And none in “Datacentre Monthly” 
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as always, try, listen, and decide if it worth the price…nothing more.
I thought the whole point of a Melco is that they can use a direct link and thereby avoid all the network malarkey. Seems not, when there is money to be made.
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Indeed, someone at buffalo has twigged to the audiophile crowd.
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I got both the Cat6 and Cat6a because 1) I wasn’t sure which to get and 2) because the price was reasonable.
I tried both for a week between qnap and switch and from switch to 272
I like the 6a in my set up. They seem to time better and have better bounce, pace and swing.
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@Xanthe. I completely agree. I found that out when comparing USB cables a few years ago. Everyone said the AQ Diamond USB was very smooth, and the Wireworld Platinum Eclipse USB was a bit bright. With my gear it was just the opposite!
Simon, for direction…simply test both ways and then pick the most musical one
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Did you also inform her about 4k£ price difference?
It will add perspective to the choice:)
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Thanks. That’s encouraging.
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Is anyone of you using a galvanic network isolator or has experience with them in regards of audio?
Of course there are also some “boutique” models on the market but as always they are based on the industrial standard ones.
I would be happy to hear some thoughts from a professional perspective and also listening experience. Thanks in advance
i had acoustic revive lan isolator before, it worked fine: softer and nicer sound. But when i got my 2 audioquest diamond ethernet cables, the isolator did nothing more. I sold it.
All RJ45 ports in all streamer players, servers, wireless hubs, routers & switch’s are galvanically isolated. Adding another, such as sold by Acoustic Revive claiming to work wonders for SQ, doesn’t work. Search the forum, a few threads on it/them. When I tried one it not do anything positive that I could hear & for sure not the ‘amazing’ improvements that are claimed. I fitted it to both the NDX & NAS ethernet branches, the result was negative. On the wireless hub to switch branch, it didn’t do much that I could hear, save your money & buy more music
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It gives you the choice because they recognise that there’s no single predictably ‘best’ answer.
So with their switch you can try all the options and find out which way works best in your system.
That’s quite a good idea actually. Perhaps I should get a 100Mb Cisco 2960 and try putting that inbetween the 1Gb Cisco and the streamer? That would be functionally similar to the Melco but with the two halves separated.
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As @Mike-B says, UTP Ethernet is galvanically isolated anyway, so for our use there’s no advantage unless
1 you have screened cables and you’re not using them properly.
2 your equipment is malfunctioning.
3 your equipment isn’t designed properly.
The purpose of galvanic isolators for Ethernet is where an entire environment must be entirely galvanically isolated (e.g. some operating theatres). For this situation an Ethernet cable can be run to the periphery of the environment, but not even the cable itself can be allowed to cross the peripheral galvanic barrier to the inside of the protected environment (even if the equipment inside the environment provides galvanic isolation at its interface). In this case galvanic isolation must be provided where the cable physically crosses the peripheral galvanic barrier, hence needing a discrete physical isolator at this location.
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Yep one born every minute. It’s all a bit Emporers new clothes if you ask me.
Someone tested recently 3 different switches with a naim system.
HP Pro Curve 2530. ( 250 euros). Bonn N8 ( 800 euros) . Aqvox SE ( < 2k ).
The best was aqvox, then Bonn , then Hp. same range as the prices.
…the difference an S100 can bring to non-Melco systems is quite surprising, especially for the heavy traffic created in a Roon environment, as well as for streaming services such as TIDAL and Qobuz, where the data has been seriously compromised on its journey from the distant servers into the user’s home. The S100 restores the magic of the source stream as no IT device can possibly do.
Emphasis is mine.
.sjb
Hmmm… Reminds me a lot of the Naim ripping engine that ripped better than anything else.
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So is your emphasis suggesting that you’ve tried a Melco S100 in a non-Melco system and it worked particularly well to restore the ‘magic’ (whatever that means) of Tidal or Qobuz streams?
Does magic here mean musical coherence, timing, enjoyability?
How does the Melco do this, and say a Naim streamer not do this, when both of them can reconstruct the same digital data from the packets that stream across the internet like any normal packet transfer?
If problems wth digital transmission occur on the journey from distant Tidal servers to one’s house they are corrected by resending the data.
If there is electromagnetic noise in the home system, what has that got to do with the distance that the signals travelled?