Completion and Conclusion
Contents
What an interesting mass test again! In this field, the differences between streamers are still nice and big, which just makes it fun and educational to put the products side by side.
Which streamer is ‘the best’, we leave to you. After all: it’s your pair of ears. Do you like fresh and open? Warm and generous? Precise and tight? These are all things that influence the label: ‘the best streamer’. In short: listen to the stream and let your ears decide.
Ifi Neo stream , the optical network connection generates more noise!!!! How is that possible?
The optical should disappear noise not introduce it? Why didn’t you try with a better power supply?
The power supply is the issue. And we test as-is. This is how you buy the streamer.
So the provided power x is for the neo stream only and the small usb ps causes all the problem?
Yes
Since the noise is generated in the eth to optical box shouldn’t be eliminated during the optical transfer to the streamer?
Apparently not… I measured multiple times…
So is it safe to assume that optical connection isn’t the holly grail for noise isolation? Or the measured noise might appear from another source?
I guess the implementation is just badly done… I never measured issues with other streamers.
In this instance the noise is probably injected in the signal before conversion to light. On the other end, the signal is simply converted back, including the noise.
No, optical isn’t a/the holy grail. If it would be, we all would use Toslink.
In case of this iFi streamer: just hook it up with a regular Ethernet cable, put a switch before it (one we tested adequate) and the result is good.
That…
Kind of ironic that an iFi product introduces noise with a supplied power supply, don’t you think?
Question, what are your settings for the dScope III? I typically use 100K input impedance, sample rate 192K, 32K FFT Prism-7 window and average over 8 samples. Your low end measurements look a little off. One thing you also have to remember is the VBUS/GND is tied to the internal supply and therefore you can get ground loops really easy when testing.
Thanks,
Gordon
Interesting test! Thank you. Going above 1000 eur by a coupld hundred the Eversolo Master version should do even better on the jitter front due to the femto clock and op amps. Would be interesting to measuer that one also.
We will test it as well