English Electric 8Switch

It also dawned on me that I’ve been using a DRAYtek for the past 6 months - perhaps that’s that the deference for me. I’m open minded so my local dealer as promised me a play with the EE, so lets see.

Good luck I hope it brings improvements.
Positioning as close to your streamer is the key, hence the rather short supplied ethernet cable I’m guessing. My dealer didn’t seem to think the cable the other end ie your existing ethernet cable was as important if considering upgrading at some point.

I’d love my dealer to give me one of his to play with over Christmas but I don’t think he’ll play ball!

Mine had eight in stock and although I asked for his demo unit a new one arrived, he was pretty confident :smirk:

He owes me a favour as he just upgraded the bearing in the LP12!

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Mine arrived this morning fhaving been ordered yesterday and all for the princely sum of 385.00 so worth a go. All seems to be connected and working. The only bus over my old mains unit is that it’s around 60% smaller so that’s a plus in itself. Time for a play.

Bargain price! How come you got it so cheap?

Two fairly obvious on eBay and one other full price. All genuine retail sellers - mine said make an offer so I tried 375 and we agreed on 385 with postage offered. I paid yesterday and it arrived at 0900 this morning. Very good indeed. Brand new unit, sealed so no an old demo unit.

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Just ordered am EE8 which will replace a CISCO 2960G.

I’m currently running an ethernet cable from the router into the Cisco which then feeds my Innuos Zenith, Apple TV, TV and PS5.

When the EE8 arrives, is there any benefit to keeping the CISCO for the non hifi gear and using the EE8 (via the Cisco) for just the hifi?

So…
Router>Cisco>EE8>Zenith

I use my router to connect non-hifi gear (Sky Box, MacBook Pro), my Cisco 2960 for UnitiServe and NAS and EtherRegen (from Cisco 2960) solely to connect to my ND555.

I have no idea if this is optimal in SQ terms, and there are too many permutations to experiment, but it seems a logical way of isolating as much as possible the streamer from the noisier devices.

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Started with router > cisco (upstairs) > nova & router > innuos (downstairs); added EE8 into the equation: router > EE8 > cisco > nova: no/little improvement vs router > cisco > EE8 > nova: major sq improvement.
Replaced cisco with an ER (with innuos @B-side) and another audible improvement (less than EE8 > nova, but even sq of the tv connected to the EE8 improved surprisingly). did not experiment EE8 <-> ER. Both EE8 and ER also connect to ifi powered 4k setup boxes: improved vq compared to stb’s connected to the router directly.

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Thanks for the input guys, appreciated.
The EE8 on its own would be better from a cable/space perspective, but I’ve got the space for both.

I’ll experiment when it arrives on Monday.

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Please explain this. What improved exactly, what are watching, streaming or cable/satellite?

streaming interactive tv, vq improvement noticeable in sharper channel logo’s and subtitles for the non 4k channels.

Hi Nigel,
What is the specific model of the Cisco Catalyst 2690?
From browsing their site there are dozens of variations for this model …

Forgot to mention this in yesterdays post but does anyone with a CISCO have an issue like mine where it takes about a minute for a device to connect online. For example I’ll turn on my TV and try to access Netflix but it’ll say I’m not online. If I wait a minute then it’ll connect.
It’s totally a first world problem thing but I thought I’d raise it in case it can be resolved.

My CISCO is a 2960G-8TC-L v02

@Simon-in-Suffolk maybe this is something you can help with?

Yes that is by design - remember you are using a commercial/industrial grade device not a basic consumer device. It is the network loop detection activating - in commercial setups a network loop can cause a complete network outage and so is very much guarded against.

You can disable the protection but you need to configure the switch by logging in and configuring the run time configuration - and enable the ports as Fastports - this turns off the loop detection.

To log in and configure the switch is not really easy to explain on this forum - but there are plenty of Cisco guides showing you what to do - look up Configuring a Cisco 2960 and Cisco 2960 Fastport on your favourite search engine

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Rather than the complication of configuring the Cisco, @anon5056134 could simply plug the ethernet cables from his Apple TV, TV and PS5 into his router and bypass the Cisco for these devices. This is what I do.

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The Cisco 2960 I have retained in service (I have two) is from the PD series with the separate brick SMPS, namely the WS-C2960-8TT-L V03. I like the idea of the external SMPS rather than the 2960s with the internal power supply.

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I see, that explain’s why I never had this issue with the cheap TP Link switch I used previously.

Thanks Simon, much appreciated.