Getting a digital signal into a DAC, and how it sounds, is an emerging / unstructured area of inquiry. There are interactions and impacts, increasingly clear to many of us, between equipment that we’re only beginning to understand. And there is wide exploration of topologies and technologies from manufacturers (servers, streamers, USB boxes, ethernet boxes, optical to ethernet boxes, power supplies etc etc). When you add it up you have a dizzying array of topologies, combinations, and price points. Using very high-end ‘old-school’ design topologies, even in an emerging field like this one, is always an option. And there is always a way to do an old-school design topology 2x, 4, … how much do you want to spend? Like what if you took the EtherRegen and put it in a $2k machine aluminum full-width case, and used the most expensive capacitors known to man and machined all the ethernet jacks out of solid billets of aluminum, etc. Employing these old-school, as well as new techniques, is going to result in a wide array of options up and down the price / performance spectrum.
Also, we are in a bit of a free-for-all in terms of topology. PS Audio is one of the most integrated audio manufacturers – you can buy PSA gear from wall to disc-spinner to DAC, phono preamp to amplification to (soon?) speaker. But how to get a signal into the DS (which is a relatively new product segment) isn’t a place where they have a solution yet beyond the Bridge II and other standard inputs. Leaving us with the infinite market options out there, from which we can cobble together many topologies and approaches, and (here’s my point, sorry) these options are not designed by anyone to have smooth value vs price curves. Some people might think that an EtherRegen should retail for $2k, others obviously would say it’s just a dumb switch that runs too hot. So weird bedfellows, in terms of cost alignment across a system, are not that surprising. Hence the $4k clock on the $750 switch box.
… I guess Octave is the pretty obvious answer to my point about PSA not having the full system chain. Stay tuned… Even though I’m hesitant to go down a single-vendor path for music library management and (if I understand correctly) give up Roon, I do hope that Paul and the gents really do put something together that beats all reasonable comers (with I2S as a big advantage in terms of less-finicky topology). From a digital perspective, a dCS Vivaldi stack is a fully-engineered single-vendor answer (for a ton of money).
So a couple observations which are entirely personal: the ER (with stock SMPS) makes a sizable difference in my system. Any sensitive listener who’s used to swapping components or even high-quality cables of different brands would hear it clearly in my system (I’ll make sure my system is updated in my profile). It costs, whatever, $750USD. Not to say this isn’t a real chunk of money, but it is very true that many of us have, rightly or wrongly, an array of non-necessary tweaks costing this much or multiples. This is less than an AC-12, which, incidentally, I’m going to try connecting to the stock SMPS when I get around to it. Feel free to tell me that’s crazy.
So is it a lot for an ethernet switch? Of course. It resembles and ethernet switch but the utility its providing is entirely different. Sooo is adding a $300 LPS (plus an $800 power cord) silly? It’s kind of up to you. I haven’t tried this yet. Is adding a $4k LPS silly? It’s up to where the customer wants to sit on the price / value curve. Yes, it’s a lot of money, and you could even possibly argue that, if you were to take a given system in its totality, it’s not the ‘best’ or ‘biggest’ impact (for instance $4k buys a lot of acoustic treatment, an area a lot of us are ignoring or where we are perhaps substantially domestically constrained). But this is a hobby and people can spend money however they want to. : )
One comparison I keep wanting to make is: assuming you are building a digital front-end path into a DS, and the total cost equals the cost of a dCS Bartok or some other “better” DAC (i.e. a multiple of the price and should by all rights be better in most every respect), have you ended up with something better (by breaking the process into smaller investments, and – not for nothing – learning what changes make a difference, and what those differences mean to you), or are you still a bit behind the game had you just listened to your old DAC for 3 years and saved up the money for the better DAC? … This is an idle question, but one I think about, particularly as I lay out decent chunks of money for … more boxes.
Anyway I’ll post my early listening impressions once they’ve solidified.
