I had a dc3 for a weekend - this was soooo good.
For this reason I jumped straight on to phoenix net - in PN there is dual rail dc3 inside.
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Since the last switch is in my rack, I guess a ābetterā streaming cable (from RJ45 wall socket to streamer) is the first step then.
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So unless you try something you donāt know if there is anything to fix! Thatās the problem right there.
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Yepā¦ little did I knowā¦ 
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We definitely differ on this. At one point my network was powered entirely by SJ DC3sā¦ā¦4 rails in total. I had Sean upgrade them to Mini DC4s. I installed them all simultaneously, rebooted my network and sat down to listen. As Iāve posted once before, the music put me mind of sitting a field away from a category 5 tornado. The raw energy was just boggling. 2 hours in that impression was gone, replaced by the feeling you get sitting in a live performance. The power of the performance, the physicality of the music (at exactly the same amplitude as previously), the rhythmic interplay between musicians was palpable as subtle rhythms in timing and especially in subtle amplitude shifts were newly revealed. The music was deeply involving, far more so than before the upgrade, which led me to post that the most remarkable impact by far was to listener response.
My system network eventually ended up with 6 DC4 rails. Once again I upgraded all 6 rails to ARC6 (the same upgrade as the Innuos Statement Next Gen). Again the impact was stunningā¦.it honestly felt like Iād replaced my S1 Mk2 speakers with something substantially larger and more dynamic.
I standardised all my power supplies to avoid noise spectrum harmonics and used Mundorf Silver/Gold cable for all DC wiring and frankly the differences that made were profound
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Hi there,
From the very start of setting up a local and remote streaming system to the end of the journey 5 years later, not once at any stage did I not like the sound I was getting or consider I was trying to fix any kind of problem. The sole motivation for several dozen upgrades to power supplies, modems, bridge, switches, cables, DC cables, vibration control etc. was the dramatic increases in SQ that each upgrade brought. I have been around hi-fi for over 50 years and have been lucky enough to have enjoyed several very different systems, but in all that time of upgrading every system I never discovered anything as rich and rewarding as upgrading the network. Most important was that after 5 years I never discovered a ālaw of diminishing returnsā . For sure the improvements gradually became more expensive, but they also became substantially more rewarding, which is why I ended up taking things to such extremes
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Fair point. For me there were always alternative sources alongside streaming, cd and vinyl. Initially theyāve won in terms of sq but with the network infrastructure upgrades it became obvious that it is not a streamer itself that is lacking performance but rather that ānoiseā in the chain.
Yeah, mine is not plugged in with my hifi either. It sounds like a lot of these āhifiā switches come with noisy SMPS. Not all SMPS are noisy. Iāve been quite happy with my Cisco POE which doesnāt even have a PS on the last switch. I may eventually try a Phoenix Net but I have such a great sound Iām in no rush. Also, Iāve read a number of users have swapped their SMPS back in after months with a LPS or other tweak to find they preferred the original sound. Thereās quite a bit of confirmation bias with much of the tweaking that goes on here.
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The simple answer is surely to think about whether you are enjoying listening to music through your system. If you are, you shouldnāt be worried.
An easy way to check whether you have RFI in your home (and you will have) is with a radio! Without resorting to a more sophisticated test, get a simple portable AM or SW radio and tune it away from any stations. Point the aerial at any appliance such as a wall wart power supply or LED light, and you will hear the interference. Follow any connected cable away from the device and you should hear the interference fade away. It it fades to nothing before the end of the cable you probably donāt need to worry about it.
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Thanks. Thatās something Iāll be trying for sure.
Best do it when youāre home alone.
My wife thought Iād gone mad, when I started examining every led light in the house with a personal stereo.
Although it didnāt help when I explained I was listening to the bulbs. 
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Yes, you may well get some funny looks, especially when your radio starts making noises that sound like something from a 1950s sci-fi movie. Still, it can be informative if you want to know whether potentially suspect devices are really that noisy.
I found, for example, that a couple of Chord DACs with built in switching power supplies were silent, as were some Cisco switches. Another Cisco switch was like a hornetās nest, and my Atom was quite noisy too.
Armed with this information, you can make your family even more determined to have you sectioned when you start to mitigate the effects by buying weird stuff to plug into your router or hifi system that they already think sounds perfectly fine as it is.
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Confirmation bias may be responsible for subtle shifts in small parts of the performanceā¦.like āooohh I can hear more bassā, āwow, thereās more detailā, āmmmm I never heard that beforeā or āI like this betterā, whereas all thatās changed is the level of attention one is paying to the music. But in a very short space of time those changes are assimilated and the listening experience longterm remains unaffected. But, if you are optimising the network in ways I detailed above, the changes are profound and affect the way you hear and respond to the music. Every single recording changes and in different ways that are almost always surprising and unexpected. For example new rhythms emerge based on subtle changes in amplitude or suddenly the music creates feelings and emotions that werenāt there before. These are subconscious reactions and canāt be fooled by having certain expectations.
At the outset of my remote streaming system setup I used to use Swiss Radio Classics to run in and warm up the system. There was no doubt that the 128kbps MP3 files were missing a lot. By the time I finished all the optimisation I would constantly switch on the amps and an hour later realise that I was still listening to the classical channel, which had become dramatically more satisfying. As good as full fat streaming? In no way! But musically highly entertaining in that the level of involvement and enjoyment was high enough to switch off the audio critic and just let the music shine and the listener bask in enjoyment. Switching to full fat streaming was always a shock in how much more there was, but the point was, those MP3 files had become good enough for sustained, highly enjoyable listening.
The biggest problem with most streaming systems is that the noise prevents the brain from truly accepting the music as real, so thereās always some sort of conscious dialog going on. Once one reaches the point that the brain fully accepts the music, the listening experience changes to one of total involvement, which I guess feels very much like the feelings the musicians get when creating the music. At least thatās how it felt to me.
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Indeed, LW can be good for lower frequency RFI such as from the mains with saturating transformers in linear power supplies ā¦ and the higher SW bands for higher frequency RFI. BTW irrespective of band best to use AM as opposed USB or LSB that you might have on SW as AM is the modulation type that is sensitive to noise. Though bad RFI will cut into any band.
I also wouldnāt worry too much about the orientation of the aerial, but bring the receiver close to the noise source should be enough.
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Is this in relation to streaming from the internet, or does it also impact on local streaming from a music server?
Iāve mostly used SW for this, now Iām going to have to sneak around under cover of darkness and do it all again with AM! Then again, I might just put some tunes on and relax.
Chris, my point was you should use AM on SW as the most sensitive demodulator for noise. So use AM on the LW, MW and SW bands. Though commercial consumer radios on MW and LW only have AM decode.
Are you mixing up the term AM with a radio band ? AM is amplitude modulation and can be used on all and is typically used by broadcast stations. It uses two sidebands that are modulated in level, and therefore in decode is good to pickup noise.
Hi @MrFixit , you are enjoying your system so why go looking for problems? If you go down that rabbit hole then at best you will just change the SQ. You will not eliminate this noise.
As @Simon-in-Suffolk states, the area that will bring most change are speakers and listening space.
However, without noticing any problems, just sit back and enjoy your music!
Indeed! Audio paranoia is something to be managed 
.
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I agree, I went through all this years ago and got my system dialed in. I donāt have a need to constantly tweak my system, it sounds great. My comment is about what I observe here with the constant need to tweak and the beliefs that get bandied about here.
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