machtdochnischt

I am very interested in your results... As I said, I have been trying to contact Ayre directly as well as Sun Audio via various different means and there was no reply whatsoever. The only way that is left for me to try is to call them in Boulder...

Hi Edward, same here: I bought my 'old' QB-9 in 2011. Have been trying to get through to anyone at Sun Audio or Ayre HQ regarding the upgrade, but I have not yet been able to invoke any kind of response, none at all. Went for email, the contact form, tried to call them... nothing... not even a 'call back in a couple months'. But I am still determined to somehow get my upgrade... Cheers, Roman

Legality is highly depending on where you are from/where you are actually doing that and what you are doing in particular. From my point of view (being a legal layman) there should be nothing wrong with setting up a server with your own (i.e. legally licensed) music data to provide remote access to yourself (i.e. to remote listen and/or watch). It might even be legal to provide the passwords to your friends and family as long as this is done in a non-commercial, non-public way. From my point of view, it is more important to think about the possible impact and consequences of your activities from a pragmatic point of view. Will someone notice what you are doing? Of course you always have to keep the economic interests of the copyright holder in mind. If you are actively mistreating these, that is possibly illegal. Will someone notice, that you do so? Will someone drag you to court? These are the questions you should ask yourself as well. Or to be very clear about it: How likely is it, that someone crawls the internet, finds your server, (illegally) hacks the password and finds out that you are actually serving music data? How likely is it - assuming that someone found out about your music server - that you are dragged to court and convicted in the end taking into account, that you licensed the music legally... Anyway, all of this is extremely complex. There are several aspects of legality in this context: 1. legality of "your music" itself 2. legality of serving/broadcasting the music to an audience 1.) Legally licensing music and transferring it into digital formats is not as simple as it looks: * You might have bought CDs/DVDs and ripped them. That could be considered illegal, if any kind of copy-protection has been circumvented to do so. * You might have bought CDs/DVDs, played them (i.e. transferred to analog) and then digitally recorded the analog signal. That might be considered legal as there is no copy-protection on the analog signal. * You might have downloaded "illegal copies" of music data. Depending on which legal system we are talking about, owning those illegal copies might be legal or illegal. Sometimes downloading illegal copies is illegal, sometimes it is not. Uploading illegal copies is usually considered illegal. * Have you bought vinyls and digitized them from the analog signal? That could be considered legal as the source is analog and there is no copy-protection in place. ... 2.) If you are allowed to serve music to anyone is highly depending on the respective licenses: * Public broadcast is usually not included in the licenses you buy as a consumer. * Serving legal music data to yourself might be illegal under the given licenses. * Serving legal music data to someone else might be illegal under the given license. To make matters even more complex: "fair use" concepts exist in most legal systems, i.e. copyrighted material might be allowed to be used and even copied as long as it is done in a non-commercial, non-public context. Fair use US Digital Millenium Coypright Act German "Privatkopie" (sry, no English translation available)

Putting a high end ethernet cable between the fibreOP and the router could of course improve signal quality between the fibreOP and the router, which in turn could improve the signal quality of the overall chain including the wireless part. To be very clear about that, we are talking about possible quality improvements in context of data, that is streaming from the internet via your fibreOP further to router and TV or Sonos. Be aware, that problems on the wireless part of the overall signal chain might spoil all quality improvements that you gain between fibreOP and router. So does it make an audible difference? You have to hear for yourself, just as goldsdad says... First off, we are not talking "internet" here. You can improve signal quality in the part of the internet, that is under your own control i.e. your LAN. Beyond your fibreOP there might be thousands of miles of different interconnects. And you do not have any control over these. So you are not actually improving "internet speed", but the speed of your local network. If data is streamed from somewhere in the internet, the overall signal chain includes many additional aspects: Quality of Service, bandwidth, etc etc. It is actually a question of network technology. That's why I would rather talk about improving the speed of your LAN... So yes, in general it is possible to improve the signal quality in your LAN by using higher quality ethernet cables. Will you experience an increase in speed? Maybe. Depends on the situation. The most error-prone part of your LAN might be your lower quality ethernet cable. So exchanging it could contribute to improve speed. The most erroneous part might be your wifi. Then it wouldn't make too much of a difference. You might have a look at router statistics as a rough hint. In the end, you have to give it a try... So have I experienced an improvement of my LAN speed by using higher quality ethernet cables? Never gave it a try. I am not actually streaming (ThinkPad -> Ayre QB-9 -> Lehmann Audio Black Cube Linear Pro -> Sennheiser HD800). The weak link of this chain in terms of digital cables is the USB interconnect between laptop and DAC. And yes I bought a high end USB cable. Does it make an audible difference for me? I think it does. Might be placebo. I just like the feeling of having optimized this weak link... btw, the Audioquest: Computer Audio Demystified White Paper is quite interesting in this context...

