Used equipment
Contents
For this test we are playing with Arno’s system and have the following components at our disposal:
1) the Lumin X1 streamer/DAC, with an SFP connection and thus the possibility of a fiber connection
2) a Melco S100 switch powered by a Farad super 6 LPS. The Melco S 100 is an audiophile switch with high-quality components and housing specially designed to minimize vibration, has a packet buffer of 1.5 MB, data are re-clocked, the so-called “traffic settings” that process the data are optimized for audio. All this to get the noise level as low as possible, this is further improved by the external Farad Super6. The switch includes 2 SFP connections and 8 RJ45, two of which are 100Mb/s full duplex that are recommended to connect to the streamer. The Melco S100 is no longer available, the company is now called Dela and provides a nice range of high quality switches, the entry level model, the S50 starts at € 3598, gulp.
3) Adot single mode glass fiber with associated SFP transceivers
4) Uptimed multimode glass fiber with associated SFP transceivers
From the respective vendors, we have added the following components there:
5) Melco C1 D20 direct attach SFP cable
6) Network acoustics Muon pro filter with RJ45 streaming cable, this is the top model passive filter from Network Acoustics with an 8 core design for effective filtering of EMI and RFI and high quality RJ45 connections. According to NA, the filter works preferably with a good streaming cable in front of it and behind it. And if you want to optimize it further you can cascade a muon pro between your router and your switch and a Muon pro between your switch and your streamer. Every step that lowers your noise level will improve the quality. Works between 10Mb/s and 2.5 Gb/s, but optimally tuned for 1 Gb/s by Network Acoustics. In this test we will not place it behind the switch because in practice few people will buy an expensive switch and a passive filter.
Further components of the installation
Speakers: Seas Exotic Tower homebrew
Amplifier: Spec RSA F33EX
Speaker cable: Jorma Design Unity
Interlink: Logic Audio SUPREME XLR (Sommer)
Power supply: Audes DC blocker followed by a Shunyata Venom mains filter connected to Audes PC2 cables
Power cables: Yeti reference V3 for amplifier and streamer, Furutech DPS 4.1 for the switch
Grounding: Puritan Audio ground and route master connected to a ground pin (for signal ground of all equipment and chassis ground of streamer and switch)
The music
For testing, we use two songs and with both songs we switch cables several times to determine the differences.
The first song is “Comme un Tango” by Vincent Belanger and Anne Bisson, Comme un tango is a good recording that is relatively easy to reproduce, no complex music, instruments remain nicely separated from each other. Here you can properly determine the stereo image and how natural the instruments sound. The song is a combination of jazz and classical with an upright bass, cello, piano and harp, the driving bass and cello provide a subtle tango line.
The second song is “Present Tense” by Radiohead. Thom Yorke on acoustic guitar strumming throughout the song, below that a drum roll, multiple layers of background vocals and guitar/strings-like arrangements and something of a shaker. It’s an atmospheric hypnotic song that builds towards the middle and becomes increasingly complex and intense, this clearly demands more from the rig, we’ll see how the cables hold up.