Goodbye Sonos, hello ????

Let's try Michael Fremer interview link again.

Michael Fremer Interview

http://www.analogplanet.com/content/analogplanet-editor-appears-scott-wikinsons-home-theater-geeks-podcast-0

I can confirm knghifi's findings re: wireless and wired...

First - the wired does not suffer from breaks in the stream - my wireless was bad for that - too many other routers in the neighbourhood according to apple support.

Second, the wired is much smoother in the highs like violins and sibilance

Don't forget - if the dac is missing a sample - it will try to insert the next best interpolated value based on valid adjacent samples. Only when too many adjacent samples are missing will a break in the audio signal occur. Somewhere between an audible break and a perfect stream you have a dac creating an audio signal that contains distortion.

High frequencies are more difficult to rebuild because there are fewer samples at high frequencies - e.g. on a 44Khz sample source, if you miss 2 samples you cannot rebuild a 20kHz audio signal perfectly.

I noticed a significant improvement in the violins on every orchestral piece I have.

Not only does it sound smoother, but the placement of instruments in the sound stages became much more precise and spacious

Your cables contribute to streaming issues also - I have tried a few optical and USB cables and found that DH Labs provide the best quality to date - so I can see why rolling quality network cables may also prove beneficial - although, if they also suffered from poor tranmission then it might take me several attempts to send this note, so I'm not sold on this right now, but when I have time to investigate it might bring some more enlightenment :-)

Knghifi

http://meicord.de/index.php?id=82&L=3

Had a chance to think about LAN cables and where a quality cable might make a difference....

Basically, anything connected to a router/computer is subject to sending data that is checked for data errors - if an error is detected the data is re-sent until it is correct - that's the way computers ensure that a vital bit is not dropped, which might cause a spreadsheet to display incorrect numbers.

The only place that data is not verified is in the link between the streaming device and the DAC - that's where I found good cables definately make a difference.

HOWEVER - there would be a case for good quality LAN cables if you are experiencing breaks in your music, which might be an indication that the error rate in your network is severe enough that the re-transmission of data causes a time lag that is long enough to interfere with the reconstruction of the audio signal.

If your streaming device does not have sufficient buffering capability then bad cables will certainly highlight the problem with more frequent breaks in the audio signal.

Vicadamone - thanks for the link - I think this is worth investigating, if only to see if it makes my NAS drive will respond quicker.

Williewonka, my AQ Cinnamon ethernet cables have ~24 hrs and the improvement is DRAMATIC over generic cable. I took MF advice and bought middle grade. It cost me < $300 for 3 cables from Audio Advisor so very inexpensive experiment. :-):-)