Snake oil - we have a winner?

[Exalted Wombat]

Can anyone find a grain of justification in this rip-off?

https://www.russandrews.com/rans-1-hi-fi-review/

[Drew Stephenson]

Well, at £960 for a switch box, unless you can find someone selling actual snake oil, then that has to be a competitor.
But I note from the review that it's actually half the price of its competitor.

[muzines]

Alan suggests that the RANS-1 offers a more subtle performance, “gently and quietly improving the lot of streamed audio by making it sound more ‘human’”.

Yes, it shows many audiophile qualities too -"Backgrounds are distinctly quieter, the treble is more refined and less harsh and forced sounding" - but it’s in its ability to present music in an unforced way, with ‘ease’ and ‘rhythm’ where it really excels.

Ah, hi-fi purists always need some way to convince themselves that spending more money improves things...

[MarkOne]

Oh, good grief.

How come you can send an error free, (or at least error corrected) audio stream from a server somewhere in Silicon Valley multiplexed with thousands of other data packets over tiny threadlike glass fibres across oceans, through multiple hubs, switches, routers, and data centres along the way, down more fibre, probably down some Victorian copper to a router made in Shenzhen from the cheapest components the manufacturer could possibly specify, and somehow by putting this box between said router and streaming box, improve the data?

[Mike Shand]

I had to laugh (or perhaps cry) when I read that it "improved" content streamed over the internet. Have they no idea how many switches, routers, DSLAMs, fibre drivers, bits of dodgy telephone copper etc. etc. the packets traverse on their way from the source? Not to mention buffering and packet loss.

Presumably the packets are "groomed" to remove the nasty "digital" sound!

[Mike Shand]

Sorry MarkOne for the almost duplicate post. Didn't see it.

[DGL.]

One joke being that for a regular switch that size the PSU would probably be a separate box anyway!
Hardly a fancy feature.

[MarkOne]

Sorry MarkOne for the almost duplicate post. Didn't see it.

No problem.

The issue with all these audiofool products is they take an idea from one engineering discipline and assume it applies universally. Power supply segregation is useful in DAC design, Cable capacitance is important in high impedance circuits, acoustic damping is important for turntables, connectors for microwave frequencies need to be special, etc.

By and large the people buying into it all are non-technical, even some of the product designers have a fairly dim grasp of how the technology actually works.

And confirmation bias will ensure you believe it all makes a difference. I’ve even heard someone in a hifi shop state that double blind testing is bad, because it puts unnecessary stress on the listener to make the right decision.

[forumuser840717]

I wouldn't give houseroom to a switch as poorly built as that Russ Andrews thing.

The ones I use for location work are a mixture of Luminex Gigacore - I have three of the Gigacore 10 - and two Artel Quarra 1G Compact switches. Plus a bunch of Cisco 300 and 350 series and Dell 2808 / 2816 for less important things and where the ruggedness and management tricks of the Artel/Luminex kit aren't required.

[RichardT]

There's a test I can think of that I've never heard anybody do. Maybe it wouldn't work, but I can't think of a reason why off the top of my head.

If a component is supposed to make a difference, why not set up a mic in front of the speakers (in a very quiet environment) and record the system with and without the component through a high class AD converter - then compare the two signals?

I wonder what the results would be in this case?

[Drew Stephenson]

There's a test I can think of that I've never heard anybody do. Maybe it wouldn't work, but I can't think of a reason why off the top of my head.

If a component is supposed to make a difference, why not set up a mic in front of the speakers (in a very quiet environment) and record the system with and without the component through a high class AD converter - then compare the two signals?

I wonder what the results would be in this case?

Well, the mic and speakers would be the weak point in the chain. Better to keep it in the electronic domain and see if anything even shows up on a null test.

[Hugh Robjohns]

When im travelling, I like to read a copy of the Beano, but if I can't get that Hi-fi+ magazine is just as funny. It's for people with more disposable income than functional brain cells.

[RichardT]

When im travelling, I like to read a copy of the Beano, but if I can't get tthat Hi-fi+ magazine is just as funny. It's for people with more disposable income than functional brain cells.

Yes, me too!

[MarkOne]

Back in the old days, I was a subscriber to HiFi News and Record Review. I used to love the engineering focus of the reviews, the photographed oscilloscope plots, the Wayne Kerr frequency analysis results, the distortion meter readings, etc….

It was all men in white coats, and pipe-smoking editorial staff with beards and tweed blazers. And all very grounded in, well, you know… science.

Somewhere, along the line, it all went very dark side. No idea what happened, or how, or, why.

[RichardT]

Well, at £960 for a switch box, unless you can find someone selling actual snake oil, then that has to be a competitor.
But I note from the review that it's actually half the price of its competitor.

I saw another for £2900!

[Folderol]

Not bad, but I'm still rather proud of this:

2016 April 1

Something we've kept rather quiet up till now

As part of our quest for the best possible sound we are planning an enhancement that passes bits through a grading process (the well known 'Enharmonic Bit Comparator' - version 33)* thus ensuring that any bit asymmetry is removed. In laymans terms, this has a heater to agitate the bits, then an amplifier to highlight the errors, and rectifiers to remove them. Symmetrical bits produce significantly less quantum noise so reduce the possibility of alignment boundary collisions, giving a much warmer, smoother presentation.

Such advanced technology has a cost of course, so to gain the greatest benefit from this process it is necessary for Yoshimi to now use only audiophile grade bits, rather than the standard ones and zeros present in ordinary programs. Bit quality is heavily dependent on the source so we recently did a line-by-line review of the code, feeding it to our Delta Orthogonal Grader.

Finally, there is the open-source BitShine engine (BS). This 'clarifies' individual zeroes and ones passing through it, making them sharper, so should give greater precision when passed on to the DA converter. This is available under the 'Multi User Grant' license. As it appears to be GPL compatible we are looking at it for possible inclusion.

I should point out that there is only a narrow window for discussion as we expect to be committed by lunch time today.

* EBC33 - Mullard

[RichardT]

I want one - so long as it's expensive!

[DGL.]

I wonder what the inside of the switch and PSU look like?, I imagine opening both of them and finding all they've done is get a generic switch, broken open it's PSU and mounted it in a craptacular ABS enclosure and done the same with the switch itself.
Plus I don't think we'll be getting Cisco quality internals here, more low end Netgear at best.
They claim a special clock and special capacitors but I doubt they've really done anything that special.

So it could literally be something like this https://eu.dlink.com/uk/en/products/-/m ... lfront.png in a different box.

Also I wonder if a plastic enclosure is acceptable for this given the use of shielded Ethernet sockets as normally unshielded ones seem to be common on plastic switches.

[OneWorld]

Nobody ever went bankrupt underestimating the gullibility of the general public

[The Elf]

What amuses me (and I do know a few of these hi-fi 'experts') is that all this audio perfection is often sought for the sake of playing back vinyl. You couldn't make it up...

It's rather like buying a top of the range telescope to look at photocopies.