Importance of clocking

About local files, couple of distinctions in my setup as to why local files sounds superior to those being streamed from Qobuz/Tidal:

1) No network noise and latency due to files being played from internal SSD storage of N30SA. 

2) 95% of stored files are digitized from analog tapes and direct DSD. 

IME, Tidal/Qobuz files are a mixed bag due to unknown provenance of files. There are some really stellar sounding files and then there are some that are simply unlistenable (to me). Not to mention, variables in our home network and equipments rendering the final sound. If one thing I learned with digital streaming is this, there is no streaming components at any price point out there that sounds optimal right out of the box without tweaking the home network. 

@lalitk

Fully agreed. InnuOS does though offer a feature for playing local files while isolating the ethernet connection, the so called offline mode under Sense. It would be interesting to know whether disconnecting the ethernet cable from your Auralic equally improves the sound when playing local files.

@antigrunge2 

Isolating Ethernet is not an option for me. My DAC is optimized to accept digital stream over Ethernet. I am streaming local and cloud based files from Aurender N30SA to Merging Technologies DAC.  

I believe severing Ethernet connection from your Innuos player should impact App connectivity to the player, right? 

@lalitk 

Ok, got it. And yes, disconnecting outright doesn’t work; hence the offline feature in Sense

@antigrunge2 ”It shows that the ethernet is a major source of DAC disturbances and some believe that clocking matters in that context.”

I’m not sure what you mean by “DAC disturbances” other than RFI noise affecting the analog(ue) part of the DAC. The streamer will have received ethernet packets/frames and unpacked these into a bitstream which it feeds to the DAC; the DAC itself doesn’t see anything ethernet. Except RFI noise which may have accompanied the digital signal created by the streamer of course.

If some people not only believe ethernet clocking can make a difference but experience that it does, we then need to move onto the mechanisms which might make this possible. Clock accuracy is not one of these, as explained earlier regarding its asynchronous nature. Something else may be at play and many of us would, I’m sure, be interested to understand what these mechanisms might be.