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I mean, as a coder, there's a real easy way to conclusively prove that there is no difference. Grab the bytes themselves from the stream, and then compare them - byte by byte - to show that the digital data reaching the PC is literally **IDENTICAL**. (And, seriously, I'm absolutely sure that they are 100% identical, because they HAVE TO BE. Digital data often contains opcodes, checksums and use compression dictionaries and so forth - these things cannot differ, or the stream would just break. It wouldn't sound slightly worse or better. It would just straight up totally break and stop working. Digital data has to be identical. It really cannot be any other way, or computers just wouldn't work at all.)
As an audio engineer I can say that with anything branded as "audiophile" gear there's a 90% chance it's bollocks. Speaking of, audiophile content is a neverending source of memes for us.
what are the legitimate "audiophile" products off the top of my head, headphones and speakers are a no brainer you get standard run of the mill and you get more expensive higher quality stuff (although there is some hard DR to be had at the high end) AMPs and DACs (again huge DR at the high end) and that's about it? digital is digital its when you turn the digital to analogue where you can get noise and stuff
Exactly me when I saw the thumbnail. I've been looking at inexpensive network switches recently, so that DLINK box was immediately recognizable to me and I was like "Oh dear god no, how, why, please no" followed by immediate "Oh yeah, well if you're buying a network switch thinking it's for better audio, you're probably an idiot anyway"
@@WiiNV They already do that with "Military Grade".... anyone who's ever been in the military will tell you that shit in the military breaks like nothing else.
So, "fast" capacitors are kinda a thing, sorta. It's possible that they replaced the aluminium electrolytic capacitors with low ESR versions. It s just possible that the low ESR capacitors might reduce phase jitter on the data going through the switch. So that will improve the sound quality, right? No. As Linus points out, it is an error corrected digital audio stream. Any jitter introduced in the switch will be eliminated by buffering at the receiving end when the data stream is decoded back into audio.
Linus is not god or something. There IS such a thing as 'fast caps' & U can definitely hear the difference. My fave R the 630 volt Sonen 'parallel' style winding ones. They have a more clear sound than others, & R not even expensive =) 'Slower' caps tend 2 'moosh' the sound with 'overhang' type artifacts, whereas the Solen R 'transparent'.
I can't even imagine if they have a decryptor, decoder and encoder to check if an audio file goes through, process it and return an enhanced one :D That would be breaking all copyrights...
I'm happy to find that Paul from PS Audio agrees with you on this subject. He preaches about the effects of every possible component in the system and makes suggestions about which should be upgraded when and tries to quantify those subjective gains. He put out a video a couple years ago called "Will an ethernet switch matter?" and stated then, as you are now, that it just doesn't matter. If their music room with the IRS V's and professional ears can't tell a difference, then there really isn't one. I also liked your use of obscenely expensive headphones to test with. Thank you for injecting your expertise on the subject!
Indeed, if a packet gets lost or corrupted beyond the ability of error correction to repair it then the receiver will request the packet again. Since you can transmit data over ethernet far faster than audio requires only in the most heavily loaded networks is it likely that a resent packet wouldn't get there in time to be played without a gap and if your network is that heavily loaded that's not an issue a cheaply built and grossly overpriced switch is going to fix.
@@roycsinclair Aye, in addition to that, when there is packet loss the audio/video typically becomes grossly distorted and unpleasant. Not subtly changing the high/lows or whatever snake oil description given.
@@dandellapaolera8169 "may improve Super HD Audio, like a hi-res WAV file" Could you provide a mechanism for how it could possibly improve the audio? I don't see how the audio format matters provided the data is digitally sent with various layers of error correction, i.e. vast majority of cases. If there was this level of corruption when just streaming audio then the entire internet should be massively suffering for all use cases.
Indeed there is no audio at all going over an ethernet, LAN or any device that is transmitted data in whatever devices are connected in that way, either switch or router. There is a difference between the two. A switch passes everything where as a router can view packets and recognize DOS attacks if setup to do so, it is a first very basic line of defense against some viruses that a switch does nothing for, at least as I understand the difference, but, I could be wrong.
I actually really hoped that you had done a cooperation with Dave Rat on this one - he has a lot videos, where he compares signals, to see what is right or wrong.
To determine if there really is any difference whatsoever, you can record the same song on both devices, then reverse the polarity on one and play it together (same device at the same time, not just in the same room) with the other. If they are identical, the result will fully cancel out for absolute silence.
Not even necessary. Download the same mp3 files twice. Would it alter them? Of course not. You want the original. As he said: It can't even work in theory.
@@herzglass yeah true but in this video they're doing a listening test which also isn't necessary, my point is just you can provide more convincing proof that as signal 1 - signal 2 = 0 then signal 1= signal 2
@@ThomasZiano It doesn't require much basic computer knowledge to figure out a switch like that must be a scam. I suppose the test is somewhat necessary for people who don't know much about the digital world.
There are disturbances not involving bit changes, such as wobbling packet delays not compensated by playback buffers. If once every second, the playback is paused for 30 ms, the sound will be really bad. That's why all modern playback equipment has buffering to avoid pauses in the middle of sounds.
5:15 even if it's clearly not the case here, "fast" capacitors are a thing. They have low series resistance/inductance, so they usually do a better job filtering high frequency transients.
Thank you for clarifying that. I kind of choked when Linus said that. They have an EE on staff and didn’t bother at least showing him the claim for a laugh. It still has zero audio benefit because it’s best used for switching psu’s, and an unmanaged switch would have a completely negligible noise contribution compared to the other devices transferring data. And _maybe_ an analog buffer. I def don’t have one in my buffer pedal. And I use clean signals way more than distorted.
These don't just improve audio quality. I've used one for 6 months or so. I needed a new car a few weeks ago because my 1974 Pinto finally died. So I went on Carvana and purchased a 1986 Oldsmobile Firenza. Imagine my surprise when the delivery truck rolled a BRAND NEW FERRARI F8 TRIBUTO into my driveway! I thought it was a mistake, but on the driver's seat was a very nice thank you note from AQVOX. THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD RUN A COMPANY!
This takes me back to a video several years ago in which an engineer deconstructed a headphone set beats by Dr Dre (I always forget which way round it goes though I think they were bought by Apple and increased in price by 100%) and priced the components at $14 making them the cheapest crap on the market while celebrity experts were rating them 5 stars and idiots were buying them for $400. I still see people now wearing them and looking really proud and I always think they have no way out of the confirmation bias that controls their world.
As I work with audio over ethernet, I already know that you can even run that with cheap cat6 cables; the information doesn't degrade, and I did not care to replace my fancy dante cables. Considering we need to patch this audio through more than one patchbay and switch, and you can still hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC, this was such an open door. Glad you made the video. Would LOVE to see it degooped, but I know that it's really hard to do (friend of mine did it for the Human Gear Animato bass pedal).
I deal in access control and surveillance equipment and while cable quality can affect the length of a run of cable, it's pretty irrelevant in real world applications because integrators can always split the runs up with POE injectors, POE midspans, and ethernet to fiber media converters.
I reversed image searched that symbol and it seems to be a merkaba cube. Very quickly reading about it "The symbol represents pure and divine energy while constantly harmonizing, spinning, balancing, moving and flowing in all four directions ceaselessly." So perhaps they are trying to use some "new age" mysticism or magic to improve your listening experience.
This is wild. The thing about audiophile scams that is so confusing is that audiophiles usually seem very interested in the underlying audio technology... which is why it makes no sense that these scams work on some of them.
