What would distinguish an ethernet switch "for audiophiles" vs a regular ethernet switch?
This has the same feel to it that those green magic markers they sold to audiophiles. You were supposed to use the markers on the edges of CDs to make the data reads richer and more vibrant and warm or some such hogwash.
I'm also reminded of "directional" audio cables, and the "DiscWasher" scam from the 70s, although heaven knows, LPs really needed help.
I had a Dishwasher back in the day, never knew it was meant to improve sound quality; I just liked to use it to remove dust from my LPs. Plus it was a fun part of the Tea Ceremony.
DiscWasher was a popular LP cleaner in the 1970s. There was a fibrous cleaning pad attached to a handle, and some special fluid that came in a small eyedrops-style squeeze bottle. The fluid was the expensive part, $5 for one or two fluid ounces, quite expensive for the day. You'd carefully squeeze out a drop of magic fluid on the cleaning pad, and while your LP was spinning, let the cleaning pad drag over the surface of the LP.
Turns out the $5/oz ($40 a cup!) special DiscWasher fluid was distilled water. Lawsuits and hilarity followed!
This epic tale of audiophile gullibility is not even on the Internet, it appears. The past is dead.
Oh I owned one. Never knew the contents of the squeeze bottle. The brush itself was well made, and seemed to clean my LPs pretty well. I never bought a refill, and I think the Dishwasher was a gift. Mine was made of nice wood with the cleaning pad attached and a hollow to hold the squeeze bottle.
There are diminishing returns in terms of objectively measurable quantities as you move up the price-continuum in audio equipment. "Audiophile" vendors have realized that there's a subset of the population for which the subjective enjoyment experienced is actually determined more by the latter than the former variable... Can't blame them for trying, although their apparent success is quite concerning.
The reviews of the music they tested are great and could both be parody as well as what they probably are, namely the dellusional ramblings of someone who got swindled:
"Via the Ethernet Switch UEF, we have a much more defined and explosive brass section. You get the proper metallic blast and blatt without strain. The piano is now wonderfully fleshed out with plenty of timbral purity and proper weight. High hat cymbals have never sounded better. Exciting stuff!"
"When engaging the Ethernet Switch UEF, your room boundaries will evaporate in all directions. The band is now in the venue with you. The bongos are unleashed with additional color and tone and with a bottom end wallop that might just startle you. Goose bump city!"
I don't believe they were swindled - these review sites would most likely be in on it and get the units for free (or on loan, but given the true cost of one of these I don't believe it's even worth the logistics of shipping it back).
This is utterly hilarious. Is it satire? The idea that an Ethernet switch could have any impact on listening other than maybe some weirdness with a ground loop or whatnot is absurd. If an audiophile were really truly worried about Ethernet they should use fibre, and then they’ll never have to worry about anything.
No ground loops in Ethernet. The signalling wires are driven through transformers, isolating them from ground to improve noise immunity.
Latency maybe, but the article doesn't talk about it, and this is typically solved the same way it is inside your computer when feeding the sound card: deliver too much info then wait. The real time delivery constraints that you can patch into the Ethernet stack on Linux are only necessary for reducing roundtrip time.
Indeed. I had to get a USB ground loop eliminator in order to run my Line6 Helix connected to the computer. Now with USB-C-only computers, it's Helix -> cable -> ground loop eliminator -> adapter -> computer. Without the need for it, I'd have just replaced the USB-A cable with a USB-C one and connect directly to the computer.
technically you can ground-loop passive high powered PoE gigabit ethernet (like for 85W radios or big beefy heated pan/tilt/zoom cameras), but that's not the scenario here.
Not defending this BS by any means, but certain cables have metallic connectors which I believe are connected to the cable's shielding jacket, and if the ports on either side are metal they are probably connected (maybe unintentionally though physical contact with the chassis) to the device's ground, so wouldn't that create a conductive path for interference?
When made properly this is only supposed to be on one end. If it's on both you do get a loop, but the disruption to the signalling doesn't manifest as audio noise in the way the website seems to be speaking of.
