Hello Pieter,

Thank you for sharing this. What you describe I really recognize in what I often have heard in my situation. About the background haze this indeed can easily completely disappear. Still in my experience with this, is that it can mean two things. 1. The sound is so incredibly pure without any noise. 2. The sound is missing details on the same level as where the background hase is some kind of detail too.

Low frequencies can increase strength by a theorie that I will try to explain soon.

Relaxed sound can be a lack of detail as well. Just like a LP is most often more relaxed due to the lesser amount of detail than most digital files.

Less stress in music. Do you mean instruments and voices had less explosive impact? Or was it more free of noise?

Don't get me wrong I'm not judging and I'm really open minded and trying to understand what the Muon brought in your system. Maybe you can react to the thoughts I described?

When we think about an 8 bit dac. Would the calculated value be the same as the measured value? I think with a perfect signal it would be, but it’s not about 1’s and 0’s but about analog build bits in a data container. When the shape of the bit is not perfect it still represents the digital value, but would it measure correct as well? I guess high frequencies will be lost first and low frequencies will gain body. See the attached scheme.

Think about what less shaped bits will do in a R2R dac. Every bit will find its resistor and all bits combined will output a voltage.

With the above theory you can see that higher values will drop the most. Lower values can't drop that much. I think a percentage of each value must be combined to get the value that will be measured. Logically you can see the lines will be less steep and this means high frequencies will be decreased more than low frequencies. In fact there will be more low frequencies, because the higher frequencies will come on top of the low frequencies.

Pieter, I agree on the effects of ethernet noise filtering, as you describe it. Even better than the best power supplies are: No power supplies! (or additional electronics in the path way) 🙂

It makes perfect sense to me also that additional clocking, prior to the DAC, has been a topic for many years since the improvements when cleaning up noise is more inline what you would expect from "better clocking", since the actual DAC clock will work better when cleaning up the noise. (words you used: Relaxed, less stress, agreeable)

The additional clocking is not actually doing anything at all, in form of clocking since the data is buffered in the DAC anyway and Jitter don´t travel on the network. The clocking just needs to be perfectly executed in the DAC, that´s all. For that to happen there can´t be any noise degrading that DAC clock. The additional clocking can however impact the the noise level positively, as a side affect. (Again, my own thoughts/conclusions)

Now, this was a side track, but to me this shows how it is possible that digital noise has always been the main problem and "simple" filtering and "airgapping" (WiFi extenders/4G receivers) is actually the best solution, not adding additional electronics/power supplies, which always comes with some level of noise in themselves. (my own theories again :-))

In addition, since the solution is actually fairly simple (i believe), in theory, it has been in the audio industries interest to try to complicate it. Not always by purpose maybe... But I see that people associated with the audio industry is actually joining the forums and try to shot down any of the simplified theories since they have an interest in selling ethernet related gear and power supplies.