Linus, glad you mentioned digital signal. Reminds me of those gold plated optical cables sold on Amazon. Hell, they're even sold in the UK at Curry's PC World stores at over £20! People are stupid!
As far as I know, the gold plating in the connectors is supposed to make them more malleable (gold is more malleable) so they should last more connect-dissconect cycles.
@@sebascorrea97 Like this video, fiber optic cable is digital. Plus, it's light. There's no current. No reason for a metal connection. (An armored fiber optic cable needs the metal protection to be grounded). In electronics, gold plating is used because it incredibly resistant to oxidation. The gold coating isn't thick enough for the connector malleability to be changed. Malleability of the metal doesn't even seem good for a connector.
@@brianwest2775 I would think malleability is desirable because female connectors might have different measurements (within tolerances) and you'd still want your cable to be pluggable. I have no idea if such a thin layer would help, though. What you say about oxidation is true. And while what you say about digital signals is also true, I don't understand what it has to do with the comment 😇.
@@sebascorrea97 Gold plating on electrical connectors is a layer only a few microns thick (0.001mm). It cannot effect the malleability of the contacts. That is done by choosing a certain alloy and annealing to soften/harden it. Source: I work in a factory that makes electric connectors.
Audiophiles and people who go hardcore on espresso (roasting their own beans, mills made from Unobtanium, special tools that mix the ground beans in a very specific way, special discs for the espresso to flow through) f*cking scare me, but they're a godsend for companies looking to screw over pretentious customers with too much money.
ANYTHING digital - As long as all of the ones and zeros are present with no extra, in order and on time, the data is identical every time. Converting between analog and digital is another story. Analog is digital with infinite resolution. Some people have said that optical discs are not a one for one recording. If not, it is malfunctioning.
I’m a electrical engineer by education (bachelors and masters degrees), and an expert in networking by trade, working for a media broadcasting service provider. Linus explained exactly why this switch cannot possibly do anything. Sound is digitized, encoded and packetized at the server and the packets are sent over the network to the client computer. The packets contain the 1’s and 0’s that make up the sound. There are several methods inherent in networking protocols to ensure that not a single 1 or 0 is ever missing or out of place. If so much as a single zero or one is not where it’s supposed to be, the packet is considered corrupted and it is discarded. Some network protocols will request the packet be resent, and some just dump it and move on without it (causing degradation since information is now missing). None of this digital wizardry is done on a switch. Switches only care about forwarding packets. Switches never inspect packets, much less make any changes to them. To retrofit a switch with packet inspection would require a whole computer-like addition (like a Raspberry Pi) integrated into the chassis. This only gets you packet inspection, not data changing. For that you need commercial level processing (think custom ROM or FPGA). At work we actually have such technology and it is extremely expensive. Also, if the data is encrypted there is almost nothing any switch or network device can do. Some special industry network appliances can decrypt some forms of data streams, but they are insanely expensive and require passwords and/or integration with your server’s security protocols. So, no, you don’t get any changes in streaming packets by changing a power supply or some capacitors.
I mean, one could argue that an L3 switch does a certain amount of inspecting and rewriting. Not in any capacity that would be meaningful to application or presentation data, but still. Not trying to be pedantic. Nice layman explaining of tcp vs udp though :) I can use this
Worked in high end audio for 12 years, been a record producer for 35 years. One of my favorite things in the studio, is to have a red button that lights up when you push it. Whenever people are whining about something, I'll push the red button and ask them if they like it better now. 95% of the time, the answer is yes. The red button is connected to nothing of course. Audio perception is a minefield for placebo and psychoacoustics. Given how powerful suggestion is to psychoacoustics, it's pretty easy to get away with snakeoil. All that being said, if you believe something is better, did you get your monies worth?
Audio engineers at live events more often than not have empty faders labelled "guitar monitor" and "bass monitor" and so on. Whenever one of the musicians ask them to make them louder in the monitor mix, they'll push the fader up and the musicians will give them a thumbs up and be happy.
I studied an "audio engineering" diploma a while back and one of the first things the lecturer did in the studio was sweep the EQ knobs and ask us if we heard a difference? Some folks nodded. He then pointed out that everyone that nodded their heads were lying... because the EQ circuit was not even engaged in the channel in question. He then did engage it to show the difference. I think many of my class mates missed the important lesson. Yes, suggestion is a powerful thing.
Yup, my friend Jack Clegg who worked as an engineer for Decca and then Air Studios had one of those too. He called it the 'producer switch'. He also had a rotary control which wasn't wired to anything for those who wanted a knob to turn.
heh, that's a great joke. I find it interesting that in live professional audio the system is still more or less analogue, but the trick here is all of the connections are balanced at the line level. Of course, digital technology has improved here as well as the mixer channels can be shorter and the mixer can be split into two with the Engineer's control interface sits at the back of the theatre and is tethered by something as simple as Cat 6 to the terminal side that also contains the "mixer." If you want good sound, you make the shortest line level connections possible and keep the power mains separate from those connections.
@@WJCTechyman I seem to remember 'back in the day' the wisdom was: a) Use good quality kit (not excellent) but this is often for mechanical and 'jointing' reasons (not intrinsic to the cable itself) b) Keep your lead length short/reasonable - for both analogue and digital. Less noise transmission and noise susceptibility. Avoid coiling. c) Power - watch for line interference, with either noisy mains power or noisy power supplies and watch how the mains cables are routed. Keep them away from signal/data cables as much as practicable. And I think you're >95% there. Which in the audio world is good enough for my ears. Then you start RTFMing, and talking to the 'old sweats/greybeards'. Turn your BS meter on though, otherwise you might start researching leylines. 🙂
I love the fact it just doesn't even stand up to a millisecond of scrutiny if you have ANY grasp of anything surrounding networking. Like, it just makes ZERO sense.
@@regiondeltas There are specialised hubs for streaming in pro audio/video - but they support AVB which provides stuff like stream bandwidth reservation, fixed latency, specialised QOS etc with an industry standard discovery/control protocol.
I used to do car audio competitions. One time I was tuning and had my eyes closed while I adjusted a setting so I could concentrate. I was increasing a certain frequency and could hear I was making it better. Then opened my eyes and saw I forgot to push a button and I wasn't adjusting anything. Psychoacoustics is a very real thing. People think they should hear something, so they do. That's where the good reviews are coming from and that's where these snake oil audiophile companies make their living from.
I have done single-blind and double-blind listening tests on audiophiles. Their results were woefully poor - when asked to describe the difference between two signals, there was any amount of confirmation bias and auto-suggestion at work, and also a desire to hear to hear things that weren't there in order to demonstrate their supposedly superior ears.
There was this audio engineer that had to deal with audiophiles and one of the things he would do is adjust knobs and sliders on his mixing console that weren't assign to anything. He would then ask the audiophile if it sounded better and they would always say yes. Even though he didn't change a thing.
This is true of many things. For instance, people tasting cheap wine with a story about it being expensive will say it tastes better than cheap wine they're told is cheap. Brain scans show that when they're told its expensive and special, more areas of the brain controlling pleasure light up, so the experience really does change for them. Bottom line is we can't trust our brains to be objective when it comes to something as subjective as taste, whether it be music or wine.
I'm 100% sure that those weird triangle pattern stickers/buttons that were glued in everywhere are the real "special sauce", aligning the energy flow for increased audio clarity by magic or some crap. I wish I were kidding.
