That’s precisely the point I was making. They compare a £50 Cisco with a £450 ‘designed for Audio’ EE and expect the latter to be better. The EE is clearly a tarted up £30 switch whereas the Cisco is a high quality £600 thing. That doesn’t for one second suggest that the tarting up hasn’t imbued the EE with qualities that make it sound better when playing music.
It’s interesting that @GrahamInSussex is honest enough to say that he bought the EE and can’t hear a difference. All these wires and switches are nice to haves, the hundreds and thousands on the cake if you like, but hardly essential.
It’s great that you are pleased with it, but caution should be exercised by anyone considering a purchase. It’s your comment recommending that someone sticks with wireless, forgets the Cisco and only gets a switch if it’s a pukka ‘made for audio’ one that I found over the top. The latter has no magical qualities, simply bucket loads of marketing fluff. It may or may not be better. Just because a marketing bod says it’s made for audio doesn’t mean it guarantees a better listening experience.
Yep i agree. Same as the opinions here are all fluff. Try before you buy is the only sure answer for the listener. I am here to give only an opinion from my own experiences, nothing more.
But it is fair to say that the EE switch looks really nice on my rack! It might be my cloth ears but I just can’t tell the difference. I don’t doubt other people do hear a difference it is just that I am not one of them. I am incredibly happy with what I am hearing though.
I can only add the following fact to this topic. I used for many months two Cisco Catalyst 2960 switches in series. I have now discarded the two Cisco switches and only use the English Electric switch.
But there are 3 main categories of Cisco 2960 usage on this forum:
put in a 2960 and most find a small uplift in SQ.
put 2 (or even 3) 2960’s in series - maybe get a slight improvement in SQ vs 1 x 2960 - or maybe make SQ worse by having even more things plugged in, even more PSUs sending electrical noise around your circuits.
use two 2960s in a Power-over-Ethernet configuration where the first Cisco uses an external psu and the final 2960 is also fed from that one psu - in every case that I can recall, users of two PoE Ciscos find a positive uplift in SQ vs one 2960.
So the idea of ‘cascading’ 2960s in series is probably a waste of time and money and carbon and is likely to frustrate people who attempt it.
Whereas having one 2960 is a good idea - and having PoE Ciscos is an even better idea.
There is nothing wrong with cascading any switch it’s how they are designed to be used. I’ve done it as long as I can remember as I need more ports than my router supplies in my data cupboard and at each uplink point in my main rooms. I have not experienced any change whatsoever as a result.
I think it was a random comment about the production cost of the parts, which is quite different than a retail price. One only needs to look at the internals of a 555PS compared to the price to know what tarted up pricing looks like.
I was brought up in a small town with a sweet factory. They made Horner’s Dainty Dina’s Toffee.
The sweets were lovely and well made. The factory machinery was German and very efficient and reliable. Nevertheless, one day it did break down and production ground to a halt. The maintenance team were unable to resolve the fault and had to call a specialist in from Germany to fix it.
He arrived by plane and carefully inspected the machinery and pipework before asking for a 7lb club hammer. He gave the pipework three powerful bangs with the hammer and the sweet factory was back in business straight away.
The invoice clearly listed the airfare and other expenses, but the Item “Fixing the problem - £15 : 15s : 0d” (this was way back in 1946 !) caused dismay to the factory owners who demanded a more detailed breakdown !
The reply was equally brisk, but absolutely clear :-
3 x bangs with the hammer at 5s : 0d per bang …………15s : 0d
Knowing where to bang ………………………….£15 : 0s : 0d
There’s a moral in there somewhere that a few of us might like to heed ?
