Is optical mostly a waste of time versus Ethernet?

@yyzsantabarbara man up now. You don’t know what you are talking about, it is as simple as that. But don’t take my word for it, ROON says so. At least admit it.

We have decades of experience building audio streaming protocols around UDP, and it has generally been our first choice, but we also know that both TCP and UDP, when implemented properly, are suitable for high-bandwidth, high-quality media streaming, so it was worth undertaking an exploration of “the other side” to see if there was actually a reason to consider switching.

After a series of experiments and prototypes, and a detailed exploration of both approaches, we found that we were able to extract more performance and reliability from TCP, so we took it to the next phase and started experimenting with TCP in our alpha environment a couple of months ago.

UDP is what I was referring to as BROADCAST.  I forgot the term but network BROADCAST messages in software are usually done via UDP. This type of message delivery is not guaranteed and can lose packets. So it looks like ROON  was using UDP and switched to TCP in June 2017. I was wrong thinking they still used UDP. However, that is just for ROON. 

The test I described previously shows me that ROON does not do a perfect stream today when something is limiting them on the network. The distortion I heard on a repeatable manner tells me that even with TCP something is going on that is giving a less than perfect stream to the DAC.

@yyzsantabarbara oh wow. You are special! Can’t even admit you have no idea what your are talking about after your vendor of choice throws it in your face.

UDP is not broadcast. It is a stateless L3 protocol. And no, it is not just Roon. You still don’t get it, if you lose a packer when you send a compressed stream, you can’t uncompressed that part of the stream at all. In addition, DRM requires at least digitally signed music, so, the entire song must be received in its entirety for it to work for downloads, and larger chucks of the stream that is digitally signed. The only thing you have proven is that your really have no clue, which I don’t blame you for, it is infinite more complex than a speaker cable, except that you keep saying you know something about it, which you absolutely  do not.
 

from Wikipedia “ The Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), which is the primary networking protocol in use today on the Internet and all networks connected to it, supports broadcast, but the broadcast domain is the broadcasting host's subnet, which is typically small; there is no way to do an Internet-wide broadcast. ”

but hey, you “program this stuff”. 
 

This thread has become a waste of time. There are some really good answers included here but some of the tangents really disappointing.

In summary it’s all about the noise passing through the ethernet cable and dealing with it. Network switches help by not adding noise, maybe canceling out some of it, and offer clocking benefits. Enough said

@jumia  No clocking benefits, if noise is entering your streamer/DAC through Ethernet, you have some serious other issues. 
 

so the take away is that you should not waste your money. Like I have pointed out and proven, the likes @sns ​​​​and @yyzsantabarbara have no clue about how networking works.