cable from output #1 furthest from the input, to the ND555.
Listened to the same 3 tracks local stream from NAS.
I honestly cannot detect any difference. Will give more time and will have a few A/B sessions.
Any suggestions? Most have noted an uplift on this thread. Am I overlooking something? Doubt it’s the Ethernet cable.

If you have a long Ethernet run from a switch straight to you ND555 , adding the switch at the end near the ND555 may not do much - most benefits seem to be where a user has a switch close to the streamer (to feed other devices) and upgrades the switch - reducing background noise. You could try putting the EE8 on the other end of the long Ethernet run - connect it to your 16 post switch with the Chord-C and run the long Ethernet cable from the EE8 direct to the ND555.

Maybe an ER is a better one?

My EE8 switch And Chord Streamline streaming cable arrived yesterday. Replaces a very cheap D-Link 5 port switch.

First you notice that EE is nicely packaged and well made with a degree of heft that mean that the cables in the back won’t tilt the switch like the D-Link.

At the moment, I have just replaced the old switch and no-name patch cords with the EE and Chord cables. From a completely unscientific standpoint, there was a noticeable improvement, mainly in lack of glare and a greater ease and flow to music. There was not a night and day difference but I don’t intend to send back the switch.

Whether the improvement is worth the money, I can not judge but in this hobby, the law of diminishing returns applies particularly strongly.

Aesthetically, the EE switch is a huge improvement. Whilst sound quality is the primary objective, I don’t want kit in the lounge room that looks like a science experiment.

I am not sure if I can be arsed to selectively change out each of the patch leads and the switch to see what differences I can hear so I won’t be able to assist with any questions on that score.

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I can only speak for the massive change in connecting it and trying out different short cables close to my NDX. Maybe your streamer is already optimized in this regard.
With it plugged in the music just comes out so effortless.

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Also experienced that EE8 was a good glare remover and it is something.

Can someone explain to me what you all mean by glare? To me glare is a visual term and I don’t understand it’s context to audio.

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For me I have always had some small echo that got totally cleaned up, and as a result music just flows better and instruments have more accuracy.
I think its easier to experience the difference at a larger extent through headphones also

How can a Naim system can make “glaring” music? I guess there must be something wrong with his music making machine to start with?

The trouble is, so many of these terms mean different things (or nothing) to different people. To me ‘glare’ seems to be synonymous with ‘shouty’ and maybe ‘forward’. The impression to me is one of unpleasantness, possibly due to exaggerated mids. But the terms may mean something quite different to people who use them!

If my HIFI system sounds unpleasant due to ‘glareness’, I would step back and ask myself why, especially I have a top of the line Naim streamer+555PS?

It is certainly possible that an improvement could identify that there hitherto had been some limitation, whether ‘glare’ or anything else (e.g ‘veiling’, lack of perfect clarity, constrained sound stage, etc), had been present though not evident until the improvement happens.

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Hi @jsaudio,

In terms of gear placement, my system is similar to yours.

All my servers, NAS, switches, etc… are placed in a network cabinet, in a dedicated room. Meaning I have 12 meters or more of cat. 6a ethernet cable between the switch and the ND555.

Ethernet Cables didn’t make much of difference it terms of sound. But I left an AQ Vodka for the last 1,5 m anyway.

But adding an EtherRegen made an enjoyable difference. I placed it like so :
Roon Server----Cisco_3560—( 5 meters fiber )— EtherRegen—ND555

I wrote my first impressions here :
–> One step forward: ER +lpsu

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Appreciate your detailed reply @Thomas.
So you have the Cisco switch in a dedicated room/cabinet to which your NAS and Roon Server are connected. You also connect your EtherRegen to the Cisco via fiber and then the last leg being the Ether Regen(in music room) to the ND555 with the AQ Vodka.
I will need to listen some more with and withoutthe EE but it is certainly not an obvious difference in SQ.
Remember I’m not replacing an existing switch in HiFi room because currently there is no switch just a straight run from basement. So this adds another piece of equipment.