Network Switches

Geez.... some toxic comments here from "everything-sounds-the-same" crowd. Relax, it's just a hobby. Nobody is pointing a gun in your head forcing to buy a switch. Don't buy it. Why do you even read this thread?

Who are the "everything-sounds-the-same" crowd
three_easy_payments seems to be saying the opposite
and I have certainly not said itWho is your comment aimed at? and what do you perceive as 'toxic' Have I missed some posts??

I guess pointing out some of the obvious would be useful (for some):

• TV and Radio stations are high noise floor environments. You are not exploring the limits of human hearing, so you can almost take those out of the discussion.
• They do care about EMI ... hence why they use balanced cables.
• Recording studios, TV stations, radio stations .... are ADCs, not DACs. A recording studio is for the most part, a single point ADC, and ADCs used in recording studios are well designed, expensive units, and aspects of those designs is to eliminate susceptibility to EMI. All those digital cables ... are transmitting digital data and that data is not being converted back to analog except for monitoring and mixing ... again, rarely plumbing the depths of hearing and if so ... to hear if any EMI or similar entered recording that may be picked up on playback.
  

I'm simply saying whether it's a nearby TV, florescent light, network switch, router, or amplifier...everything near your audio system that is powered by electricity has the potential to cause noise. Reducing these effects can be beneficial

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Ah I think I get it now.
You are saying that adding an extra piece of equipment, a switch or anything , is adding further potential to add noise to your audio system. Nothing  to do with the digital audio it is switching. yes, of course I can see how that could happen

Surely I can be forgiven for that confusion. After all, this thread is supposed to be about switches specifically for digital audio not just about which switch will interfere less with your audio system when installed in your system regardless of whether you are streaming digital audio or not

we may be on the same page

Hello atdavid

Thanks for your input

Some of what you say is correct but much is way out of date, or maybe we are just further ahead in the UK. (I believe the USA doesn’t even have DAB yet)

When you say that "Recording studios, TV stations, radio stations .... are ADCs, not DACs" I'm not sure you have grasped the terminology. ADC is Analogue to Digital Converter(or conversion), it can't be a studio or TV station, it is just one of the processes that take place in that studio or station

In the distribution of a single radio programme, for instance, it will go through a number of ADCs and DACs for technical reasons before it is even sent back from the cloud for final distribution

It will encounter more ADC/DAC before arriving on my network.

I'm not sure even how TV studios and radio stations crept into the discussion

No, I would just say you are a bit slower in the UK .....

Would you rather I said encoding of the baseband signal into digital and decoding of the baseband signal into audio instead of ADC and DAC? The baseband signal will be encoded once with an ADC in a studio these days.

After that it is all digital. It should have been pretty obvious from what I wrote that that is what I meant." In the distribution of a single radio programme, for instance, it will go through a number of ADCs and DACs for technical reasons before it is even sent back from the cloud for final distribution" ... I can assume you mean encoded digital data, not baseband encoding and decoding, which in the context of this whole discussion is, well, rather meaningless and pedantic without being useful as the parameters for noise rejection, data recovery, etc. are 1) completely different from baseband audio, and 2) not really even the point of most of this discussion.

Last, if you are going to be pedantic, you may want to figure out who your audience is.


Studios crept into the discussion because someone tried to use, erroneously, that "professionals", i.e. in radio and TV studios don’t care about this.