They look like a sticker you might put under a glass bead to make it look from a distance like it's a faceted cut stone. Snake oil within the snake oil; just greasy serpents all the way down.
You weren't; some doorstoppers claim to align audio properly by reducing vibrations. A well-known snake oil reviewer Darko Audio was one of those reviewers that used it.
they kind of look like anti-tamper stickers. Lockpickinglawyer did a video on them and would make sense if theyre trying to hide the tech that they are using
About 25 or something years ago (damn, I'm old) I had this teacher who was also an audiophile. He claimed, that golden CDs sound better than the regular ones, simply because they're golden. We (electronics students) tried to explain, that it is a digital signal, 1s and 0s, it doesn' matter if it is saved on a golden disc or one made of birdcrap - as long as it is readable it will be identical. Like talking to a brick wall. That's when I realised that you can sell any crap to an audiophile for loads of money and he'll just defend your product better that you'd do yourself.
Like the gold plated hdmi cables from Monster. Doesn't make a difference since it is all digital and like Linus said, it may be unprocessable because of DRM encryption. (OR 3DES for network cables) If the HDMI cable was analog signalling somehow, then it might make a difference in quality of the signal. Next up gold flash plated, honey dielectric SDIF coaxial cables. Analog capacitance games on a digital audio cable.
A lot of years ago I saw a discussion similar to this regarding wooden knobs on an audio amp. The "upgraded" wooden knobs were supposedly performance-enhancing. Wooden knobs, on the amp, nowhere near the speakers...
But were they remastered for CDs? The mastering process alters the recording to match the medium it is recorded on. Records and tape needed adjustments to counter how the medium itself effects the sound (simple example is Dolby noise reduction). In the early days of CDs they took the record masters and digitized them which is less than optimal. If the gold CDs were remastered for CDs then they would have sounded better. Or they could have been typical audiophile bunk.
@@roberteltze4850 I'm pretty sure they were NOT remastered. Some German "Hi-Fi" magazine back in these days did write about a blind-test they did. They wrote the same stupid stuff. Identical CDs, Gold and Silver each, claiming they could hear a difference - of course "Gold" sounded clearer, more punchy 🙂. Same snake oil, like with (almost) any audio AV-cable, but they need the money from the advertising. If you look at the pay for AV-magazines and their ads, the amount of super-special cables for anything is huge. There "might" be some valid reasons spending a LITTLE bit money for some analog cables, but I believe it's mostly people buying this stuff to make themselves feel better or superior.
I love Creedence Clearwater Revival. I bought the gold CD, and despite EQing the crap out of it, it still sounded harsh, bright, and brittle. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am an audiophile, but I think sometimes trying to make something better can backfire.
Probably 30 years ago, or more, the editor of a HiFi/Stereo magazine made the remark, "An audiophile is someone who listens to the equipment, not the music." So true.
This is the first half a problem. Second one is that often they listen to imaginary equipment. I mean equipment make sense if we talk about measurable parameters
@@CrisOrlandoBR Yes. Exactly. I use ebay DACs for pulling the audio off of HDMI from my game systems to use with my setup's mixers and an old 1970s or 1980s stereo receiver. Even for a $10-20 device, the audio is good enough.
I recall a "test" between tube and digital amps. The "experts" flipped a switch to determine which had a better sound. Almost all agreed that the tube amp was "richer". Then the switch box was opened, showing that it wasn't even connected.
Yeah I was not satisfied with this video. We still don't know if they added anything to the device itself. So many easy tests could have been done to verify it actually doing nothing. Maybe stating that it COULD NOT possibly do anything because it being digital and encrypted, he saw no reason to further test it.
The point is... it will reverse only the sounds coming out of the recording. If there was anything at all that was different, a sound added, it will come out even if it is faint. People do audio extraction all the time to remove certain voices. Not perfect, but it is the basic gist of it.
Nothing wrong with selling a base product! But I get what you mean. If I was D-Link I would have made them have a fat disclaimer saying D-Link has nothing to do with their product lol But it’s like buying a base model anything and upgrading it yourself. Except this company didn’t change or upgrade crap. So yeah Like Linus said, we should be able to trust, but it’s so hard to find honest people/companies. That’s why I flipping do tons of research 😂
@@GunmetalG I get what you're saying because people take cars and make them "more" by modifying them. My point was more because of their marketing saying "Don't get a normal D-Link router for reasons get this one for reasons!"
I love "audiophile" videos like this because they always remind me of the legendary article from years ago about people claiming to be audiophiles not being able to tell the difference between "premium" speaker cables and _coat hangers._
you shud chek out techmoan, he have tested a lot of typical older snake oil products , like cd demageticer , cd beveler and other gadgets that do jack shit.
@@jokeletsplay I was actually trying to find the _original_ original article to source here, but everything kept referencing a 2008 post on Consumerist that looks to be unavailable and I was on a phone so I couldn't Wayback Machine it properly to see if it was indeed THE article I remember reading. Maybe GearSlutz or HydrogenAudio has a copy of the original? Timeframe would be between 2005 and 2008 since I remember first reading it no later than 2009.
Fun fact: 9 out of 10 top rated sommeliers in California couldn't tell a difference between white and red wine in a blind test. And they do that for a living. What are the chances for a regular Joe-shmoe (with more money than sense and who self-imposes the 'audiophile' moniker) not to be fooled by coat hangers?
In the early 1980s I was an audio engineering student. My prof drilled into us over and over again "If it sounds good it is good". That practicality has served me well. Train your ears, listen critically, then ignore all marketing hype. Go with your ears. If it sounds good, it is good.
@@nguyenphutrong2492 U R just being silly. Cables top out well under the price of cars, & a lot of people R just buying them as a conversation piece & 'bragging rights' & don't even care about sound quality, at all. 4 instance, planar speakers all sound like $hit, pretty much = jaggy & harsh & compressed, & sometimes they would want 'affirmation' like asking what I think & I'm like 'pretty cool (if U like the sound of breaking glass & nails on a blackboard =)) = "may want 2 compare 2 what we carry & C what U think' =))
huh, just like how i think about music in general...it may be promoting racism and illegal things....if it sounds good, it's good...no matter the message it holds....it's like poetry and yapanese....one obviously sounds better since it rhymes, while the otter can still sound good in it's own way
Often in musician and engineer circles that I'm in, people make fun of Behringer because it's cheap. And I'm like... okay, but if it does the job well, it's good enough for me
Even if it's a placebo effect, after they watched this video that placebo effect will be gone and their expensive purchase is ruined. It's basically similar when your body having a serious illness but your life is just fine and well. But after you got diagnosed by the doctor, then you're starting feeling sick and weak.
For future audiophile tests, have someone else swap the cables for the subjects. This way you can do "control" tests where they pretend to change cables, but plug in the same, and see if the subject thinks one or the other are better.
The subjects shouldn't even know there are Ethernet cables involved, you could tell some of them immediately knew that Ethernet couldn't make a difference and were influenced by that realization. Heck, they shouldn't even have test subjects, just compare the audio signals directly to show that there is, objectively, no difference.
Even if this is understandable as a procedure, a marked difference would have been noticed if this was not a scam. Frankly, paying 800 dollars for this is insane.
Network Engineer here! Perfect explanation of layer 2 networking, tcp/ip, and https. Good job! A lotta folks dont dive that deep and I love seeing that you all did :)
@@tuckersguitarfiasco Search for Professor Messer on RU-vid. He goes over the CompTIA Network+ certification which includes in-depth explanations about OSI, the network layers (theoretical) and network topology.
