Is optical mostly a waste of time versus Ethernet?

@sns here is the thing, I am guaranteed the foremost expert on networking on this site. I don’t know a lot about everything, but networking is the one thing I do know, love and have made my life and career off. 
 

Therefore, like I said, confirmation bias is a real thing, and what you are proposing, where you could modify, in your favor, the payload, in real time of encrypted and digitally signed protocols, is a joke. Trillions of bank transactions every single day happen securely just because you cannot do what you think you hear. Money talks, and billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars move every day on the basis that what you say you hear, cannot under any circumstance happen, ever. 
 

those are the facts. 

@jumia   so, I would skip the “audiophile” switches, and go with a enterprise switch. You can find cheap Cisco, Juniper, or other enterprise grade switches on eBay. 
 

“Audiophile” switches that I have seen actually have no real networking specs, just terms that doesn’t apply to networking at all. 

@fredrik222 

You may be a networking expert, which I respect unconditionally, but is there any possibility in your way of thinking that an analog waveform representing a secure digital financial transaction succesfully completes with added noise? Is there any possibility that a streamed song sounds different to the user if there is added noise on the ethernet feed? Is there any advantage in your way of thinking to limit the ethernet feed to 100mbps rather than “top speed”?

I think you’re talking two different things. there is the physical network topology segmented into layers then there is the electrical noise associated within the wire separate from the ethernet packets. Fiber not being metal is impervious to external electrical noise but does need power to perform the conversion to light so it could actually be noisier than a cable depending upon the power supply used to drive it.

Here is a wiki article on packet loss. An explanation for my degraded ROON audio signal on that George Harrison song (the whistling part), when my ROON Core was behind a lower bandwidth PowerLine network is explained below.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) detects packet loss and performs retransmissions to ensure reliable messaging. Packet loss in a TCP connection is also used to avoid congestion and thus produces an intentionally reduced throughput for the connection.

I am not going to belabor the BROADCAST message type I brought up into the conversation. It is at a level higher in the OSI stack than is relevant for audio streaming. So my mistake on bringing it up in this audio discussion. I assumed that audio streams were UDP BROADCAST messages.

However, the crux of the point I was making was that network packets are being dropped in audio streaming. Contrary to what this self-proclaimed EXPERT is saying. The Wiki article indicates that even under the TCP protocol, packets can be dropped (intentionally).

My reproduceable test with the George Harrison song shows me how to mangle a song on ROON 100% of the time. This is an example of network congestion causing poor audio quality in streaming.

I believe the EXPERT was making fun of the people on here with functioning ears and also potentially more expensive network cabling and routers et al, than the EXPERT themselves use.