It has to be? The albums look chosen to represent a certain strain of aging hipster that doesn’t realize the world has passed them by. If this isn’t satire, the author is astoundingly self-unaware…
Fibre has its own challenges -- crystalline structure, IoR homogeneity, and polarization effects can affect the entire audio spectrum. I wish I could say it's better, but ultimately ju/st a different game.
this assumes you're transmitting analog data through fiber.
fiber as an ethernet link is packetized and has error correction. 1Gbps and 10Gbps stuff is just OOK blinking LED on and off. Pretty hard to screw up unless you have a chipped ferrule/facing, dirt on the fiber, or dirt in the connectors.
can we maintain high fidelity satire close to the shannon limit? what do the varying code rate waterfall curves look like for satire FEC on modern equipment?
In the times that I used forums with phpBB and SMF I really liked that I could select the font that I wanted to use, using Comic Sans is a nice way to let people understand that you are using the satire.
I'm not sure it's satire, but it certainly hits the mark. I do wish there was even a hint of basic physics in there, anywhere.
I can see the logic behind a properly isolated switch - for example, I have optical everything as my amplifier has a terrible habit of turning switching power supplies into chainsaw noises. Anywhere I can isolate shared noise is a win. But that's achieved with amazonbasics toslink cables, not .. magical pixie dust, or whatever these guys are selling.
Unfortunately it is not satire. The audiophile community has a lot of these "snake oil" products, and they have their own followers. I believe they take advantage of the continuous pursuit of audio quality audiophiles have, even though it is not well founded, not does bring any quantifiable improvement.
You will see things like really expensive HDMI cables, or Power Cords that increase the treble, and many more.
I have a hot take on this: Sound only exists inside your head, so if you convince yourself something sounds better because you paid a $shitton for it, then for all practical purposes it DOES sound better.
You're paying top dollar for a placebo effect, but it's every bit as real as "sound" is.
Absolutely.. Currently working with a new HD audio codec and although I know it’s nonsense, it sounds and feels better than ever at times, in fact I can relate to his description of the clarity with his new gadget.. A simple 3 minute ABX test tells me I’m smoking crack and 1:1 normality is once again restored..
Unless you're actively thinking about how awesome your equipment is the entire time you listen, I don't think placebo is a very useful improvement.
And more accurate reproduction that enables you to hear everything in the recording is not subjective either. (And if you want certain equalizer settings you can always do that yourself on top of quality hardware.)
You can extend this analysis further. The reason that audiophiles listen to music is for enjoyment. Thus, if they get enjoyment from paying $gazillions for a cable, then it is money well spent.
Only if your golden oxygen free ethernet cable has also been hand-blessed by tibetan monks, and its jacket made from single source organic free range non-GMO nylon
It seems like there's enough market for this BS to sustain a legitimate factory operation with full-time employees. Now while there's no way to tell whether the founder is just a conman or delusional as he'd never admit it, I wonder what the employees think of all this.
This video also includes a good drinking game - drink every time he says "by hand".
The "lab" looks like a small repurposed kitchen. I've seen better labs at electronic hobbyists' homes.
I wonder if it crossed any of these reviewers minds that the audio they listened to traversed countless switches, network routers, fiber amplifiers and who knows what else before it ever hit that switch.
I have zero clue who buys this stuff. Perhaps I'm in the wrong business!
In some sense, it doesn't surprise me that there's some market for this. For the older audiophile who doesn't understand digital music or networking, their only analog is.. analog. :-)
So if you look at the setup with "vinyl goggles", where upgrading your stylus or pre-amp or cartridge _does_ have some impact to audio quality - since the physical diamond or sound chambre can vary - you can see how someone without any IT knowledge could conclude that, likewise, upgrading the devices in the "signal path" (network) for digital music would make an impact.
Now like, obviously that's wrong, but if someone is willing to pay you $2000 for a Realtek switch in a fancy case.. Clearly the market will oblige!