I am kind of leading the same discussion on facebook so I just repost below, what I think is the correct technical explanation. I actually hope, that someone challenges this explanation and tells me if I am right or wrong. Anyway, to answer your questions based on this explanation: 1. High end ethernet cables can make a difference: when streaming via ethernet. When no streaming is done or the streaming is not done via ethernet, a high end ethernet cable does not at all make a difference. 2. Of course cables usually affect only the wired part of a setup. I might get the question wrong, but in a combined wireless and wired setup the cables certainly affect the wired part of the signal chain. -- given the post attached below, I want to further elaborate on 1.): Ethernet always takes care of error correction, i.e. it ensures correctness of information transmitted between sender and receiver. That is not a bad thing as we are not talking analog and this happens transparently. If errors can be corrected, there is no problem. If they can't, the receiver knows and acts accordingly. Problem with ethernet are delays. Delays cause jitter in a streaming context (only). For transmission the message (i.e. the file) is split in numbered packets. Packets are sent separately. Error correction is in effect, i.e. to put simple: signals are being sent back and forth until the packet has been received correctly. It is kind of a negotiation between sender and receiver, that ensures this. Usually the packets are not received in the correct order, i.e. packet 3 might arrive at the receiver's end before packet 1 and packet 2. The receiver basically gathers all received packets and reconstructs the message by putting the packets back in the correct order. At the time of reconstruction of the message, it has been ensured, that all packets are correct in terms of contents. Correct packets in correct order => correct message. Something that can happen in this context is delay. A packet might be erroneous. If it is, it will simply be resent until it is correctly received. If a packet is lost, it will simply be resent until it is correctly received. This takes time. The receiver might have to wait for a single missing packet for a long while. This is not yet a problem. It just means, that it takes some time to correctly transmit information. The actual problem occurs beyond ethernet. Depending on chip design as well as implementation of operating systems, drivers and applications it might be the case, that the receiver starts to process parts (!) of the correctly received message before the full message has been reconstructed. This usually occurs in a streaming context and not if you are just transmitting complete files between say your NAS and your laptop. So what's the problem? To put simple, a message is being transmitted and while it is in transmission the receiver already processes the message. Then a physical problems occurs. Ethernet for sure takes care, that the problem is eliminated. But meanwhile the processing on the receivers end continues. The receiver might want to process a packet, that has just not yet been received. And that is, when jitter happens (btw, I am not talking about interval lengths while doing the AD/DA conversion; that's another type of jitter that occurs in a separate part of the signal chain). So essentially there is kind of a hole in the message. But the receiver just continues to process packets coming in. Usual implementations get rid of the problem by providing for a buffer, i.e. the application that processes the message provides for a certain lead time before starting to process the incoming message. During the lead time it only gathers incoming packets. This way there is more time for any occurring errors to be corrected properly. Hence, if the implementation of streaming is robust, additional buffer size achieves the same quality improvement as a high end ethernet cable. --- 8< -------- First