Linus, I used to work for a company who would hire a homeopathic "environment cleaner". She would come in to our office and put little holographic stickers on all of our computers and electrical outlets that look remarkably like the ones inside this switch. They were supposed to "clear the air of harmful EMF waves" and "block unwanted interference". I bet that's what those illuminati stickers are.
we have an extremely famous race car driver called Peter Brock who literally was a dead set legend but actually had a falling out with i think Holden because they refused to put special crystals in the transmission for.... i dont know, new age aerodynamics? EDIT - No the fallout was with his teammate Larry Perkins who thought he was batshit insane)
Alex always figured out the tests, even in the "blindfolded" 8K tests, he figured it out what it really was, not kind of, he was spot on - Jake almost got it.
Depends on the type I guess. I like a nice speaker system and when it comes to like, a halfway decent cable and amp, a nice hundred or two dollar pair of headphones, I understand paying a biiiit more money, but this is definitely way over the top. You’d be surprised when going to like, /r/audiophile or other “mainstream” audiophile discussion places, well over 95% of the people there agree with Linus that stuff like this is bullshit
@@nikkigrace5288 I remember reading on a forum somewhere about a guy in Japan who had his power company tie in like a dedicated line off the mains with transformer and everything just for his audio room. You could sell that guy anything.
Let's talk about wine. There are some people who just want a bottle of wine that "tastes really good" and are willing to splurge for the $50 bottle over the $8 bottle. Then there are people who buy $1000 or $10,000 bottles of wine. Sometimes this is just because they're rich enough to afford it, other times they actually think it's better. Same with audio and audiophiles.
Dawid Does Tech Stuff had a video about an audiophile NAS that claimed to provide improved audio quality, except that it was configured in such a way that it could be affected by bit rot. They wanted $25,000 for a NAS you could build better yourself for like $500. Also, Tynan's face while inspecting the oscillator is peak comedy.
Well to be fair, that NAS was expensive because it had some pretty high end specs. BUT even for what the specs were, it is/was still massively overpriced. Besides the fact that it was absolutely overkill for what it does 😂 My old 4790K that serves as a storage server now can do that shit. For a fraction of the price, including 3x16Tb drives...
There are NAS that also have a built-in DAC, and in theory if the DAC is a good one, it might result in better sound quality. But I personally won't suggest that, conventional NAS have higher storage, more versatile, easier to service and repair, and better value. If I have that amount of money I might as well just buy a good dedicated DAC
@@Mom19 Those old 3rd and 4th gen Intel CPUs do make for excellent cost-effective storage servers. I'm using a 3rd-gen i5 with TrueNAS and it makes for an excellent home NAS.
Reminds me of something one of the Electronics professors tell all the new students....."All electronic parts are made of smoke! If you let the Smoke out....they won't work!"...
My cables have had the oxygen replaced with oxygen taken from the recording studio, during the original recording. Sure this can increase the cost somewhat (maybe $5000/cable/artist/album) but the upside is clearly there. I once had one of the cables leak during playback and the smell of that original oxygen made it like I WAS THERE. Lets say a good album can now cost me $5000 per listen, but I can tell the difference. /sarcasm.
Curious about the yes and no's. Everyone who had said 'yes' wore glasses. Given that this was tested on the AB1266, which are *very* particular about the orientation and seal of the pads in their audio presentation, the differences they were hearing were more likely from the break in the seal due to their glasses stems as they shuffled the cables and not from the switches.
make sense, but originally I started thinking "oh yes, I also turn down the music when I have to see something" 😆 they had us in the first half not gonna lie
I agree, people are not wearing the headphones correctly and then making it sound different on the other ear. It should be the same but they made it sound different somehow.
but they were wearing the glasses in both tests so it should still sound consistent with one another, considering they didnt change the position of the headphones(which they seemingly didn't). So theyd hear both versions equally 'wrong'
There's one major thing Linus didn't mention as far as "where the positive reviews came from". Presumably there's nothing stopping those reviews from being submitted by employees of that company, or their family and friends.
Or entirely fabricated… but they may also just be people who felt they had a better experience. No way to be sure as an outside observer, but claiming fraudulent reviews outright is fraught with potential legal peril
I like the Techmoan approach of showing the madness of audiophile gear: re-recording the 'improved' audio into a recorder, comparing the wave forms, and showing that the wave forms are literally identical.
"But that is clearly just because his microphone isn't good enough to pick up the subtle nuances that make the music so much better" If people want to believe, you simply won't be able to convince them otherwise. If people don't have a prior opinion and are genuinely looking for knowledge, both methods are probably useful, and this type of thing is probably more useful to many regular people rather than a more technical debunking. I do wish he could have gotten the crude off the PCB to see if they actually did anything to it, though.
@@88porpoise In theory, you could eliminate the microphone as a variable here. Consider that multiple recordings of Speaker A will vary slightly due to run-to-run variance. If a second different microphone can reproduce these quirks, then they almost certainly are not caused my either microphone. It is either environmental noise, interference, or the speaker being recorded. Of course this result could only be achieved with extremely sensitive microphones, but that's a given if you want to evaluate audiophile equipment. Suppose then that Speaker B is also recorded. If the difference between Speaker B and Speaker A is no different than the run-to-run variance for Speaker A, then Speaker B is not significantly different than Speaker A. You could also cut out the microphone entirely (and the speaker, for that matter). If the equipment being tested is not a speaker, then there's no need for a speaker at all to test it. Simply record the waveform with an oscilloscope that has more precision than the run-to-run variance for the equipment being tested. Edit: but I agree with everything else you said. I admit that my comment is a little obnoxious because you weren't actually arguing the point.
The fact that audiophiles can spend thousands upon thousands of hours "researching" and debating products and obsessing over components in their home signal path (essentially the tail end of a very long chain) while somehow remaining entirely ignorant to how music is performed, recorded, produced and distributed always astounds me.
Audio and cs engineer here, music isn't the only thing you can hear, the fact that people always obsess with music being the main component of audio always astounds me. Whenever I tell people that I'm an audio engineer, they ask what kind of music I make or whether I play an instrument which just makes no sense in my case
Word. I always wonder how people think 192kHz recordings sound better when any professional mic's frequency response doesn't go (much) over 20 kHz anyway.
@@remcovandijk279 It can be useful to oversample when processing audio to avoid aliasing distortions etc. But for just playback anything over 44.1kHz / 48kHz is silly. And its more that our ears don't go over 20kHz (mine barely reach 15k haha, too many gigs) rather than what mics can do.
Audiophiles are always willing to see the emperor's new clothes. There's some peer fear that although they don't really hear a difference they have to say they do, or they genuinely think they do. It seems you can sell them anything at any price.
Used to describe myself as an audiophile to people because to me that meant someone who really enjoyed sound and considered it an important and often neglected aspect of modern film and games (see the horrible state of modern movie sound-mixing for instance). Then I come to find out it actually refers to individuals that exist on the same spectrum as flat-earthers; people throwing their money and faith at buzz-words and technobabble.
@@bronyhub I almost fell down that rabbit hole, but then I immediately realized it was and illusion dictated by other "experts" as soon as I accepted I'm partially deaf. Whatever gives me enough power and clarity to understand music and films will do, no need to chase the fantasy.
Audio gear is the best place to find snake oil. The first solution to the issue would to be to stop coping about your hearing ability. I think because it's such a subjective thing people want to believe it's more important than it really is EDIT: Yes there's more variables to this than I wrote above. You can check the replies for those if you're curious.