Galileo SX Ethernet cables were designed around a brand new UEF Filter featuring Graphene and a special UEF Tech first developed for our award winning Blue Fuses to eliminate digital noise through an inductive process that takes place outside the signal path. UEF Graphene Shielding is now applied in a new Matrix Grid pattern for a striking lowering of your system’s overall noise floor so you hear detail and dynamics in the most holographic soundscape of any Ethernet cable in Synergistic Research history. We upgraded the UEF Ground Plane with new UEF Blue Fuse technology and treated the entire cable to a new UEF Blue Fuse treatment that both increases overall cable performance as it lowers the time necessary for cable burn in. Lastly the outer shield of the cable can be attached to ground with an included ground plug or can be attached to an optional SR Passive Ground Block or our SR Active Ground Block for a dramatic increase in overall system performance. If fail to recognize the superiority of these cables you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. And with new Gold and Silver UEF Tuning Circuits that change the yin and yang of the digital cable from detailed to liquid pain extinguishing the voices of man from the mortal sphere you can custom match them to your system and taste or try them without, the choice is yours.
I fed that into a neural network based text generator and got something that is no more or less sensible and logical. Next step: fully automated audiophile marketing copy generation?
===============
And if you are a system builder and want to make sure you're in the right class, let's talk about the final piece. We went back to the drawing board and developed an outer jacket and inner shield made from unbreakable material with customizable applications. With these exceptional cables we assure that your system will stand the test of time and will also stand up to the power of the Graphene RF head stage.
Galileo SX Ethernet Cable Features
1)High Strength Diamond Strand Spliced Cable:
-Band with closed, crimped jacket with 600 strand copper lacing that is non-conductive making it easier to splice using RCA terminals and soldering
-Unbreakable Diamond Strand Spliced Cable - 100% diamond strand, zero standing wave, perfect for any extreme use. This cable is MADE TO SHINE, ALL the way through. It is almost as shiny as it sounds.
-Unbreakable 900 Volt rated jacket, clad with Nomex.
2)UL Certified Platinum Wire Terminals:
-20 feet of unbreakable Platinum Wire Terminals.
3)Radial Wire Terminals and 4 Ohm Fitting:
-100 foot of Radial Wire Terminals and an 8 ohm Fitting (2.4 Ohm rounding up to 1.4 Ohm).
How to use Galileo SX Ethernet Cable
1)Communicate over USB:
-Use the included 3 pin high voltage USB cable to charge the Galileo SX.
2)Locate Transmitters/Transmitters:
-Pair the TX/RX cables on the Graphene wireless receiver to each transmitter on the radio to receive the signals.
3)Setup Channel:
-Use the included 1.5mm 4 wire installation kit to route the QRP channel to the channel provided.
Special thanks to:
For backing the Galileo SX system with your pre-orders, for testing the Galileo SX and answering our questions, and for helping us design this new Graphene Ethernet 3.5mm cable, we'd like to thank Ben McMullen from WinRadio Shack and Mike Schulz from Radio Shack.
To get a hold of us, you can email us at glynner (at) wryqr.com or check out our contact page on GrapheneRfans.com.
The only way I can think this could make any difference is if generates less electrical noise from its internal power source or emanates less RFI that could be picked up by the rest of the audio gear.
I'm sure not all audiophiles are dumb and I think a few educated ones pay for expensive cables that are used for digital data. I'm really curious why.
So obviously there is "high quality" and "frivolously expensive" cables, but there is a reason to get a good digital data cable: shielding.
Think of something like UDP traffic. If you have poorly shielded cables, you could corrupt a packet. In the case of UDP traffic, you will never get that packet back. Do this enough, and it may impact sound quality of eg. streaming audio.
Some audiophiles are used to spending thousands on cabling and power cleaning and it does make a difference if $100k has already been spent on the gear. So when presented with a switch like this it makes sense to them. But they are snakeoil. One thing that these things claim is jitter reduction - because jitter was an issue on the original USB devices using synchronous protocol. But try to explain that any kit they have is already buffering ethernet because it is impossible to do otherwise, and you'll just hit a brick wall. Better to drop $2k on this, and another $10k on special ethernet cables, just to be safe!
Hang out on a website devoted to high end audio, like Meridian [1], and you'll see half the people starting threads about some new $10k cable they bought, and the other half studiously avoiding telling them they are wasting their money. Just don't get involved.
> it does make a difference if $100k has already been spent on the gear.
That sounds like a sunk cost fallacy, why does it matter how much was spent? It should be the other way around where "clean power" makes a noticeable difference with cheap playback equipment with flimsy filtering capacitors in their power supplies. So-called "audiophile" equipment of boat-anchor weight should not need "clean power", that should be handled by the power supply.