off, I'm neither an electrical engineer nor a communications engineer, so I might not use the proper terms here. Anyway, I'm sorry, but I just do not get, what a "high quality ethernet cable" has got anything to do with improving audio quality in a digital system. We are talking about a digital to digital connection. On the physical level problems with the signal obviously exist. There is noise, i.e. the signal might be altered due to various reasons, particularly electronic-magnetic interference. As the signal is digital the description of the amplitude is quite obvious. It is 0 or 1. No need to distinguish between infinitesimal differences in amplitude as it would be with an analog signal. Furthermore jitter exists. This means in short, that the duration of a signal to transfer a single symbol is not exactly one Unit Interval long, but it might slightly differ in duration. It is essentially a problem with clocking the signal.Put simple, if the difference in duration is too short or too long, a single symbol (i.e. bit) might be read as no symbol or two symbols of the same type. These are the types of errors that might occur on a physical level. In a network context jitter might occur as delay, but we'll come to that. To put it simple, in analog signal processing the signal is being transferred from source to destination without any change of the actual information transmitted (in theory and if you do not deliberately use something to alter the signal). If with this direct transmission the signal is being altered due to problems on the physical level (e.g. electro-magnetic interference), the altered information is transmitted to the destination. Hence if an error occurs along the signal chain, this error is transmitted directly to the destination. The information sent out from source differs from the information received at destination. So far so good. Now we are talking ethernet. Ethernet includes analog signal processing, but it does not work at all like analog signal processing. Data transferred via ethernet is processed on multiple levels. Google "ISO OSI model" for fun, please. Of course errors might occur in various ways. But these errors are identified and eliminated digitally. If you look at your router you might see collision statistics. These are actual errors on the physical level. They have been identified. Signals have been resent. The original information sent out at source has completely been restored at destination. The data link layer of the OSI model takes care of that. Ethernet helps on the network layer to connect nodes (i.e. source and destination). There are way more layers involved before the complete file (i.e. the full correctly restored message) resides in the memory of either your laptop or whatever device to be processed further.To deal with the second type of jitter (delay of streamed information in context of networking) there usually are buffers involved to make sure, that even though the transmitted information might have been erroneous at some point in time, the final information is correct (particularly in order as on the network level information is being sent out in packets). If talking about digital to digital connection always think about your bank and about what you would do to them, if there would have been arbitrary errors with money on your account. Imagine error-prone digital high frequency trading. So, I am quite sure, that the AQ cable improves signal quality. But with digital audio you are not actually hearing the signal itself like you would in an all analog system. The digital connection ensures, that the messages transmitted along the whole digital path is correct and unchanged. The data is actually transmitted inside your computer as well. There are different chips, main memory and the CPU as well as registers in the CPU involved etc. And of course, jitter really happens at the time of AD or DA conversion. But that's got nothing at all to do with ethernet.

