This is a review of a network switch that was launched in November by US company Uptone audio who have linear power supplies and USB regen and ISO regen in their stable.

Ive been keenly following the development threads on this product since early summer and after reading the first flush of user impressions since the launch I pulled the trigger. Cost was around £660 from the UK distributor.

So the design principles of this switch are meant to address current leakage from the ethernet sources that can travel via your ethernet cables onto your DAC circuits and create havoc as noise within those circuits. There is also a very low phase noise clock within the switch which also hells reduce noise to the DAC and minimise jitter. Im not going to expand too much on the technicalities beyond that but i will point folks to Audiophile Style if they want to know more.

There are 4 ethernet ports on one side and just one on the other. There is an option to connect to a reference clock a ground shunted SMPS is provided. There is one optical sfp port.

So this diminutive little switch arrived on Friday, i was on a work do and got home at 9 to put the switch in the system and have a listen. I played a couple of familiar tracks before putting the switch in to “calibrate” my drunken ears .

My system consists of an Apple TV 4th gen and a Lyngdorf TDAI3400 power DAC. I stream spotify and watch amazon and netflix and terrestrial tv via the internet.

First off i put the ethernet from my in the wall power network and my apple tv into the 4 ported A side and my 3400 on the B side. I fired up spotify and was immediately treated to a very different sound to what I was used to. I could hear far more details , the volume appeared to go up 1db, bass was very solid, the top end opened up and the soundstage increased significantly. The music appeared to be far more natural and at ease. I listened to a couple of albums on spotify 320 kbps and thought this was very promising.

The next morning I woke up at 6 and crept downstairs for another album played low, wow it sounded sweet. Spotify stayed on all day until about 4 when my daughter wanted to watch TV. I stuck a couple of youtube tracks on but although the sound was better I was disappointed that its hadn’t had the same leap as spotify.

The next morning I was playing through my favourites with a big smile on my face , then switched. to youtube again as I wanted to fiddle with the set up. Now switching to my one ethernet in on the B side and apple tv and tdai 3400 sharing the A side, i gave apple tv another whirl..... wow big jump in SQ , massive sound stage, very solid bass amazing textures on sounds particularly percussion, lovely strings too, loads more detail and inky black background. I switched back to spotify and i though i lost a little of the quality but was worth it for such a great step up from both my sources.

Better picture on TV too.

Will try to post pictures tomorrow.

If you are serious about a digital front end then you need one of these or the purportedly better sounding SoTM switch ( but you need the pimped up and loaded version.

Everything is important in digital , but wow a switch that is capable of delivering large uptick in SQ, who’d of thunk ?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk