Launched in early 2024, Computer Audio Design’s (CAD) Ethernet Control is designed to reduce unwanted high frequency noise on the Ethernet network connection in audio and video equipment, thereby improving the performance of streaming-based and file-replay systems. Roy Gregory puts it to the test alongside a duo of competitors.

Computer Audio Design (CAD) firmly believes that reducing unwanted high frequency noise in a hi-fi system audibly improves the system’s sound quality. To that end, the company has pioneered a portfolio of highly effective solutions to the problem, including the new Ethernet Control.

Hi-fi reviewer Roy Gregory, meanwhile, believes that there is considerable scope for improvement when it comes to digital audio. As formats, “streaming and network replay are very much a work in progress,” he writes, and “when it comes to streamed music and high-end audio, it is largely a story of unfulfilled promise.”

Fortunately there is “a light at the end of this particular tunnel” in the form of “offerings from the likes of CAD (Computer Audio Design), one of the few manufacturers to generate consistently enjoyable and musical results from file replay”.

The company’s new Ethernet Control is intended for use with audio source components such as servers, computers, streamers and DACs, and also with amplifiers and other analogue components with RJ45 connections for service, control or configuration. The device is small, unobtrusive and simple to use, and will deliver audible results with both streaming services (Spotify, TIDAL, Qobuz, etc) and with locally stored music files.

Auditioning three different Ethernet filters in a comparative review, Gregory ranks the trio as ‘good, ‘better’ and best’, with CAD’s Ethernet Control earning the top slot as ‘best’ with a performance that “fully justifies the cost”.

“Given the price of many high-end streaming components – and the lamentable musical performance they all too often deliver, [CAD’s] Ethernet Control is a bargain of monumental proportions, one that potentially, finally allows your crazy expensive boxes to actually do what you’ve probably been telling yourself they’ve been doing all along,” he concludes.

Read Gregory’s review in full online at https://gy8.eu/review/threes-a-charm

Discover more about CAD’s innovative range of components – all of which are designed to markedly improve the sound of your computer-based audio – and locate your nearest specialist retailer, at www.computeraudiodesign.com