Ethernet Switch- what's the point?

@zavato

To answer your question, as you are going from your router directly to your single streamer, a high end ‘switch’ may not be necessary. I had the same question, and was advised to get 2 Media Converters, tethered with an optical connection : Router > 1st Media Converter > 2nd Converter tethered with optical > Streamer.

This helped to ‘strip’ unwanted noise from the router, and indeed sounds better. All in? About $100 via Amazon. I’m pleased with the SQ increase.

Interesting thread and have a question:

I have a Motorola Modem and Asus ZenWifi mesh routers. I have a switch near the router and I have hard wired the smart TV, Roku, NAS, etc, and one of the ports from this switch has a cat6 cable connected to the wall ether net port. The other end of this port has another ether net cable (~25 feet) all the way to my basement where my audio room is located. I am quite happy with the fact that I was able to get a CAT6 cable routed into the audio room before the drop-in ceiling was replaced with a regular ceiling.

What suggestions do you have to make sure that the noise from the network switch on the floor above is not transmitted into the audio server that makes use of this hard wire? It is not that I hear any noise, but based on previous experiences in cables, I believe that there could be room for improvements.

@bkeske - thank you for the directed nature of your comments. Yours is an interesting thought. Question though- do we know that converting to optical doesn’t also include converting “junk” as well? 

@zavato

thank you for the directed nature of your comments. Yours is an interesting thought. Question though- do we know that converting to optical doesn’t also include converting “junk” as well?

The optical cable is ‘clean’. My understanding is the media converters are what actually cleans the signal from the router. The optical cable simply keeps that signal clean before being ‘fed’ into the streamer (important to use a very short ethernet cable from the 2nd media converter to the streamer).

I’m a vinyl guy, so no expert here, but did this at the recommendation of someone more knowledgeable about Digital than I.

And a relatively inexpensive solution to obtain better SQ when streaming from the internet. I’m very pleased on the return of investment ($80~100).

@milpai

I read recently in these instances a long run of optical cable using an ethernet media converter at each end ensures no unwanted noise inserted along the length.