Where should I go from here with my digital front end?


Good morning

My digital front end consists of a recently purchased  Lumin U2 Mini hard wired with Supra ethernet cable from an Eero mesh unit. Modem and Eero router located on 2nd floor. My listening room is in the basement.

My listening is 100% streaming from Tidal and Quboz with a budget of under $1k

should I:

1) upgrade the supra cable

2) add an Etherregen or Eno filter

3) add an audiophile switch such as the English Electric

4) other

Thanks!

 

emil

@chilli42 

The signal is full of jitter from upstream connections.  Once that jitter is introduced, there is no way it can be changed or removed.

Which "upstream" connections are you referring to?

Regards,

barts

 

 

Barts,

There really is nothing you can do to eliminate jitter from the media provider companies as their signal pass through multiple computer servers and switches before it make it into your house.  Unless you have a dedicated trunk from the Tidal servers there really will never be a clean signal from them.

Another vote for decoupling the noise from the copper lan cables with fiber right before the streamer.  I use an ifi silent power ps for the fiber back to copper conversion box with audioquest rj45 1ft cable to streamer. All for less than $300. I believe galvanic isolation is the only thing that matters with the digital network assuming you have a solid gigabit network...

Thanks everyone for responding.

I've decided to try the fiber converter route with power supply from Amazon totaling  $163 all in. No brainer in not giving it a shot especially with amazon's easy return policy.

Should have it by Wednesday. I'll report back

Here’s the thing with the fibre optic conversion…it’s resilient to the EMI and RFI after the signal is converted into fibre optic, however the converter modules themselves introduce their own garbage into the signal. In my system it manifested itself as glare, glassy and thin sound and that didn’t work out for me. YMMV.
 

You have to find the solution that does the least amount of harm while removing what doesn’t belong in the signal.
That is why ultimately I returned the fibre optic converters and went for the passive Network Acoustics Eno streaming system.

I agree with Amazon return policy it would be a sin not to try this fibre optic stuff. If it works for you, that’s an awesome first step.