Techmoan did a few similar videos recently where he tests out few expensive devices that 'allegedly' improves the quality of audio CD's by 'demagnetising' them, and shaving a bit of plastic off the edges. All got great reviews on their website, and unsurprisingly on testing made no difference whatsoever!
Well audio quality at certain level become subjective. What they did is promote is with branding and marketing to justify it and people that buy will tell themselves it's better cause of their mindset and money they spend
@@ribertfranhanreagen9821 It's not subjective at all when the digital waveforms of the audio track are 1-for-1 identical compared to the original audio file.
With all the features it packs, it is rather cheap. I mean a christal AND 3 stickers of dubious source should have this healing terminally ill garden frogs over a kilometer away. That's basically a steal! They could even milk an bigger audience if they included the negative karma filter of cristal and goo in there!!!!
Audio engineer here. A couple of ways of scientifically proving/disproving claims by manufacturers of these products: 1. Play both the D-Link and the modified switch simultaneously into separate channels of a high-quality interface, and run Smaart software to analyze the two signals against each other. Smaart uses FFT to display any differences in frequency response and latency between any two sources in real time. If the frequency response displays flat, then both interfaces produce the exact same audio. 2. Use a high-quality audio interface to record a particular song through each switch onto separate tracks. In the DAW, zoom in to the sample level, and time-align the two audio files. Play both audio files at the same time, but polarity-flip one track. If the result is total silence, then both tracks must contain the exact same data, because only sample-level copies of audio files can cancel each other out.
If it is a digital signal than there could not be any difference. Same as downloading a song and one time it is 5000000 bytes and second time it is 5000001 bytes in the song file. Would be funny, right?))
@@AliShuktu Obviously. Point being, if audiophiles accepted logic like that, then scam switches wouldn't exist, yeah? They accept Smaart readouts and polarity flips. That's their language. Indisputable. Otherwise, they'll just swear they can feel a difference between the switches until someone shows them proof with their own tools.
Those stickers looked a lot like snake oil audiophile sticker that promise to enhance sound or reduce noise by whatever quantum magic theory they had. Being a part of audiophile community myself, I have seen these stickers around.
I have worked in high end audio my while life, servicing and installation. I have seen a lot of snake oil products. So totally agree with this. Especially the part about digital audio. I remember when audiophile USB cables came on the market. And the sales rep saying, there and 1's and 0's and then there are 1's and 0's. Trying to signify that some 1's and 0's are better than others. NO. they are a f**king 1 or a 0. The only difference a digital Audio cable make is if they are so poor Quality the will give drop out causing error correction, even to the level of jumpy cutting out audio. This is also why companies like meridian use cheap PC CD mechanisms in their high end CD players, because it makes no difference, the difference is all in the quality of D to A conversion. Thank you for this video I constantly feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall trying to explain this to people. its all aimed at the type of customer that gets constant ID-ten-T errors
IT & network guy over here. I've spent so long, 3 decades attempting to explain the difference between analog & digital to audiophiles it makes me lose faith in humanity. How an intelligent, professional, mentally stable person who obsesses over a hobby so much they spend hundreds of thousands on it and thousands of hours pouring of details can still insist the $2000 gold plated USB or Cat5 cable makes things sound better is just baffling to me. It's a cult.
@@disposabull One of my coworkers (who used to be my boss back when he did networks) is a degree'ed electrical engineer, who, tho he OUGHT to know better, spends more on his interconnects than I spent on my speakers. (*walks off shaking head*)
@@mrz80 I once had to try and explain to the head of IT, PhD in computer science that it was a bad idea to use software raid on a single HDD that he had partitioned.
At the end it's stupid uninformed people buying something that google could clear up in less than 10 minutes... and the people who don't seem to have the 10 minutes but thousand dollars for a cable aren't really the group i'd die on a hill for.
Snakeoil has always existet in every "high end" market, startign with gold plated optical cables. Techmoan did videos on a CD shaving device and a CD electrostatic neutralizer that was supposed to improve the audio of full digital media. His media test loading the tracks into audacity and having it compare the 2, leadin to a dead silent 3rd track.
Gold Plated Optical Cables!?… My frustration trying to explain to the "educated" Visions electronics employee, why that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, not even mentioning that the gold was just painted plastic.
This reminds me of an "audiophile" that I worked with. He talked about how he had speaker wire that he paid $100/ft for that was raised off the floor on insulators. He also had a wifi router sitting on his preamp and couldn't figure out why he was hearing weird sounds from his speakers. He was a tool so my coworker and I were of no help. Our suggestions went along the lines of... You should check the polarity of the resistors in your preamp. Some must be backwards.
Maybe he had the cables Paradox made that turned out to be just normal extension power cord, and several high profile audio magazines rated the cables as REALLY good and what a difference etc. I find that pretty funny. 🤣
To be fair: for the analog signal in a speaker cable a changing impedance between the cable and the floor does in fact make a difference - none that would be in any way audible, but at least there is a physical process that results in an actual - albeit miniscule - change in the signal. The part about the wifi router though...
I am curios about something. Normal speaker cables are not shielded. Are those audiophile cables at least shielded, or is it 100% snakeoil? Also would shielding speaker cables make a big difference?
@@hubertnnn As far as I understand it, speaker cables carry the powered signal from the power amp to the speakers, so they are relatively high current and voltage when compared to signal cabling (eg. phono etc). As such they are not affected by interference as much, as they inherently have a high signal-to-noise ratio. You do not therefore want to use a coaxial cable (ie. shielded) for this use due to the higher current involved, as they could theoretically overheat, depending on the power of the amplifier involved. So RF interference is not a big deal for speaker cables AFAIK. The issue is the 'audiophile-grade' stuff isn't shielded either, it's just "100% Oxygen-Free Copper" or "Pure Silver Conductor" or some such nonsense. A decent copper conductor speaker wire is all you need, not $100 per foot. It will make no audible difference, even to people with 'golden ears', and I guarantee the idiots buying it don't have the ears to hear subtle differences anyway! So they are 100% snake oil. Much more important is to treat the listening environment with bass traps and acoustic treatment to cut down on standing waves and reflections, something I guarantee no 'audiophile' ever does.
You can just a/b an audio signal by inverting one of the waveforms (levelled) against the other and if you have a straight line there is no difference, if there are variations those are differences. This is categorical and precise.
Clearly sirrah, you are no _true_ audiophile. Coming in here with your science and logic, and, and 'falsifiable testing' witchcraft. This is displeasing to the audiophilia gods and you will be accursed with untraceable hum for all eternity.
They won't be the same, because of the digital to analog conversion and because you probably can't line up two streams exactly. But obviously not because of whatever network switched they passed through before. To fix both the misalignment issue and the DAC problem, just copy the files from a network drive to your PC and mix them in audacity or so. It's not chatting because it makes no difference whether you copy the whole time over yesterday or just have it be buffered for a few milliseconds.
Yes, but in this case it's like investigating whether a car moves or not while driving down the road. If you can transfer a file at full speed, the switch works. If you can't, then it's broken. If the data was altered in any way, it would be completely useless as a network switch.
Loving the idea blind tests will prove anything to audiophiles. They'll just feel more special their golden ears can immediately hear the difference in a non-blind test.
Back in the day someone on the very early internets did a blind comparison of speaker cables.... the one that got the most votes was 2 coat hangers stretched out with no insulation. :D
My first thought was: Why do they invite "regular" people to listen? For an audiophile, it's easy to argue that those testers just don't know what good sound is.