The whole "audiophile" scene is rife with mass-delusion, they fall for the same scams as those who e.g. buy "amulets for protection against evil spirits". Neither of these do anything but both may feel better by having them. The "audiophile" may get the same satisfaction from listening to whatever he plays as whatever random person does listening to his or her music using whatever equipment they have at hand. The difference is that the random person did not have to pay a scammer to achieve satisfaction. The same was true for the "audiophile" before he fell into the trap but now he's lost that ability.
The most die-hard believers will insist that if two pieces of equipment sound "obviously" different when you know which one you're listening to, but they're indistinguishable under a double-blind test, then the only explanation is that the testing methodology must be flawed. They simply find the "placebo effect" explanation absurd and refuse to accept it.
I've seen a gold plated audiophile TOSLINK cable before. Which is actually a fat multimode optical connector. But the part you pushed into the socket sure was shiny!
At least the price is normal. I'm ok with 6 euro for a one meter TOS link cable. Nice touch with the "can't lose those" protective tip covers, I really miss that when moving stuff around.
I second the incredulity in every other comment here, but the bit that really struck me was the aluminum chassis reinforced with carbon fiber to _dampen vibration and resonance_. In an ethernet switch. What?
I guess, if I had to stretch to say something nice, it's good that people like the author exist so that some engineers get to have a bit of fun designing a boring old switch with a no-compromises budget.
EDIT: their website (the maker, not the reviewer) is pure (oxygen free, directional) gold. They have a ten thousand dollar power cord with extra little plugs on it that you can attach to something called a carbon fiber tuning module to "voice your system."
Basic carbon fiber plate in a few mm thickness is actually really cheap now, you can get custom cut quadcopter frames (with all of the CNC work included) for $40 to $50.
Even that site, though, feeds into audiophile irrationality. The DAC reviews, for example, throw a bunch of measurements at you, but there is no way a human could hear the difference in the best and worst DAC.
> there is no way a human could hear the difference in the best and worst DAC
Are you sure? Remember that a DAC in this context is also an audio circuit, not just an IC performing digital -> analog conversion. I can say with certainty that switching to a USB DAC made a big difference vs using the output on my motherboard, no computer noise + I lost an unnecessary amplification stage. Of course, I would never spend $$$ on a DAC, because as you mention it's a very low-impact component of the system.
The other thing is that DACs which support high sample rates can play your high sample rate music without software resampling, which is obviously not a useful feature for a lot of people but is definitely audible if you do have high sample rate music for whatever reason.
Clearly I am in the wrong business. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to set up shop selling high-end audiophile gear. Our first product will be a series of speaker cables, enhanced with cadmium for better alignment of the electromagnetic fields. Price, $700.00 USD / foot. If you have to ask how much the special gold-plated connectors cost, you can't afford them.
I swear there must be a form of tinnitus which is only present when you are actively listening to something such that people are convinced the sound is some ground feedback loop.
115 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] threadThis has the same feel to it that those green magic markers they sold to audiophiles. You were supposed to use the markers on the edges of CDs to make the data reads richer and more vibrant and warm or some such hogwash.
I'm also reminded of "directional" audio cables, and the "DiscWasher" scam from the 70s, although heaven knows, LPs really needed help.
price?
DiscWasher was a popular LP cleaner in the 1970s. There was a fibrous cleaning pad attached to a handle, and some special fluid that came in a small eyedrops-style squeeze bottle. The fluid was the expensive part, $5 for one or two fluid ounces, quite expensive for the day. You'd carefully squeeze out a drop of magic fluid on the cleaning pad, and while your LP was spinning, let the cleaning pad drag over the surface of the LP.
Turns out the $5/oz ($40 a cup!) special DiscWasher fluid was distilled water. Lawsuits and hilarity followed!
This epic tale of audiophile gullibility is not even on the Internet, it appears. The past is dead.
two grand
"Via the Ethernet Switch UEF, we have a much more defined and explosive brass section. You get the proper metallic blast and blatt without strain. The piano is now wonderfully fleshed out with plenty of timbral purity and proper weight. High hat cymbals have never sounded better. Exciting stuff!"
"When engaging the Ethernet Switch UEF, your room boundaries will evaporate in all directions. The band is now in the venue with you. The bongos are unleashed with additional color and tone and with a bottom end wallop that might just startle you. Goose bump city!"
