Anybody want a laugh?

The argument among those like the OP is always that we are simply transmitting 0’s and 1’s within a square (-ish) wave. But there is never any attention paid to how that square wave gets from point A to point B - it’s as if it is conveyed by magic with no outside forces (i.e voltage). The nearly square transitions are still sharp and sudden and these waves contain not only the 0’s and 1’s but also its odd harmonics. There is absolutely room for noise so it’s really just a matter of whether your gear is capable of highlighting the noise and whether your ear is capable of hearing it. I personally haven’t been able to hear the difference between ethernet switches and cables yet I’m not ready to dismiss the differences in the name of science - but I also don’t feel like this is a worthwhile area to spend my audio dollars when there is much lower hanging sonic fruit for my musical priorities.

That’s not my argument. My argument is that the other equipment that will connect on either end of something like this switch, and indeed the internal solder points inside this switch are not capable of producing an improvement, so dropping this “link” in the middle of a dirty chain won’t do anything. 
Weakest link anybody? Super old principle that still holds up quite well. 
The mods deleted my original reply, which contained no profanity or anything else that would normally warrant removal from a forum, so I guess the AudioGon leaderships MO is defending the fragile state of mind of its membership. 

Yes we read the ad, yes we know caps,  resistors etc..are standard upgrades, yes we're aware of all this. What's ho ho funny is the ignorant rubes who think doing this to an ethernet switch is going to affect anything you'll hear. 

Then you don’t know anywhere near as much as you think you do.

This argument is chock full of flaws.

My argument is that the other equipment that will connect on either end of something like this switch, and indeed the internal solder points inside this switch are not capable of producing an improvement, so dropping this “link” in the middle of a dirty chain won’t do anything.

The biggest flaw is its a false understanding of what components do. They do not improve anything. The best a perfect component can do is perfectly pass the signal. Any departure from the signal is by definition distortion. Therefore as a matter of simple logic no component ever can make anything better. The very best components merely do the least harm.

The next flaw is in thinking that it can’t matter because all the other components are flawed. Well, of course they are flawed! A high end audio system is like looking through a window of a thousand panes of glass. Each component is a pane of glass. Some are clear, some tinted green, some flat some distorted, some clean, some dirty, some tinted scratched up curved and smeared with gook. No matter how many or how bad still if you can remove any one of those panes and replace it with one that’s nice and clear and clean, well for sure that is an improvement.

This also shows why the "weakest link" argument is faulty. The weakest link is a great way of looking at what to do next, to get the most bang for your audiophile buck. But the fact of the matter is you could replace your strongest link and get just as much improvement. (But it will cost more, which is why this is not a great idea.) Because it is just like the window panes, and instead of replacing the dirtiest most scratched up one you replace the cleanest clearest one. But as long as its replaced with one even cleaner and clearer it will still be an improvement.

Improvement, to be clear, in the sense of being not as bad. The fundamental error is in thinking these things actually make things better, when in truth all they are doing is making things less bad.

Miller, I generally enjoy your posts, but you just wrote a book explaining something completely obvious that ignores the fact that nobody is ever going to have access to an “audiophile” cable or dsl modem. Even if they did, this is one of the purest examples of it just being 1’s & 0’s. 
The firehose of information coming out of a broadband connection has to be decoded and converted in so many ways before it ever reaches your device that thinking a fancy switch, or fancy Cat6 cables will do anything is complete hogwash. 
To make the point stick, I’d be willing to bet my house and both vehicles that nobody on this forum could reliably identify network components like these in a double blind test. 
That’s just the breaks man, like it or not.