@@acetechnical6574 interblock cable quality is a real thing. The very cheapest sometimes has bad contacts at soldering points. Same goes for speakers cables. Should be somehow low resistance and preferably low capacitance? If you want *best* cables, check what professionals uses on stage (usually balanced feed-line). They resistant to all kind of RF environment handles power etc. Best cabling hands down.
Every typical audiophile should know, the secret to getting a clean sound is to remove sound-absorbing particulates from the air by running an air purifier beside you while listening to the music
They should also turn off any carbon monoxide sensors as they will introduce noise to the signal! THAT'S A JOKE BEFORE ANYONE DOES IT!!!!!!!! (I can't believe I even feel the need to add that lol)
@@alexanderkupke920 not fan you have to use a soundless air filter that cost arround 1kk ... you are not pro....and D-link ... they cant even make a working plug and play wii fii usb-card.... ppl seriusly belive in that brand for hii end stuff? Saludos de argentina
@@dariocastro9079 I thought it was obvious that comment was less than serious. Besides that, so far personally as in my professional carreer, with those small unmanaged switches I found no serious difference between, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link,... you name it. They work fine for a while, you can just bet if it is either something in the switch or the power supply that first lets the smoke out. But keep in mind, that is about unmanaged chap switches for use at home or certain other situations, those sell for anything between 20 and 50 bucks. When you get into professional stuff, you usually talk about actual managed switches (and with managed I do not mean those with a very basic web interface), but then you are in a completely different price range and yes, then you deal with quite some differences comaring for example D-Link to Cisco or Aruba just to name two. With USB WiFi Adapters, so far id nid not even have mixed results. Those I had to deal with all have been crap. And coming back to the pretended audiopphile differences, ignoring how much noise the devices power supply actually can introduce into your power lines, if anyone still believes or claims that anything where digital data is transmitted can have any impact on sound quality without introducing an actual DSP and befor you et to the final stage converting digital back to analog for any kind of speaker, check how transmission of digital data works first.
Kudos for explaining why it can't make a difference. It's easy to mock audiophile equipement, but I love that you took time to educate why it can't work even in theory.
this should be common knowledge tbh, especially among "audiophiles". If an "audiophile" doesn't understand that a switch could not improves the quality of digitally encoded packets of audio files, they deserve to be scammed.
Typical PC network uses TCP/IP which uses 5 layer model: 1st layer - physical cabling (copper, optical, or Wifi) 2nd layer - frame being send between 2 devices with MAC address (L2 switch like in this video, local LAN, corruption data detection via CRC code but without correction) 3rd layer - packet being send between IP addresses (router devices and some L3 switches, able to send packets worldwide) 4th layer - transport layer - using two types of packets and port number (for multiple transmissions at the same time): packets are TCP (with re-sending if data corrupted, most today's traffic) or UDP (for real-time data/video/control, generally for input lag sensitive applications like drone control, corrupted packets are detected and discarded) 5th layer - application itself - like HTTP protocol for web browser, or FTP protocol for file server etc. At this level data are encrypted if you use HTTPS protocol. So typical switch like in this video is L2 device with zero knowledge about what data are being transmitted especially when today everything is encrypted. Total scam and they should be sued for fraud against customers. Even most Hi-Fi world is about scam you cannot sue them because all that gold plating improves analog transmission a tiny bit. Probably not possible to hear the difference but electrically measurable. But L2 switch is nonsense. HIFI is a scam, it always been for decades. Anybody wanting high sound quality is buying professional studio HW (monitors, headphones etc.). People dealing with audio as daily job are immune to Hifi scam.
@@bigbrain8839 By knowing that the distance between astral bodies is very far, and between those astral bodies is the vacuum of space. It's not hard to figure out. If you dot a piece of paper with black dots in the same way the night sky is filled with stars, you can clearly tell most of the page is blank space between those dots, and that's only in 2 dimensions.
Everyone saying "it's just 1's and 0's" doesn't know what they are talking about. This genuine, audiophile quality switch actually changes the Font so the 1's and 0's LOOK different and therefore SOUND different. If you really want to hear the difference you have to use audiophile-level headphones such as Beats by Dre. He's a Doctor so he knows what he's doind when it comes to these things.
What would you say about all the comments asking to record audio for comparison…. To me the suggestion is a bit frustrating as it perpetuates a misunderstanding of digital audio signals.
@@robertt9342 I mean sure, you could record it and flip the phase so you have only the "difference" between both. That's what ANY audio test should start with rather than placebo-driven human tests but I also understand why they didn't do that. Because the product doesn't make any sense in the first place so such a test would be rather unnecesary.
Its actually incredibly easy to compare two audio waveforms thanks to waveform interferometry. Grab a really high quality PCM recorded, record a .wav from each stream, pull both waveforms into an audio editor, invert one of them then combine them together and you will be left with the exact difference between the two.
In this specific case that would be completely unnecessary since we are talking about the transport of the waveform (or any other data) that will be identical regardless of which of the switches you use. The waveform can be a 6kHz 8 bit mono recording of a phone call and it will arrive in the same form, shape or quality regardless of the path. There are tests where your suggested method would be really useful (encoding, compression, A/D and D/A conversion, ...) but not for this. The moment that the electrical issue that they are "rectifying" would become a factor influencing the transport, the audio would not be distorted but very obviously disrupted - up to that point the data would be identical.
GDAY DUNGEONSEEKER,From Australia..can someone invent a small rechargeable magnetic base, frequency sampler,,,and combine it with an out of phase frequency generator…about 2inches round, angular faced dome on top ..containing transducers for sampling and generating out of phase received sound ..like an outer receiving ring of transducers,, and an inner ring for generating the phased “ SOUND “..thereby cancelling noise…or a pair…one receiving…one broadcasting…I WANT THESE MADE FOR MY PC…FOR A FAN NOISE CANCELLING ACCESSORY….does this idea sound crazy?????13_900K….+4090..64Gb Ram…in an ITX CASE…AIO Cooling
Could LTT labs be used to help debunk products like this? It would be nice for there to be some kind of repository where we could go and look up tests that have been done on a particular product to see if it's claims have been verified or if it indeed is snake oil.
@@DoubleMonoLR Maybe to people with experience and knowledge, or the time to do research, but for others having a way to quickly verify products are genuine can save them from wasting money
@@Doomcraftian what i think he meant is that ltt can debunk most audiophile snake oil with just their normal video routine, no need for the labs treatment.
Have you every visited AudioScienceReview? They do things like this but use measurement gear quite often. Not everything the site owner does is correct but the information is much better than you'd find most other places and there is research to back it up.
Common man, I am an audiophile and I dont buy on this snake oil even a bit. DAC's and AMP's matter. The headphones matter. The codecs matter. But digital is digital. No processing makes any difference. Power supplies can make a difference. But these kinds of things are a joke. But in the name of audiophile, every "audiophile" brand is looting the customer. Audiophile components are similar to the components used for computers which require high tolerances for perfect signal integrity. I have seen many audiophile equipments using the same components that a premium motherboard uses, or even a premium TV uses. Just that it has a better power supply with lower noise levels.
Psychologically, this is known as "post purchase rationalization" and it's a fallacy that nearly every single buyer of a so-called premium markup experiences, from this all the way to BMW or Apple or whatever.
@@astridlindholm1159 i love the people that actively and legit buy the 1k+ cables (which are almost always worse than something cheap btw), hope the people that make those cables spend their money well.
