Where does your digital streaming system actually begin?
By Gautam Raja, content manager, Upscale Audio
I turned 50 this May, and when my wife asked what I wanted, I said, “A clock.”
“You mean a watch?” she asked, since many of my peers were getting themselves hefty wrist-bling to mark hitting a half-century.
“No,” I said. “A clock.”
“Okayyyy, where will you put it, your home office?”
“No, on the third shelf of the audio rack. This clock doesn’t actually tell the time.”
She sighed, gave up, and helped me acquire the Mutec REF10 NANO, a 10 MHz reference master clock that I connected to my UpTone Audio EtherREGEN network switch. She had no interest in learning what it did, but she could certainly hear the sonic improvement. “It sounds more like music.”
Wait a femtosec... I’m using a clock on a switch? Yes. Yes I am. Welcome to the next big thing in high-end audio: Going north of the streamer.
Where Does the System Begin?
One of the most trenchant audio questions I encountered this year was in a review I can no longer find, so I’ll paraphrase: “Where does your digital audio system start, at the streamer or at the modem/router?”
Most people treat their streaming systems as if they start at their Aurender or HiFi Rose or Bluesound streamers. In the last couple of years, I have found that you get tremendous sonic returns by treating your system as if it starts at the Comcast or AT&T or Frontier modem.
The new Eversolo DMP-A10 comes with an SFP port.
What does this mean exactly? Let's look at one of the newest products of 2024, the Lumin T3X. Lumin took the T3 streaming DAC and upgraded it in two major ways: they gave it a linear power supply and a fiber-optic network port.
Having long followed this little mantra of 'better power, lower noise', I have put all my network components on Sbooster linear power supplies, connected those to an AudioQuest PowerQuest conditioner, and physically spaced them as best I can, using high-quality Ethernet cables.
Because of where the internet service comes in, those network components–router, NAS, and Intel NUC Roon Core–sit in a built-in cupboard in the middle of the house, and are plugged into an English Electric network switch. From here, a 60-foot AudioQuest Forest Ethernet cable used to run through the attic, over the kitchen cupboards, and into the front room to the EtherREGEN switch on the audio rack (also with an Sbooster and now that Mutec external clock) that then connected to my Lumin U2 Mini streamer. (I got a roll of AQ Forest and terminated the lengths I needed with the AQ Telegartner connectors, it’s pretty easy.)
Converting to optical Ethernet is likely to be the go-to upgrade of 2025
Most recently, the long Ethernet cable was replaced by a fiber-optic cable and a Sonore opticalModule was added to the equipment in the cupboard, a device that converts the Ethernet signal from electrical to optical. I had already optimized my network so much that this last change wasn’t huge, but Ken Davis, our sales manager, recently converted the run of copper cable from his mesh device, and reported one of the biggest gains he’s ever gotten from a change to his system.
So converting to optical Ethernet is likely to be the go-to upgrade of 2025, as more digital products come with a Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) port. An SFP port is like an empty hard-disk bay; you buy the specific modules you need and plug those in. Just like with the Lumin T3X, more audio sources and hubs now let you plug in the familiar RJ45 Ethernet connector as well as the fiber-optic LC connector and give your network the ability to convert between electrons and photons.
Small Factor What?
Before we dive further in, remember that home networks are like Tolstoy’s unhappy families: Each is noisy in its own way. Over the years of trading network-upgrade secrets, I’ve found that some people report eye-opening, jaw-dropping changes while others go, “Ehhhhhh, not sure I heard anything.” Very rarely, things can get worse, for example when I used a no-name brand clock on my switch and it made the sound bloomy and slow.
The advantage of SFP is that it’s modular, so you can change modules as technology advances. The disadvantage of SFP is that it’s modular, so there’s no end of choices. The Finistar brand of optical modules comes highly recommended, and for audio, you should pick the single-mode (OM1) and not a multi-mode module. It’s important to have matching modules on each end of the cable.
The longer the run of copper Ethernet cable you convert to fiber-optic, the more you’re likely to hear the benefits. Many of our customers have mesh devices or Wi-Fi routers very close to their systems, and this is absolutely not advised. (This is also why a wired connection is preferred.) Use this as an opportunity to move those powerful gigahertz transmitters as far away from your audio components as you can. Never forget the story of a turntable customer who had a constant hum on his system, and our analog manager went through all of the usual suspects (ground loop, stacked components, loose connectors, bad cable dressing) and it was finally traced to a Wi-Fi router in the next room, immediately on the other side of the wall.
The Lumin L2 is a super-NAS and high-end optical and electrical switch.
SFP Products at Upscale
Lumin’s top-end X1 streaming DAC has had SFP for a while, and it is now standard on its newer products, namely the U2 streamer, T3X streaming DAC, P1 and P1 MINI network hubs, as well as the L2 music server/switch.
HiFi Rose offers SFP ports on the RS130 streamer and RSA720 optical hub, and Eversolo has it on the new DMP-A10 streaming DAC. Out of all of these, two products let you integrate fiber-optic with your network without having to get a whole new digital source: the Lumin L2, and in a more specialized way, the HiFi Rose RSA720. (We’ll let the product page explain itself.)
The Lumin L2 is essentially an audiophile NAS and network switch in one unit. You can store up to 8 TB of music, and there are two RJ45 ports and two SFP ports. If you got the T3X streaming DAC, you’d connect one of the L2’s SFP ports to the T3X’s, giving you access to hard disks but with complete electrical isolation. One of the L2’s RJ45 ports can connect to your router, allowing access to streaming services (again with complete isolation) and to share the L2’s music with the rest of the network. The other RJ45 port could be for your Roon Core, and the second SFP port could offer a clean connection to another streaming system.
The great thing about SFP ports becoming more common is that you can isolate yourself from so many network components’ noise in one go. However, because perturbations such as phase noise and ground-plane noise embed themselves in the Ethernet signal, there is still a case for optimizing power to your network components and using products that specifically address these issues with active isolation and reclocking.
I will eventually go deeper into this topic, but I’m going to wait until more of you try fiber-optic networking and hear the benefits of “going north of the streamer”... so that there’s a smaller percentage of you thinking I’m a lunatic for wanting a 10 MHz reference clock for my 50th birthday. (And for my switch.)