The 21st century has brought consumer products to a new level; gone are the days of constructing large towers. Today, we obscure our network access points for a false sense of security. We created a massive addition to our everyday vocabulary: Bluetooth, RFID, 5G, IOT, wifi, and mesh networks. They enhance our quality of life and increase sources of interference.
Many everyday items are susceptible to these electromagnetic fields. For example, electronic circuit boards, power cords, and cabling are not just emitters. They are receiving antennas. Our human bodies and objects can absorb wireless transmissions. This is called SAR or Specific Absorption Rate. It calculates our daily radiation exposure limits, a discussion for another day.
Conservation of energy states that total energy in a closed system remains constant. However, when it was discovered there was a relationship to mass (E= MC2), understanding of the properties in the electrical world changed. Energy can be transformed, absorbed, or reflected.
For our music systems that use electricity to amplify sound, the environmental noise we create daily is detrimental to the system's fidelity. We coexist in a saturated electromagnetic environment that adds noise and digital hash.
It may be easier to relate to noise pollution in the visible spectrum. For example, a century ago, you could see significantly more stars at night than is possible with the naked eye today. We place observatories far from civilization and now in space to glimpse what is beyond our world. Why, well, our lights create visual spectrum noise, which operates at a specific frequency band (visual light) and is made by the lowest bidder. The majority of light sources also emit RF noise.
Consumers are generally oblivious to the millions of miles of transmission lines and billions of devices that negatively impact our music system.
EnKlein acknowledges the modern noise challenges generated by the communication and digital revolution. We aim to eliminate this new environmental distortion from our stereo and entertainment systems.
Digital sources are widespread in the 21st century. They have benefitted from the technical renaissance. However, not all communication technology is equal. This is not a discussion on a vendor's implementation prowess.
This is a commentary on transmission medium and protocols. This falls within ISO-OSI models layers 1 through 4, also known as the transport model. This is the main reason Dave K often refers to cabling as “Transport,” implying the lower levels of the model. Very few people understand that ISO-OSI Is a standardized model for effective communication between engineers and scientists. Let the coders dispute the relevance of layers 5-7 in modern application development.
Let’s simplify everything by creating two groups based on the physical layout; one is called point-to-point, and the other is multipoint.
Ethernet uses the TCP/IP stack and has the highest possible bitrate and capacity in high-fidelity equipment, as commercial-grade fiber optic is out of reach. Ethernet has an internal issue at its core, not a typo. The fact that two or more devices can talk concurrently on a simplex network has disastrous results for streaming music and video. This event is called a collision. When a collision is detected, all devices on the network stop communicating for a randomly generated period to avoid more collisions! Yes, your data stream is interrupted. Ethernet collision increases as more devices are added to the network. Some people may think they are safe as they have multiple “Switches” in their network. A managed switch/router only repeats data along an ethernet path when the address corresponds to a device on the leg of the network. The truth is you would have to know how to administer the network and be able to afford a managed switch. Most devices repeat messages along the chain.
Ethernet with a few devices can stream up to 40% of the bandwidth with another catch. Low-cost cabling and devices can create false collision detections. This happens more than you would anticipate, even on commercial systems. The industry doesn’t like customers to realize that 40% of the total available bitrate is limiting. The industry responds by increasing data rates, ever notice the data rates are intentionally backward compatible and may support 1/10/100/1000 Mbps devices. The service falls to the rate of the slowest device on the network segment. This is not advertised in large print for the same reason online consumer agreements are so long and detailed that we click ok. You get what you pay for if…
EnKlein Ethernet cabling is designed to reduce false collisions by entering a zero reference point in the cable grounding design. We can assist your dealer with recommended switches, routers, and access points to meet your end client's needs. Often, the straightforward implementation of the EnKlein ethernet cable between the access point and streamer is enough.
Point to Point is another popular and effective communication technique with simplex, half, and complete duplex varieties. Protocol control is often used to prevent data collisions. However, the metallic interfaces are prone to acting as EMI absorption antenna. Think about it: a dipole antenna is two parallel wires.
I often hear, “My current Brand X cabling uses twisted geometry that I can see!”
Think of Einstein’s relativity discussion; imagine yourself as the size of an electron; can you see the twists? No, for the same reason, people standing on the ground reckoned the earth was flat until science proved otherwise. Understanding the nature of perspective observation is essential to comprehending physics.
The point-to-point transceiver in your equipment must have clarity to determine the nature of a symbol transmitted along your digital cabling. Introducing a new term or symbol, think of the computer 1s and 0s as positive, negative, or nothing. Nothing is the space between symbols. Your transceiver has to determine the value to recreate the music readily. When the transceiver is uncertain, the packet of data is lost! This is not conducive to high-quality streaming!
EnKlein Digital cables are designed utilizing multiple perspective measurements and their relationship in 5 dimensions to engineer exemplary construction techniques and material requirements for every use case.
Analog and digital interconnects perform different functions. Everyone agrees that they are transmission media for music. Analog music has a complex waveform. The individual sounds of instruments and voices are distinguishable. Digital music is a single carrier frequency where binary information, 1s, and 0s, represent all music as a data block.
Digital music is transformed into analog music at some point in your system, as speaker drivers are mechanical devices. Analog music typically remains analog throughout the entire system.
So far, we have established analog music as a complex waveform compared to digitized music. The physics behind each type of music format is different, each with different challenges and solutions.
Enter the four wisemen you may recognize: Oliver Heaviside, Hendrik Lorentz, Heinrich Hertz, and James Maxwell. Maxwell created classical electromagnetism, and Heaviside and Lorentz refined and created practical applications of Maxwell's work, amongst other contributions. Hertz's work is prevalent in the world. For example, the technical terms "Hz, kHz, MHz" are named for Hertz and are typically found on the specification page of stereo equipment manuals.
Now, we have the mathematics and physics to describe analog waveforms and how they interact along a wire/cable. The group delay is an efficient measurement for complex analog waveforms, a Heaviside contribution to science. This simple principle allows a purposeful interpretation of complex music and speech as frequency blocks. With this technique, we can measure velocity differences between groups.
Group delay has an audible impact on amplified music and our cable design process. Group delay is more complex than our simplified description, as impedance, capacitance, resistance, and reactance vary over frequency and materials. It's known that waveforms don't travel at the same speed over cables.
The components in your stereo have varying specifications in their manuals and often include industry measurements that obfuscate design issues. The electrical variation of system components adds to the performance degradation of poorly engineered cable designs.
Science implies that identical cables replaying identical music will have measurable differences between amplifiers, preamps, and speakers.
Physics and mathematics allow EnKlein to design engineering solutions to reduce and remove these negative, undesirable interactions.
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