There are Audiophile Rocks that are placed on your speaker cabs or DAC to “reduce jitter” or “improve sound quality” for sale. Literal painted rocks ffs.
As an audiophile, I'm begging you Linus, debunk more trash! I hate a lot of this stuff but the internet is a cesspool of people arguing in favor of all sorts of mind numbing devices
Lol, if i could sell this crap i'd do it. Like google can debunk this in less than ten minutes... if i don't have this little time but thousands of dollars for a cable maybe i deserve to get ripped off.
I don't get it, but, isn't LAN a digital signal? Even if there was noise on a digital signal, you use filter capacitors and coils to clean them up. And the DACs are in the laptops or desktop computers, not the network switches! This doesn't make any sense!
I want more content like this please. Mostly more snake oil debunking but especially more audio focused content even though I know it may not be on your radar. As someone that's trying to get into home audio there's a wasteland of snake oil content out there that's hard to decipher for people with limited knowledge. I worked in live entertainment audio production for a few years and the more I learned the more I realized that it would take an entire lifetime at my mental capacity to deeply comprehend audio engineering, therefore I became a lighting guy instead and I've been happily ignorant ever since. 🤣
I remember when I was a kid thinking I was an audiophile. The truth was, I just liked how 100 dollar ear buds sounded compared to the 10 dollar shitty ones you buy in a grocery store checkout lane. I still love my audio, but I'm a firm believer of "Good enough" these days. As long as it doesn't sound fuzzy, I'm a happy camper!
To be fair, there is the kind of audiophile that doesn't fall for bullshit. They care about frequency response, and if an amp can drive the headphone, that's it. Nowadays you can find cheap but high quality DACs and Amps from China, as well as IEMs. Everything else is snake oil.
@@gustavrsh They exist in masses in recording studios, the amount of midrange gear they use is huge. Because these days that stuff is just so good if you're not overpaying for a crappy product. Even tho I've been involved with music since my teens, I simply do not have the ears of an audio engineer - to me half the quality these guys require is "good enough". And even the best guys in it I know are saying half of the insanely priced products just don't do much anything.
Completely agree. I know almost everything I listen to is only medium quality at best (mp3, youtube, etc.) so there's no point in going overboard. I enjoy how it sounds, that's what matters. The only place I've splurged is for my living room surround setup, but that's for more immersion in movies, not perfect reproduction.
Indeed, and even more annoying as some of this stuff is actually genuine. but figuring out what is scam and not is challenging. Also sometimes things make no difference for 99% of installs, but shield speaker cables for instance can sometimes be genuinely beneficial.
I need to make a clarification there, High end audio is not the same as audiophile. High End Audio development teams are generally made up of audio technicians, electronics engineers, and people holding PhDs in various fields, all of which focused on the actual science of audio. They're companies that produce expensive things, yes, but that expense can be justified, very easily. Audiophile development teams consist of a single person who, at most, has a foundation level business degree, and usually not even that, The products will be expensive, despite no real justification for the things that go into them Think of it like High End Audio is the Doctors, Physicians, Nurses, of medicine Audiophile is Homeopathy.
This is gonna be the #1 search for this thing now so their sales will drop alot and they seem like the company to freak out and send a ceases and desist letter for showing their “secrets” as if it would be actionable 😂
And rightly so. Fair enough if they've "upgraded" a few parts but the bullshit spray they've used to describe the product and the insane price they've put it at, they deserve to be found out.
I wouldn't count on that, logic and audiophiles don't have a cozy relationship. At least some will undoubtedly claim another part of the chain is the problem, which makes this kind of bs particularly suitable to audiophile snake oil - as it requires so many other items to get an audio output.
unlikely. Anyone that has bought a $1000 network switch for audible improvement is already doing so, knowing there is no scientific reason for that to occur. ethernet is already isolated and buffered/error checked. I'll watch for the lols.
For all the audiophile guys out there: Don't put your network cable too tight around sharp corners... Put it like a banked curve... otherwise the high speed bits are falling out of the cable. It's like with the nascar racing track... ;-)
That's like Dilbert and Wally telling their PointyHaireBoss™ that his workstation couldn't connect to the token ring network 'cause the token fell out of the cable and got lost in the carpeting. :D
This is true for coaxial and twisted cables, though. Bend coax too tightly, and the core will get pushed into the isolator material and not be exactly in the centre anymore. That causes an impedance jump and therefore reflections. In analog TV systems it can cause ghosting or echos, in digital systems you won't notice much until the signal degrades so much that error correction can't keep up anymore. All good coaxial cables have a minimum bend radius specified. Typical digital TV coax has a minimum radius of 10cm or so. For twisted cable the minimum bend radius is a bit less critical, but you gotta take care that you don't cause a flat spot in the twist or break the shielding, if it's a shielded twisted cable. Network protocol is stupidly robust, people have run a connection over literal wet string, and i think i've had an 100mbit connection over a piece of 3 pair telephone cable that wasn't supposed to be here.
U R mocking something as fake but in fact it does happen, especially with video cables, like coax will get 'ghosting' in video if U bend it 2 sharp, because it causes reflections because of the angle & so on = 'jumping the curve' sort of thing, so while trying 2 sound like a 'clever troll' U made yourself sound dumber = LOL In 'radar' they don't even use wire but 'wave guide' empty tubes = the signal just bouncing around in there, literally.
@@mfbfreak I went to a customer office one time to investigate database corruption (in the old days of MS JET, very susceptible to corruption on poor connections). Turns out the utp cat5 cable between workstation and server was just laid on the floor between the two computers and the woman would run her chair over the cable every time she adjusted her seating position. The cable outer sheath had become split and the individual pairs had become untwisted along a length of about 10cm. No breaks, just untwisted and therefore no shielding. Everything worked fine EXCEPT the jet database which kept corrupting as the error correction couldn't provide enough stability for the connection.
Audiophiles simply don't understand what digital audio actually is. Hence all the devices that shave the edges of CDs, or gold tipped toslink cables...
So I am neither an audiophile, a computer scientist, a network engineer, OR particularly tech-literate… but the moment I heard the words “network switch” and “better sound quality”, I laughed. And then I laughed again when the intro blurb mentioned the placebo effect, because that’s exactly what I was thinking.
Yeah it's so blantant. Literally any other audophile product makes more sense. Even when my mate spent stupid amount for power cables so they are "stable" it was more believable BS than this. Then again sometimes audioshops are dumb too. I once tried to buy headphones at a guitar shop (they distributed some brands) and they let me test them by.... plugging them to an old PC and playing youtube music for me... (I came with a reference CD i know had good sound and I know what to look for...)
I'm an audio engineer and I think one of the most important things to realize is that music, at least when you get into the conversations about high fidelity and such, much of what we perceive with our ears falls into placebo. This is why spectrographs and oscilloscopes are so important to give us the whole picture. I can't tell you how many times people have asked me to turn up their mic, I pretended to turn it up so as not to throw off the balance of the mix, and they were happy with it the rest of the night. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: Audiophiles are just flat earthers for speakers. So are those "432hz healing frequency" dorks.
Yeah all those claims for A432 are really funny. I must admit the music being slightly flat does make me sleepy, but certainly there’s none of the supposed unique medicinal effects for each note! And the worst is when they say stuff about aliens too.
