Is optical mostly a waste of time versus Ethernet?

Fibre Optical is the holy grail of streaming. I have 3 of the Sonore OpticalRendu's and they are fantastic at giving a very clean clear sound from your DAC. 

Putting a FMC in front of the OpticalRendu also improves the stream. However, I had 3 different brands in front of my OpticalRendu's and the only one standing is the EtherRegen. My Sonore OpticalModule is dead and a cheap FMC that was part of the Small Green Computer package is also dead.

For the 2 cases where the FMC's died I take the fibre optical directly from my network switch's. This does not sound as good as adding the FMC in front but it is not that much of a difference and I have moved on to listening to music.

1. Seems the etherregen is a glorified fiber media converter, which may do a really good job but it's extremely expensive when only used as a fiber media converter Once you use ER as a fmc you can't really use the remaining ethernet ports because it will adversely impact the optical connection what's lots of spillover noise from the other ports. Not sure why ER doesn't do a simple network switch without optical. And not sure their fmc is very good.

Who is small green computer? Kind of a curious company that relies heavily on etherregen. 

Yyzsantabarbara

What the heck does a opticalrendu do?

Very confusing

I did swap out the wall wart PS on the second converter box as SNS described. I put in an IFi power supply….big and immediate leap in better sonics that I could easily hear, it was not subtle