SSD aka Solid State Disk - is a completely different type of hardware to store data with: * "Standard" hard disks actually store your data on rotating magnetic disks (called platters). So a standard hard disk really contains disks where data is stored like on magnetic tape. Due to the rotation conventional hard disks cause additional noise, vibration and further problems. * SSDs do not contain any mechanical parts. Nothing is rotating. There are no disks. An SSD consists of chips that store your data (your USB flash drive is quite similar to an SSD in terms of data storage). The speed of SSDs is way higher than of conventional hard disks. That is why they originally were used as internal drives to be connected via the SATA, PATA, or PCIe interfaces of a computer. If you would use an SSD with an older USB2.0 or 1.0 interface, the USB interface would limit the speed of the data transfer, although the SSD itself would be able to provide data with higher speed. I am quite sure, that with the advent of eSATA and USB 3.0 external SSDs should be in existence making use of these faster interfaces. Just ask amazon for external SSD. I do not know about the serial interfaces of your iMac and Dune Player, but they have to provide one of the faster serial interfaces (i.e. USB 3.0) to make full use of the speed of your new external SSD.

NAS aka Network Attached Storage - to spare you all the technical detail: it is basically a set of hard drives (of various possible types) in a separate box/server. It is not part of your computer like an internal or even external hard drive would be. The data resides on the hard drives inside the NAS. The NAS manages all data on its hard drives and serves access to the data via network, i.e. ethernet or wifi. Data is available to any computer/media player/etc. with access to the network. NAS systems usually provide for specific access control. Essentially a NAS is a server, whose sole purpose it is to serve data stored on its hard drives to the network. You can buy NAS systems for consumers and businesses. The types differ mainly in features provided by the system. Home user/consumer NAS systems usually provide for features such as simple RAIDs*), DLNA servers, FTP servers, cloud backups etc. Examples for consumer NAS systems would be: * Buffalo Technology * LaCie * Iomega (now a Lenovo company) The Lenovo Network Storage overview shows a few business systems as well (the rack mounted ones). Setting up a NAS is as simple as it gets: you include the NAS in your network, i.e. connect it to your router. * in the Windows world you would then have to 'map network drives', i.e. point your windows to the IP of the NAS and assign a drive letter. Done. You can then access the whole storage provided by the NAS via the mapped drive as if it was an internal hard drive. Technically speaking, Windows uses CIFS or SMB to access storage via networks. * as I am not too interested in the Apple world, I cannot tell you how it would work with your iMac. But it should essentially be the same: you have to point your Mac to the NAS' IP. Apple's Airport Time Capsule is kind of a NAS, but it seems to be limited in functionality. Apple systems use AFP Bonjour to access storage via network. * to access the NAS' data via media player, tv or similar device, it is usually easiest to use included DLNA server capabilities of the NAS. You would then be able to access the data directly from say your TV or iPad. * LINUX system use nfs to access the NAS. Same principle: tell your OS where the data resides. I myself have been using NAS systems (buffalo and iomega) for years now. They really come in handy. You know, that your data is safe and sound. At any given time a faulty hard drive can be replaced and none of your data is lost (yes, I had to rebuild the array once). All of your data is stored in a central place and is accessible by all devices in the network (e.g. your iPhone, TV, etc.). The NAS can be situated anywhere you like, i.e. you don't have to have an additional device (hence additional noise) in your listening room. You could just set up the NAS somewhere in your basement and serve the data from there, etc. etc. *) First off, RAID is NOT considered to serve as a proper backup strategy for your data! Please do not rely on RAID as the only backup of your data. Anyway RAID is one of the advantages of NAS systems over standalone external hard drives. A RAID (redundant array of independent disks) combines a set of hard drives in one array. All drives of the array are managed in a combined way and are accessed as a single logical unit, i.e. as if it was one drive. RAID provides for different levels of redundancy, performance, capacity. The different types of RAIDs are denoted by numbers. Imagine a RAID array with 4 hard drives of 1 TB. A typical consumer NAS provides the following RAID modes: RAID 0 - no redundancy; your RAID provides 4 TB of data storage as one drive; due to parallel reads/writes it provides for high performance provision of your data; if one hard drive crashes all the data of the array is lost RAID 1 - full redundancy; your RAID provides 2 TB of data storage; all data is mirrored, i.e. at any given time there are two (or more) copies of your data (you can usually set the number of copies you want, i.e. you could set the RAID to provide for 1 TB storage with 4 copies); if a hard drive crashes, you can continue to use one of the other copies, replace the crashed hard drive and rebuild the array; data will be accessible at all times; RAID 1 usually improves read performance and reduces write performance; due to the mirroring the capacity is limited RAID 5 - complicated to explain: it essentially does not provide for a full mirror of your data (like RAID 1 does), but saves separate 'parity data' to repair it. In case of a drive crash, you can replace the crashed hard drive to then rebuild the whole array. As no exact copy of the data exists somewhere in the system, you can not access data, while the array is rebuilt. More capacity than RAID 1 and less than RAID 0. (essential reading see article)