Latency maybe, but the article doesn't talk about it, and this is typically solved the same way it is inside your computer when feeding the sound card: deliver too much info then wait. The real time delivery constraints that you can patch into the Ethernet stack on Linux are only necessary for reducing roundtrip time.
fiber as an ethernet link is packetized and has error correction. 1Gbps and 10Gbps stuff is just OOK blinking LED on and off. Pretty hard to screw up unless you have a chipped ferrule/facing, dirt on the fiber, or dirt in the connectors.
I'm going to say turbo product codes
can we maintain high fidelity satire close to the shannon limit? what do the varying code rate waterfall curves look like for satire FEC on modern equipment?
The best I can think of is Hamming codes, because "hamming it up", but improvements would be welcome.
I can see the logic behind a properly isolated switch - for example, I have optical everything as my amplifier has a terrible habit of turning switching power supplies into chainsaw noises. Anywhere I can isolate shared noise is a win. But that's achieved with amazonbasics toslink cables, not .. magical pixie dust, or whatever these guys are selling.
You're paying top dollar for a placebo effect, but it's every bit as real as "sound" is.
And more accurate reproduction that enables you to hear everything in the recording is not subjective either. (And if you want certain equalizer settings you can always do that yourself on top of quality hardware.)
But like how much buffer do you need to completely eliminate any effects of jitter?
I tried the manufacturer site: https://www.synergisticresearch.com/accessories/ethernet-swi...
I still do not know.
A $6,000 power cable.
If this is not satire, they have no shame.
Entry-level.
https://www.audiovisualonline.co.uk/product/8041/audioquest-...
It seems like there's enough market for this BS to sustain a legitimate factory operation with full-time employees. Now while there's no way to tell whether the founder is just a conman or delusional as he'd never admit it, I wonder what the employees think of all this.
This video also includes a good drinking game - drink every time he says "by hand".
The "lab" looks like a small repurposed kitchen. I've seen better labs at electronic hobbyists' homes.
This is what Russ Hanneman[1] startup would look like targeting people from three comma club
[1] https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Russ_Hanneman
I wonder if it crossed any of these reviewers minds that the audio they listened to traversed countless switches, network routers, fiber amplifiers and who knows what else before it ever hit that switch.
I have zero clue who buys this stuff. Perhaps I'm in the wrong business!
So if you look at the setup with "vinyl goggles", where upgrading your stylus or pre-amp or cartridge _does_ have some impact to audio quality - since the physical diamond or sound chambre can vary - you can see how someone without any IT knowledge could conclude that, likewise, upgrading the devices in the "signal path" (network) for digital music would make an impact.
Now like, obviously that's wrong, but if someone is willing to pay you $2000 for a Realtek switch in a fancy case.. Clearly the market will oblige!
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...
https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/galileo-sx/galile...
Galileo SX Ethernet cables were designed around a brand new UEF Filter featuring Graphene and a special UEF Tech first developed for our award winning Blue Fuses to eliminate digital noise through an inductive process that takes place outside the signal path. UEF Graphene Shielding is now applied in a new Matrix Grid pattern for a striking lowering of your system’s overall noise floor so you hear detail and dynamics in the most holographic soundscape of any Ethernet cable in Synergistic Research history. We upgraded the UEF Ground Plane with new UEF Blue Fuse technology and treated the entire cable to a new UEF Blue Fuse treatment that both increases overall cable performance as it lowers the time necessary for cable burn in. Lastly the outer shield of the cable can be attached to ground with an included ground plug or can be attached to an optional SR Passive Ground Block or our SR Active Ground Block for a dramatic increase in overall system performance. If fail to recognize the superiority of these cables you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. And with new Gold and Silver UEF Tuning Circuits that change the yin and yang of the digital cable from detailed to liquid pain extinguishing the voices of man from the mortal sphere you can custom match them to your system and taste or try them without, the choice is yours.
===============
And if you are a system builder and want to make sure you're in the right class, let's talk about the final piece. We went back to the drawing board and developed an outer jacket and inner shield made from unbreakable material with customizable applications. With these exceptional cables we assure that your system will stand the test of time and will also stand up to the power of the Graphene RF head stage.
