Here's the pre-arrival hardware mix, with the LHY SW6-SFP LAN distributor holding space for EFI before returning to the main system. Because I had the hardware, I added one wrinkle. Rather than feed the R26II Ethernet and USB, I dedicated an Audalytic DR70 to USB. That's because switching the bigger Gustard back and forth between USB and UPnP-based Ethernet too often made the latter non-discoverable. Now both paths were dedicated, stable and switched in the preamp. USB does Spotify Premium, YouTube and microphone podcast taping. Ethernet does Qobuz and local files through Audirvana. Happy days. Onto audiophile legos. Round 1: replace LHY's SW6-SFP 6-outlet switch with EFI. Round 2: replace my two series-strapped LHY switches in the main system with EFI. Round 3: compare COS Engineering's S6/LPS1 combo of network switch and external linear power supply in either system. On arrival day I discovered Alex Halberstadt's Stereophile review of the TP-Link MC220K Ethernet-to-fibre media converters. It kicks off with a visit to a friend who, after demo'ing his system for the writer, disappears into the next room and changes something. Upon returning and playing the same track, "now it sounded quieter and more resolved but also far more colourful, vivid and physical. I heard a better sense of texture and presence as well as enhanced musical flow. The music made more sense… when I asked my friend how he'd managed to so dramatically improve the quality of his breathtakingly costly digital front end, he said a little sheepishly that he'd inserted a pair of Ethernet-to-fibre converters between his network switch and the streamer. He'd bought them online for ~$85 including shipping." Alex then recreates the experience in his own system with the same results. Fibre-optics for Ethernet not Toslink are being rediscovered. Again, EFI's unique selling point is doing away with two external converters, their wall warts and the fibre link between them. Instead it all happens invisibly inside one box. "EFIng a" as in…

… "fuckin' affirmative"? It's a colloquialism from the US army later publicized in Norman Mailer's WWII novel The Naked and the Dead. Using it here maintains proper literary decorum. There are things which we can measure but not hear—especially in digital. What's a DAC with a measured 130dB of dynamic range supposed to do in an inner-city room whose standing noise floor is 40dB whilst maximally compressed music doesn't eclipse 6dB of recorded dynamic range and the single-ended triode amp barely hits 80dB of S/NR? How about endless choices of digital filters which in most cases sound no different yet clearly exhibit divergent measured behaviour? In short, I entered this gig unsure whether my swaps would net anything. When I heard more difference than I previously had with my USB isolation, I was nearly shocked. For more army slang, this was the opposite of fubar. I just don't think they have a term for that. 

I didn't immediately have my own to put the sonic difference into a word or two. That took more thinking on what I heard and what it meant. If we segregate sounds into beginnings, middles and ends—transients, sustains, decays—some gear changes how we perceive the leading edges. Sharpened they can improve focus, localization and timing. Softened the sound can feel mellower and smoother. Particularly tubes but also DSD conversion and kit voiced to mimic either can elongate our trailing edges. This enhances tonal overlay just as more room reverb enriches tone. Within reason it also emphasizes recorded ambience. If decays shorten, the sound gets drier and more clipped. EFI did neither. It affected my perception of the sustains' weight right after the transients. Though limited as such comparisons are, we might perhaps think in pugilistic terms whereby the impact of a trained boxer's check hook goes past its initial impact smack but follows through from the hip through the rear foot into the floor—a form of integrated afterburn which a beginner's jab from the elbow and shoulder lacks. Translated into sonics, this action meant more gravitas. So I did have my own term after all. Being pure digital-domain doings, this of course was no thunder 'n' lightning stuff. Just so, it tracked. Its delta exceeded my USB isolation, probably because it preceded it. USB merely routed cloud files out of my PC which Ethernet had just downloaded to it via my router. I thought of how an effective water purifier installed at the entry of our water mains impacts not just the kitchen faucet but shower head. And that meant that USB too improved. This telegraphed as reduced difference between Ethernet and USB. Ethernet, DSD512 and Audirvana/Qobuz still had the edge over Spotify Premium/USB but now it was smaller than before. Clearly the copper-glass-copper chicane at work inside EFI created greater benefits than the earlier all-copper multi-port reclocked network switch from the same designer. Like Alex Halberstadt I'd just gotten the fibre-optic memo—again. Having bought in fully this time, now it was permanently installed on my desktop. Happy days indeed. But to extend from a personal punt's pleasure to a more formal review, I had two more rounds to make.

Before we move on, a brief intermission to restress an earlier point. If I purchased a €5'000+ audiophile streamer, I'd expect these UIP/EFI twins to make zero difference. That's because the job they do for me so effectively—as external add-ons to a prosumer workstation doubling as streamer—should already be handled inside any such costly deck. If today's EFI could still improve it, I'd seriously question why I'm being charged crack coin for a stripped-down computer disguised in a hifi-bling chassis. A €399 Wiim-level streamer certainly can't be expected to pack €1'000 worth of retail coin in Ethernet/USB isolation/purification, each with its own dedicated power supply. Hence where I see EFI's native habitat is somewhere between the camps of Wiim and Antipodes/Innuos/Lumin; and with PCfi adherents in particular. End of intermission.