@@kaitlyn__L yeah it always spirals into some utter nonsense. Worst part is that it all falls apart if you have even the most infantile understanding of tuning systems. That's conspiratorial thinking for you. Adam Neely did a fantastic video about trying to tune a piano to those "healing frequency" charts. The hilarity that ensues is 100% worth the watch. Lmao
@@dirg3music lol yeah I can’t imagine trying to get a physical stringed instrument that precise! That’s one neat thing about synths, you can do perfect tuning instead of TET (or other temperaments). But of course a lot of people don’t actually like the sound of perfect tuning since we’re so accustomed to acoustic ones!
I know how to prove it, Linus. I hope that you somehow see this. The guy from the Techmoan YT channel bought a weird device that shaves a tiny bit off of the edge if your CDs. It is supposed to reduce wobble and make them sound better. The device actually made its way into major audio magazines and apparently there was heated discussion online about whether or not it did anything. He made two recordings in Audacity. One was the original cd, one from the shaved CD. He then inverted the waveform of one and laid the two on top of each other. When played, the result was silence. There was no difference between the two recordings. Techmoan explains it much better than I can. Its probably best to just watch the video.
@@psychoterrorism No the device being talked about here did nothing for surface scratches, go watch the video. It literally has no way to do that, just a blade for shaving the edge of the CD.
@@psychoterrorism NOPE. you are talking about a different product. The product referenced was not used for resurfaceing the disc. It cut the edge of the disc at an angle. Maybe you should read the entire post.
@@ryanmitcham5522 Ha right I read shaving the edge as removing the bottom surface of the disk, assumed this was a repackaged version of a legit product... at least that would at least have had a chance of improving the audio!
Minor correction @ 16:39 Layer 2 data is not called packets, but frames. Packets is layer 3 data. Frames go between MAC addresses, and packets go between IP addresses.
That was my only concern, as well as he explained layer 2, the proper term is called a frame, which is based on the MAC/physical address. The term "packet" refers to layer 3 messaging, which includes the IP address. But these details are only significant for anyone whose work requires a Cisco CCNA certification, and typically of no significance to audiophiles.
@@michaelbates1426 And layer 3 can request re-transmit, layer 2 can detect errors (checksum) but there's no mechanism is ethernet for a retransmit. Since the description is SMB, a layer 3 protocol, I assume a dropped packet will be immediately replaced long before the buffer is exhausted. Also at the relatively slow data rates of an audio stream, and no competing demands on the switch, QOS is not needed nor would it help.
@@thomasmaughan4798 SMB isn't a layer 3 protocol, though ;) When leveraging SMB, you would inherit the integrity/retransmit properties of TCP. If you transmitted via another mechanism such as RTP, there's no retransmits built into UDP. A bad packet checksum is simply dropped in UDP (much like an invalid CRC in Ethernet that drops the frame), it would be up to you at a higher layer to implement retransmits if you desired, although in a real-time stream you definitely wouldn't want to do that since you'd have data from the past trying to play, wedged into the rest of the stream, out of sequence.
Would have been, but kinda beyond the needed scope of this vid. Anyone with the slightest networking knowledge is going to know that the digital data getting sent isn't going to be representative of the final audio output. This video is for more basic tech users who understand some buzzwords and know "enough to get by" so to speak. So basically anyone who knows what that would mean is going to know that would be the case anyways. Better to just focus on proving it in the simplest to understand way and then explain why for those who need to be taught.
@@CRneu of course there isn't but putting some objective proof on the video besides testimonies of people not hearing any difference would shut up a lot of people who still wanna believe that a switch that does basically nothing to the digital signal impacts sound quality
@@CRneu That's the whole point. Without doing an OBJECTIVE comparison, this entire video is flawed. It would have been straightforward for them to at the very least capture the audio and do a comparison like Techmoan does. The product is obviously snake oil, but I'm flabbergasted that LTT, especially considering their goal with "LTT Labs", would pass up the opportunity to actually show something meaningful.
As a senior tech professional, This is funny. You are passing digital data over those lines, not analog. If reducing noise on the line was necessary, you would have corrupt audio files coming through them, not files that had electrical nois in them.
This video literally covers almost every single “higher end” audiophile component in the music playback industry. Just insert a different name and brand and replay this review!! GREAT JOB!! 🎉🎉
@@brkbtjunkie at the end of the day speakers make the sound, from what the source sends out 99% of the good stuff comes from the speaker the other 0.999% is your pre amp with a teensy bit left for your power amp and all the other junk most that people can't notice the difference
@@abxaudiophiles I am surprised that they didn't do ABX, I'm even more surprised that they did not do some form of analysis on the data moving trough the switches to categorically prove that there is no difference
Honestly the "better than lossless" claims can be real since a higher quality master will sound better than the original. Of course it depends on the individual song. The real big issue is the fact MQA is closed source and requires you to pay licensing fee's if you want to use the format.
This is in the same realm as the CD/DVD edge shaver that claimed to increase clarity in video and audio from discs by "reducing scattering from the laser". It was a variable speed turntable with a small chisel tool and ink dispenser to apply after shaving that sold for thousands.
You should also digitally record the direct audio output and compare the wav samples. They'll be the exact same waveform, sample by sample. Or, you know, just run a CRC hash and you'll get the same result because the files will be exactly the same, bit by bit as digital transmission does not change audio lmao
I think they only had the "test" here as a joke, the claims are so stupid that anyone who knows even a little bit about how Ethernet works knows the claims are completely impossible.
exactly, once the audio is digital, the only time that can lose quality is the precise moment of the conversion from digital to analog (done by the DAC, this is not at the switch!!!!). If there is noise in the line the DAC will pick it up, but the transmission itself is not going to change the bloody audio. Guys!!!! Linus, WTF, you disappoint me!
This was my thought as I watched this. With the resources available at LMG they could easily settle this with a more direct comparison of the data coming out of the device. People are not reliable test equipment. The explanation of why this shouldn't work is nice and all but that won't settle the debate for the people determined to believe it has some effect. Showing that the files that pass though this device are bit for bit identical to the files that pass though any other device is a way better mic drop moment.
ahaha 10:52 - Mac users are trained by Apple to tell the difference even if there aren't any.....well, expected - as how they could sell iPhone then lol
You should also do a reference test, where the testers actually listen twice thru the same system (without knowing it). Psychologically, if you expect a difference, you will likely "hear" a difference 😉
Awesome vid. Please do more audiophile stuff. A lot of money is quickly spent by those trying to get the best sound quality. Having a trusted source of info like LTT would be a godsend for tons of people.
I don't really personally think you need to know much, audio is a very personal experience and if it's for music that depends on the genre. Generally for the best audio experience you want completely flat sound curve, like studio headphones. A common problem with a lot of the common commercial audio gear is bass boosting, and that's not bad per se if you listen to a lot of bass heavy music, but if you also like to listen to soft jazz or whatever then it might end up sounding muddy because when you bass boost on the hardware you are bass boosting the entire signal. At most the conclusion of all vids would be "if it sounds good to you, then it's good" we aren't anatomically the same either, we all have slightly different levels of hearing. Which is also why most trustworthy audiophile content on RU-vid are 99% just reviews of products, because there really isn't much to say, like objectivly. also generally speaking with audio gear, the more expensive is actually usually a pretty good indicator of quality, although a mid range priced headphone can be just as good as a high-end headphone, the reason to get high-end is if you need an overall excellent experience - which for most non professional usage shouldn't be a priority, for commercial use only get high-end if you like expensive stuff.
The issue here, is that there is nothing high-end... Is is a standard switch with stickers added. It is a plain scam! I own a pair of AKG 7xx headphones and love them, some don't... That is a matter of taste... Not a network switch!
