Jakenz

Yes, I wasn't disagreeing with your point, indeed I agree the US distributor is unlikely to be at all happy with being undercut, just making an observation re a pricing factor in play.

Expect removal of German VAT of 19% for export outside the EU accounts for much of this difference, so @russellbobbyis probably getting it cheaper than German locals can (assuming US customs duties and/or sales taxes are not material).

Interestingly Cybershaft, at the bottom of the silver cable page you linked to, say cable capacitance and length is a factor for square wave, but not sine. Presumably this is based on their experience measuring phase noise across a variety of equipment & cable designs and combinations.

Indeed! FYI Cybershaft repeat this as a standing statement on their product page for their new pure silver 75 ohm cable, without which assurance fewer of their target market of Cybershaft 50 ohm clock-owning clients would be interested methinks. 😉 https://cybershaft.shop/products/75ohm-pure-silver-bnc-cable

I like that we both have Puritan + GM setup, albeit with systems at rather different levels. At the risk of going a little off topic, how did you initially signal ground with a Puritan PSM + GM prior to getting the Route Master? Back slightly more on topic, a cheap / easy and very effective clock cable tweak I and a number of others over at Headfi have recently tried with satisfying results is this: using copper foil tape with conductive adhesive to wrap the BNC male/female junctions at both ends of the clock cable. Funnily enough I was indirectly prompted to try this by @JohnSwenson 's emphasis on the quality of shielding being key for sine, which I predominantly use, sounds best in my system. I had also read separately in a RF radio context that very high frequency RFI/EMI finds easy ingress / egress (particularly the latter) through even the smallest pin holes or discontinuities in shielding, easily reducing shielding effectiveness by tens of dB. In particular RF pigtails* with their additional junctions are not great, shielding has been shown to drop by tens or potentially scores of dB. So when I got the Minicircuits HP filter recommended by John I found myself looking at a series of BNC junctions. Which got me thinking about the mechanical and potentially conductive/shielding imperfection of the often loose BNC junction vs say an SMA screw type connection. So I wrapped the whole filter (the two BNC junctions) at the DAC end in copper foil and it sounded clearly better. I did the same at the clock end for the cable/clock junction - a similar additive improvement. Tried it with a range of clock cables (I have about 5, tried it on the best 3), they were all satisfyingly improved. The character of the audible improvement is similar to reducing jitter by other means I've experienced (signal grounding, better clock cables etc) - a more full bodied, spacious and dynamic sound with less edginess and glare. I can't listen without it now, my system sounds a little shrill, thin and flat without it. This is another easily audible change I'd be interested in knowing whether it shows up in measurements of clocks & DACs. *I'm aware many DACs and other clocked devices have - of necessity - internal pigtails from the clock board to the BNC female jack on the back of the DAC. My R26 has this with an MCX to BNC pigtail. Following the lead of @Stellabagpuss and @rodthebod I replaced the pigtail with an MCX/BNC adaptor (no cable in between) to which I directly attached my Harmonic Tech clock cable, including foil wrapping the entire BNC junction, now sitting just above the circuit board. Sure enough this brought further improvements of the character I describe above. However it was quite impractical as put too much lateral stress on the tiny MCX socket and couldn't fit through the back panel without modification. Or even close the lid fully. I'm not in a hurry to do this, so just a proof of concept/validation of a theory for now. Perhaps I'll replace the pigtail with something better as I understand @MartinT is doing. Sorry a bit of a spiel there, but hopefully not too off topic and of some interest, especially to the folks on this thread with the ability to see if this shows up in measurements.

Hi @Clockmeister I've followed your posts here and on the TAS forum with interest. By contrast my only tool to measure the performance of my gear is my ears, trial and error experience with a much smaller range of gear than you have to hand. Still, I have enough to notice a few repeatable patterns / correlations. So one repeatable phenomenon I've observed recently I'd be interested in knowing if you've ever tried to measure, is the audibly beneficial effect of signal grounding and vibration damping on external clocks and DACs. Addition of a Quartz Acoustic ground box to a spare BNC or s/pdif RCA of the Leo Bodnar, the LHY OCK-2 and my R26 DAC lifts their performance markedly, a more dynamic, spacious yet less digital sound. Vocals softer, more full bodied and papable. Ditto re adding A5 sheets of fo.Q's potent 2mm thick damping sheets (SH-22K/21K) to the chassis of each of those three as well as my LHY SW-8 switch. In the case of the petite LB I have it sitting on a sheet. This signal grounding benefit is on top of my baseline of a Puritan PSM156 power conditioner and their Ground master with dedicated ground rod. The effect of the signal grounding and vibration damping is additive and sufficiently pronounced (my system sounds much better with it) it wouldn't surprise me if was measurable /observable in a cleaner square wave and/or lower phase noise at lower offsets. I'd be interested in your observations here. To acknowledge the thread topic I'm not yet an EtherRegen owner... Waiting for the ER 2 release, but would suggest ER owners might wish to try fo.Q damping on their ERs given how potent an effect it has on my LHY switch. Indeed @Dandou is well placed to try this should he so wish...

It is easy on one windows PC to select boot menu / priority, I agree, I have done this. And successfully booted once last week as you know. Other PC is work PC with locked down/inaccessible bios boot menu. Anyway I will buy and try a USB drive. (I also had a spare second USB SSD I was going to try but it was faulty… I am having some bad luck).

