HumanMedia

I am very eager to hear some reviews from those who have upgraded from the original

Feeding the Qutest 24bit 704khz or 768khz bypasses its upsampling. All good if your upsampling is higher quality than the Qutest. BUT all DSD is decimated down to 24bit 704khz. So there will be fewer conversions and data loss if you feed it upsampled PCM at 704khz or 768khz.

Fascinating stuff! I have a similar setup but with only one eR and to keep thing simpler, my OpticalModule isn’t even in the chain anymore. So my current setup is: router - ethernet - B-EtherRegen-A - optical - opticalRendu I wonder if I would get an improvement following your lead and reconfiguring to: router - ethernet - A-EtherRegen-B - ethernet - OpticalModule - optical - opticalRendu Any thoughts?

A week back trialling Roon and trying to work the way it is designed and I now conclude that the user experience is terrible. It will be the sole reason why I will not continue with it. Whoever designed it used the wrong design principles for what it is. They used a web site product catalog paradigm for what should have an app-utility design. In this case a good user experience is not lots of catalog images. Web site design is for infrequent visits meant to communicate brand and a limited range of products. Think product catalog, with casual browsing of unknown items. App design is for frequent usage with more complexity and a higher rate of user outcomes with less 'browsing' interaction (scrolling eye scanning etc). Think a tool to find access larger number of items and a more outcome driven usage with a larger number of desired tasks. Such a shame they didnt get a proper UX person in from the ground up, rather than a web designer with a narrow range of design experience. Such a shame as technically it has a good foundations and features. But if the core use of quickly finding accessing and using the core items in the system is so handicapped, for me it does not make up for it.

Yeah, no way I will trust Roon to identify my artists and albums, that is all switched to only use my metadata tags.

I returned to try Roon to try it again with this trial. STILL no list view for albums and artists? Am I missing some setting? half of of my releases don’t have room for the title of the release, and I often can’t tell the difference between different releases, as the differentiating bit I add to the end is chopped off. It’s even worse with classical releases with almost every title truncated. I am forced to do across and down scans of big dumb icons for everything? I am not in a store doing random browsing amongst stuff I don’t know, it’s my collection. I just want a small icon and a wide space for the title of each album or artist, and rapidly scroll up and down with my eye in the same spot to read the titles. And it still doesn’t sound as good as the free Logitech Media Server system, and no I don’t have DSP or any nonsense turned on. What a missed opportunity. I will keep trying with it to see if I can twist it to work the way I do, but right now I won’t be continuing with a pad subscription.

Some techno. Hard when it needs to be but with delicate production quality

IMO the user interface on both apps is poor, but Yate has so many power user features and allows access to so many details, plus it’s batch processing is extremely powerful. It’s great to be able to point it at 300,000 files and create reports of which of them are missing album artist tags, or have control characters in the tag text, or what file names do not conform to Mac or windows filenaming conventions, or which files have embedded art, or which dont. You can basically get it to look for ANY conditions and create a report, if you want to dive into its scripting you can get it to batch correct things automatically as well, but I prefer it to report and I will manually go and edit them. It also detects invalid tag parameters, corruptions, garbage inter-tag data and other structural problems. The app is bristling which so much power user stuff it does over complicate the presented user interface, but despite all of the visual noise, I still find its directness of doing simple editing tasks more intuitive than MP3Tag. I think it was one of the first apps to support editing of multiple instances of the same tag, which most players now support. I’m guessing that most other editors now support this? From the same company you can can a free drag and drop Audio File Health checker app and a DFF to DSF converter. I have zero affiliation and I am usually harshly critical of the visual design of user interfaces, but in Yates case, it’s power and utility get my recommendation, despite the lack of polish and over-featured clutter of its interface. Yate (macOS only) https://2manyrobots.com/yate/ the other free utilities I mentioned (macOS only) https://2manyrobots.com/plaster/

I was underwhelmed by MP3Tag on Windows years ago, moved to Yate on macOS which I found far better, now years later MP3Tag is on macOS, but Yate still appears to be the better application.

My suggestion is to immediately stop sharing the JS-2 between the HMS and TT2 as that completely bypasses the Opto DX. Also both of the Chord HMS and TT2 draw well above 1A at times so they really shouldn’t be run from an LPS. I am biased but my ideal UpTone Power supply implementation would be a separate JS-2 on everything. And get one of the custom 15v JS-2 (ask SuperDad about this) for the HMS which for some reason sounds better with 15v. The TT2 is less picky with voltage as it is used to change its internal supercapacitor supply, but 15v wouldn’t hurt here either. To save space and money, I guess ypu could use LPS 1.2 on the EtherRegen and ISORegen.

Go on @cool_chris - take him up on it, what is one more to compare and this might be even better. You are the best person to compare them. Wont you need two, one at each end to match receiver sensitivity?

What is your favourite SFP from your list?

Now at around 15 days burn in of the PlanetTech SFP. Yes SFP really do need a good burn in. They have improved considerably. The high end metallic ansound has gone and the entire midrange has a wonderful clarity. The only real negative is a slightly accentuated lower treble. It sounds clean but just a bit too elevated in the upper midrange and lower treble. Quoting Chris from the ‘novel way of...’ thread who has tried ‘many dozens’ of SFP “I was searching for many months and testing extensive a lot of SFPs and changes between them were very big .Each had a strong character in some aspects but was lacking in the others.” Now the use of commercial networking SFP seems to me to be the weakness of using optical connections in audio systems. We have quality low noise, reclocked switches with SFP connections, etherRegens, opticalRendus and opticalModules. All wonderful BUT then we put noisy commercial grade SFPs right inside them next to all of that low noise precisely clocked circuitry. Which got me thinking, dreaming actually, of a company who plugs this Achilles heel and creates an audio-grade low noise SFP to compliment the rest of our quality networking chain. Just as I was waking from this dream of unboxing such a device, I noticed that the logo on the box was “UpTone Audio”. @Superdad was this a dream, or a vision of the near future? Please tell me it was true? An audio quality UpTone Audio SFP? Please?

While Im burning in my PlanetTech SFPs, Ive been going back and forth to compare between an optical connection and an ethernet connection into the EtherRegen to contrast the difference (then on to an UltraRendu). Just doing this the difference is an eye opener. There is not a clear cut winner in all respects but there is definitely a noticeable difference. So I will go out on a limb and say YES - there will be a difference between eR + uR and eR + oR. However will it be an improvement? I cant answer that as its so system dependent, plus finding the right sounding SFP is another chapter in getting the sound to your taste. Oh and another finding. I had a USB tweak between the UltraRendu downstream to the MScaler. It was a definite improvement. However with the optical connection, what ever that tweak was doing is no longer needed, in fact it sounds worse with the tweak in place with an upstream optical connection. So changing something upstream made the downstream tweak not just irrelevant but a negative. Im just thinking about that IsoRegen... Plus from the parts mentioned the outgoing USB in the OpticalRendu sounds like the parts list for the Phoenix. Im not saying its as good as, but as Barrows suggests, you might find the OpticalRendu output by itself is actually better than having an IsoRegen in the chain. Or like me, by making a tweak upstream, the IsoRegen is less necessary.