For those noting omens, the city state of Taiwan hosts more makers of audiophile network switches: COS Engineering with their S10 and Zayin with the Stargate. Zayin are the new sister brand of Clones Audio who relocated to Taiwan when China took back Hong Kong. It's where Lumin remain who incorporate LAN distribution socketry in models like their L2. This corner of the globe really sweats the quality of our LAN for digital music distribution. Here's Chorus Chang: "Our GX clock includes four independent temperature-controlled oscillators with their own discrete circuitry to prevent mutual interference. These clocks are identical to what's in our best network switch. Why moving the clocks offboard creates superior results has to do with the switch's self noise which influences the clock signal. Housing the clocks in their own shielded chassis with six sub chambers fully isolates them from the switch's radiated fields. The GX's superior jitter figures even show this improvement. My power supply switches at very high rates then combines with a top-quality linear voltage regulator to become a form of switching/linear hybrid."

"But the 12V umbilical input can still bypass it with a fully linear version. The 10MHz ports are for our own N8-Pro, future models in our lower tier and of course components with 10MHz clock inputs from other makers like Aurender and Esoteric's K-03/K-05 SACD players. 25MHz is for our best machines. We actually test each and every unit during our quality control process against a golden sample to insure tight performance tolerances. Finally, our clocks use square-wave not sinusoid signal. We believe that the former works better for network applications, the latter better with D/A converters."

If the pro-audio idea of a masterclock is to sync multiple digital components to one shared clock, aren't four clocks three too many? It's certainly not the classic concept. Instead it replaces an individual component's clock with a presumably better one which here can be done for up to four components. That's conceptually similar to upgrading an internal power supply with an external one. The assumption must be that the GX is measurably superior not just 'in the box' but once we add four BNC solder joints, four physical BNC connectors and an impedance-matched high-speed cable between them. When I tried LHY's OCK-2 clock to sync their SW-6 and SW-10 network switches to a shared 50Ω masterclock, I couldn't tell a difference.

Yet on my desktop the same clock improved ambient retrieval and treble textures whilst clock-slaving a Singxer SU-2 USB bridge and iFi Pro iDSD Signature DAC. I enjoyed the difference enough to permanently add this clock to my office. I simply don't know whether the reason for it being audible there but not in the main system was applying it to USB/AES not Ethernet. Try before buy seems good advice with clocks.