I have not tried a USB stick yet (mine are too old, low capacity) or USB SSD (I have one, but it is not spare, an in use storage drive). I will buy and try a USB drive. And maybe also borrow another PC. Thanks.

@antonellocaroli I tried rewriting the Samsung SD card as well as a third Sandisk SD card, including also trying the flashing again from another PC. Still no success with any GP flashed SD card on thr X240 PC. Same error messages occur each time. I was going to try booting using these cards from a second PC I have available to me but the bios is locked down so unable to access boot menu to boot from USB. Will need to find/borrow another (third) PC to try it on. Have you encountered this behaviour/these errors before? Likely explanation?

Thanks Antonello. As far as I am aware the only OS on the PC is Windows 10 installed on its SSD, I've not tried to install GP on its SSD if that's what you're asking. I have only tried to run GP on this laptop by booting from the flashed SD card in a USB reader. Used this image for flashing both the SanDisk and the Samsung SD cards - GentooPlayer-UEFI-OpenRc-8.10.img which I downloaded a few weeks ago. Will try reflashing the SD as you suggest.

@antonellocaroli I am trying to run GP on a USB / SD drive on a Thinkpad X240 but am running into problems. @Dandou is helping me with Diretta and GP setup but suggested I contact you for assistance here. I managed to run GP successfully last week on a 32Gb SanDisk drive (a slow low class, spare from an old phone) with the X240. I was able to use GP to get the signature of my hardware for the trial key you subsequently provided. However I was unable to get GP to boot again from that 32GB SanDisk. It produced these error screens repeatedly. I concluded that SanDisk must have been faulty so I today bought a new SD card. A 128Gb Samsung Pro Plus. Much faster to flash GP with Balena Etcher. Then booting X240 using GP on the Samsung SD this evening (NZ time) it proceeded much further than the last attempts with the SanDisk, to the point it appeared on my network with an allocated Ip address. However it would not respond to ip_address:5000 being typed into a browser of another computer. Note also there were multiple error messages in the boot log. I have tried this 5 times now including restarting the router and switch first. No success, same errors each time. See below screenshots. Appreciate any direction you can provide. Cheers Jake

Hi there, I am in the early stages of setting up my Rosanna to work with GentooPlayer with the help of @Dandou - waiting for my test key - but in the meantime just doing some ASIO Foobar high bitrate internet radio streaming and I can confidently make one initial observation: the Rosanna really likes being grounded with the Quartz Acoustic Premium ground box - the same one I already have connected to my DAC. Bass much punchier, weighty, soundstage goes from flattish to spacious, airy, this with internet radio. I mean this is super early days, no burn-in, basic software setup (will move to Gentoo + HQP) but already sounds quite excellent with the ground box. To be continued...

That's a very positive first impression, especially given your baseline of the A26 & R8. Appreciate from your subsequent posts (incl re use of the DI-20HE) it sounds like you're still in the process of finding optimal settings etc, but I'd be interested in your thoughts as to where it sits relative to those DACs, which I realise are themselves very different and in a different price class. This was on my radar when I got the R26 last year, but had next to no reviews or user experience back then, so great to seeit is getting some increasing exposure, positive user impressions.

I do indeed. Haven't listed to it for a while, been meaning to sell it, but somehow I never seem to get around to selling things. Which is good for comparisons if not so good for my bank balance. Speaking of which I have a similarly parked Gustard U18 DDC I can try the LB with in various combinations including dual-clocking the R26 or the U18 alone, test the special R26 'synergy' postulation...

Intrigued by the shared experiences of several R26 owners who found a really positive improvement with the LB, including one chap who felt it bested his AD Emperor (not sure which exact model) with the R26, I've ordered one to try out. It's not expensive so I figured what the heck. Reading your first-hand impression of its sound with the R26 is reassuring as I appreciate you are very familiar with what a well clocked system sounds like. I will compare the LB to my LHY OCK-2 and OCK-1. I upgraded to the OCK-2 earlier this year after having the OCK-1 for six months, which itself brought really nice improvements to the R26, but the upgrade itch got to me. My Focal Sopras' beryllium tweeters were not a super easy listen with either the R26 or the SMSL VMV D2 AK4499 prior to the OCK-1's arrival. Both LHY clocks with the R26 are good enough to respond differences in clock cables used, the best one so far by some margin being the Harmonic Tech Digital Copper III. And yes, I acknowledge the uncertainty as to the actual phase noise of the LHY clocks, given the OCK-1 unit measured by John Swenson had 1hz offset noise around -90db and 10hz offset around -120db IIRC, and LHY/Beatechnick's response of just removing phase noise specs. I don't wish to reopen that can of worms, just to acknowledge it. Even so, that's around 20db better than the LB's specs. One would expect the OCK-2 to measure/perform better than the OCK-1, which certainly seems to be borne out by both my first hand experience and that of folk who got OCK-2 and compared it to their high spec'd reference clocks like the Mutec REF10. Anyway, given the gulf in phase noise specs, I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a little scepticism and trepidation that this will turn out to be an expensive experiment, but I'm keeping an open mind and I'll be interested to hear what I hear with the LB when it arrives.