Ethernet Cables, Switches, WiFi and all that

So you use only the Ethernet plug of your router ( box) ?

Yes, my house has ethernet cabling linked by a regular switch.

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I do not think that you got what I was saying. :wink:

I do not think that Naim recommend or suggest any network switches, but then you keep insisting that they do? My guess is that you might have mis-heard it from one of your Naim dealers?

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My Naim dealer recommends EE8 Swtch or if you have more money Phoenix Net. I believe other Naim dealers are recommending the same.

Naim don’t recommend non Naim or non Focal kit as far as I am aware.

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Thinking back to the time, I am not sure they recommended that switch, but I remember on a visit to the factory with some forum members where the question was asked and it was suggested that particular switch and similar would be suitable and from a network point of view nothing special was required to work with their system, and indeed if memory serves me right they were using a little Netgear switch in their demo suite.

It was around this time, I had found that a spare Cisco 2960 I had over a little Netgear switch I was using for the living room hifi removed RFI (intermodulation interference) issues with my NAT03 tuner, but had also accidentally discovered it had changed the sound from my NDX positively for my tastes… I investigated the causation, and also I found some UPnP servers to me sounded better than others serving exactly the same content from a NAS… I investigated the causation of that too and took some measures and traces, which I did share with Naim engineering at the time when they were developing the next gen streamers.

Many of the observations I found I was told later had been mitigated by the then new architecture, and indeed that matched my findings too with my NDX2.
(This shouldn’t be confused with common mode currents that can flow through any connected electrical cable, and mains and Ethernet leads are currently the main external connected cables these days)

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Naim audio UK recommended the Netgear switch when I emailed them in 2015.
I also read that sometimes in our forum.
For example a post from Chrissu in 2020:

ChrisSU](/u/ChrisSU)

Oct '20

Pretty much any switch should do the job fine. It doesn’t even need to be a Gigabit one for the modest demands of audio streaming, and Naim streamers all use 100MB ports.
Personally I would have no hesitation buying a used switch that would otherwise be cluttering up someone’s loft. They are pretty reliable things with no moving parts, and there’s very little that can go wrong.
The Netgear Prosafe switches were a suggestion from Naim. That dated back to the time before aliens invaded the Streaming Aurio forum and turned it into a never-ending Ethernet cable and switch discussion. If you want to dip your toe in the water, get a Cisco Catalyst switch from ebay and see what you think.

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OK, thanks, now I got you. However, I suspect that there must be something missing in your setup or in your house, it should not be that complicated?

Hi, it was some years before that post that I recall Phil Harris of Naim posting that the little Netgear switch would be suitable. (This was some time before Simon opened Pandora’s box by suggesting the Cisco Catalyst switch might improve sound quality, and well before the arrival of audiophile switches with similar claims, albeit with different explanations of how they could achieve them.)
There was no suggestion from Phil at the time that this switch was a sound quality tweak. Back then, network discussions here tended to be about ensuring reliability.

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Good one though not in use currently

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I the days of these early discussions on improving SQ with a switch, home network routers had questionable switch sets, some running half duplex. Adding a simple unmanaged switch “such as” the Netgear gave the NAS-Streamer connection full duplex.
When I first started streaming in 2014 my router ran so hot the plastic deformed, I assume that was half duplex. A Netgear GS105 bought the next morning fixed that problem.

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Presently using the five port version as my first switch.

DG…

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in fact half duplex can be better for sq

I don’t understand why you say complicated. There are many many users here with a dedicated audiophile switch, be it EE8 , Etheregen, PhoenixNet….
I have just the PhoenixNet connected to my cheap commercial nasty router. My Nds and Melco are connected to the switch.
In that case we are hundreds having something missing in our set up or house.

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You have saved some money then. It’s curious, for me, that you prefer the regular commercial router vs an audiophile switch. You may be the only one with an Nd555 here.
Maybe your Etheregen was faulty ?

Enjoy your new Tad speakers. There’s a review in Ear audio on new classics with Tad speakers. They found the match very good. :+1:

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I was at a show a few years back and Andrew Jones demoed his TAD Reference One’s, very resolving and neutral speakers, sounded really good for 5 figures. Too bad he bailed for Elac then Mofi. He is a brilliant designer.

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I know where you are coming from - but in my experiments back in the sensitive days of the NDX it made no difference - and in fact upnp discovery used to sometimes struggle … again if you think about it you will understand why :slight_smile:
But I never rolled my own single pair ethernet lead to really prove the point.

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Sorry, I mistook your setup with someone else where he has quite a few cascading switches!!!

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…… I’ll take your word for it, but if it was half duplex that caused my HOT router meltdown, I’ll stick with full duplex playing COOL toon’s.

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I don’t think it was that - I think it was more likely from the days that the switching was all done in software in some of the early ISP router/switches, as opposed to ASICs that tend to be used now. I seemed to remember you had one of those devices?
Half duplex ethernet uses Hubs - where as Full duplex ethernet uses Switches - though a segment on a switch can work as half duplex if required - but it is rare now.

Maybe the switch (D-link DES-1008D) I have connected to my box is good enough.

Concerning the new system, I received the NSS333 just hours before departing. I had just the time to install it (a bit complicated; I’ll explain why elsewhere) but not to listen to it extensively. The TAD speaker had just 5-10 hours running in. So it’s much too early for definitive conclusions but it looks great. I may post elsewhere about the TAD speakers since there aren’t that many members who have those. And thank you for pointing them to me.

By the way, the new system is also connected to the internet via a wall Ethernet socket connected to a switch and then the box. I plan to test WiFi versus Ethernet connections to see if I can hear any difference. This will be interesting since from what I read there shouldn’t be much difference with the NSS333 which has been designed to work well both with various Ethernet cables and WiFi.

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