Post by petea on Feb 16, 2020 12:37:06 GMT
I spent some time this morning trying to eliminate an annoying, intermittent glitch in the network feed to my system in the UK. Due to limitations of my living room I have my equipment distributed either side of a doorway. And, to compound that space in the 'racks' limits which bits of kit can go where. This means that the Fidata music server is on one rack and the streamer and the DAC that processes the feed from it and the server is on the other (this may change once I have managed to try out the Lector 24/192 unit). It is far from ideal, but does not cause any real problems other than cabling ones. The schematic below shows the arrangement.
Anyway, the reason for this thread is that I am pretty certain I have isolated the glitch to a 'faulty' Cat5 socket, labelled RJ45 Socket 1 in the schematic. Unfortunately this is behind the rack holding the Fidata server and is pretty inaccessible. Part of the testing and the current solution was the connect the AQVox Switch 1 to RJ45 Socket 2 and, so far that works perfectly, but means the network feeds go across the doorway twice (and yes I know there are other wiring configurations that I could try, but there are reasons behind the current one). So, what I need to do is either check and repair the connections to RJ45 Socket 1 (the other end is fine) or replace it. Now I'm going to have to take everything off the rack to do that so I started to look around to see if I can find better RJ45 sockets than the standard 'network grade' ones I am using currently. Amazingly it seems to be the one area where you can't buy ridiculously expensive 'audiophile' ones!
However, there are a few screened Cat6e ones around and the ones I have selected are the MK K5846S modules. I'm not sure if they will make much difference in my setup, especially as the AQVox switches are in the circuit and the network output from the Fidata to the streamer is similarly 'filtered' and the network cables themselves are all the AQVox Edge series cables. We'll see!
Does anyone else have any opinions on / experience with network sockets?
Anyway, the reason for this thread is that I am pretty certain I have isolated the glitch to a 'faulty' Cat5 socket, labelled RJ45 Socket 1 in the schematic. Unfortunately this is behind the rack holding the Fidata server and is pretty inaccessible. Part of the testing and the current solution was the connect the AQVox Switch 1 to RJ45 Socket 2 and, so far that works perfectly, but means the network feeds go across the doorway twice (and yes I know there are other wiring configurations that I could try, but there are reasons behind the current one). So, what I need to do is either check and repair the connections to RJ45 Socket 1 (the other end is fine) or replace it. Now I'm going to have to take everything off the rack to do that so I started to look around to see if I can find better RJ45 sockets than the standard 'network grade' ones I am using currently. Amazingly it seems to be the one area where you can't buy ridiculously expensive 'audiophile' ones!
However, there are a few screened Cat6e ones around and the ones I have selected are the MK K5846S modules. I'm not sure if they will make much difference in my setup, especially as the AQVox switches are in the circuit and the network output from the Fidata to the streamer is similarly 'filtered' and the network cables themselves are all the AQVox Edge series cables. We'll see!Does anyone else have any opinions on / experience with network sockets?