Galileo SX Ethernet Cable Features
1)High Strength Diamond Strand Spliced Cable:
-Band with closed, crimped jacket with 600 strand copper lacing that is non-conductive making it easier to splice using RCA terminals and soldering
-Unbreakable Diamond Strand Spliced Cable - 100% diamond strand, zero standing wave, perfect for any extreme use. This cable is MADE TO SHINE, ALL the way through. It is almost as shiny as it sounds.
-Unbreakable 900 Volt rated jacket, clad with Nomex.
2)UL Certified Platinum Wire Terminals:
-20 feet of unbreakable Platinum Wire Terminals.
3)Radial Wire Terminals and 4 Ohm Fitting:
-100 foot of Radial Wire Terminals and an 8 ohm Fitting (2.4 Ohm rounding up to 1.4 Ohm).
How to use Galileo SX Ethernet Cable
1)Communicate over USB:
-Use the included 3 pin high voltage USB cable to charge the Galileo SX.
2)Locate Transmitters/Transmitters:
-Pair the TX/RX cables on the Graphene wireless receiver to each transmitter on the radio to receive the signals.
3)Setup Channel:
-Use the included 1.5mm 4 wire installation kit to route the QRP channel to the channel provided.
Special thanks to:
For backing the Galileo SX system with your pre-orders, for testing the Galileo SX and answering our questions, and for helping us design this new Graphene Ethernet 3.5mm cable, we'd like to thank Ben McMullen from WinRadio Shack and Mike Schulz from Radio Shack.
To get a hold of us, you can email us at glynner (at) wryqr.com or check out our contact page on GrapheneRfans.com.
Again, thank you for your support!
,
B
BGN: -33h53m
I'm sure not all audiophiles are dumb and I think a few educated ones pay for expensive cables that are used for digital data. I'm really curious why.
Think of something like UDP traffic. If you have poorly shielded cables, you could corrupt a packet. In the case of UDP traffic, you will never get that packet back. Do this enough, and it may impact sound quality of eg. streaming audio.
Hang out on a website devoted to high end audio, like Meridian [1], and you'll see half the people starting threads about some new $10k cable they bought, and the other half studiously avoiding telling them they are wasting their money. Just don't get involved.
[1] https://www.meridianunplugged.com
That sounds like a sunk cost fallacy, why does it matter how much was spent? It should be the other way around where "clean power" makes a noticeable difference with cheap playback equipment with flimsy filtering capacitors in their power supplies. So-called "audiophile" equipment of boat-anchor weight should not need "clean power", that should be handled by the power supply.
The whole "audiophile" scene is rife with mass-delusion, they fall for the same scams as those who e.g. buy "amulets for protection against evil spirits". Neither of these do anything but both may feel better by having them. The "audiophile" may get the same satisfaction from listening to whatever he plays as whatever random person does listening to his or her music using whatever equipment they have at hand. The difference is that the random person did not have to pay a scammer to achieve satisfaction. The same was true for the "audiophile" before he fell into the trap but now he's lost that ability.
Would it be ethical to push such person through double-blind test, which (I assume) would disprove that there is a perceivable difference?
https://web.archive.org/web/20090304012729/http://www.avguid...
edit: I found it again! https://www.amazon.com/FosPower-Toslink-Digital-Connectors-S...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=expensive...
I guess, if I had to stretch to say something nice, it's good that people like the author exist so that some engineers get to have a bit of fun designing a boring old switch with a no-compromises budget.
EDIT: their website (the maker, not the reviewer) is pure (oxygen free, directional) gold. They have a ten thousand dollar power cord with extra little plugs on it that you can attach to something called a carbon fiber tuning module to "voice your system."
Are you sure? Remember that a DAC in this context is also an audio circuit, not just an IC performing digital -> analog conversion. I can say with certainty that switching to a USB DAC made a big difference vs using the output on my motherboard, no computer noise + I lost an unnecessary amplification stage. Of course, I would never spend $$$ on a DAC, because as you mention it's a very low-impact component of the system.
The other thing is that DACs which support high sample rates can play your high sample rate music without software resampling, which is obviously not a useful feature for a lot of people but is definitely audible if you do have high sample rate music for whatever reason.