Anybody want a laugh?

Mr. dougeyjones:

Your GUESS at what a piece of equipment will or will not do is not very logical.
Your demeanor is that of someone very upset with ??? people???
Try something else to do with your spare time for a while.                DON'T watch TV,  and avoid conversations that are not about puppies or other cute stuff.

Upset.. You’re seeing the neutered version, I think I’ve had more of my posts here moderated than any forum I’ve posted on in the last 20 years. 

As for limiting my media consumption to “cute stuff”, judging by how flimsy people’s confidence in their purchasing is around here, I think I’ve struck a nerve. 

Though I don’t expect this thread to have any lasting effect, I do think it’s brought out some people with real technical expertise. Those individuals have tried (maybe in vain) to color in some missing details, which has power washed some of the snake oil that accumulated back into the drain where it belongs. 

“Though I don’t expect this thread to have any lasting effect”

You got atleast one thing right and it didn’t even provide any real laughs. Total waste of time, better luck next time 😎

I believe that if you use shielded ethernet cables, there actually is a chance of affecting your sound output... because they have the potential to create a ground loop if the switch and streamer are on different outlets. Most people, however, don’t use shielded cables so that’s generally not an issue.

I’m assuming these audiocentric switches are for streaming within your own home - otherwise, there is a whole world of internet infrastructure out there between you and the streaming data source.

Assuming the streaming protocol is TCP based, it’s packets over the line, into a buffer for reconstruction, then into another buffer for decoding. The transfer rates are significantly high enough that unless you’re dealing with major network congestion (something these tweaks won’t help with), you should have no problem keeping the buffers full.

If for some reason, your home network is sufficiently congested, the best thing you can probably do to ensure good quality audio is to implement some kind of QoS policy in your switch to prioritize traffic between the source and the streamer.

Hope to keep this discussion respectful - this is my view from a computer/software engineering perspective.

These cheap off the shelf made expensive switches are layer 2 you can’t do any priority with them. A $50 netgear managed switch would do more for a busy home network.