Is optical mostly a waste of time versus Ethernet?

@fredrik222 Okay, audiophile streaming is mature technology, don't expect further innovations. Is that an accurate statement?

Quite obvious you don't have patience for 'ignorant' people, in fact your additional comment as to the stupidity of people in regard to things political exposes level of malice also exposed in this thread.

As for expertise, a lot of us don't have expertise in many fields, not enough hours in the day.

Issue here is the usual overgeneralization and categorization of entire cohorts of people. Plenty on this forum ignorant about many facets of this hobby, but most are trying to educate themselves both through other's expertise and experience. You assume I'm not willing to educate myself, I suspect your emotions coloring your reading comprehension skills when you completely missed my post as to the purchase of Mikrotik enterprise grade router. In fact I'm at this very moment in steep learning curve getting this thing configured. I may never totally understand all the technicalities of networking, but at least I'm wiling to experience a wide variety of equipment and protocols involved with audiophile streaming.

@sns  no, that is not accurate. You still can expect incremental improvements of mature technologies, and I assume a lot more metadata will be integrated in the future to augment the listening experience.

Certainly intentions to be malicious in any posts, but if you can’t call out people on BS and at least try to have a fact based discussion, what is the point?

I did miss that you had acquire a microtik, although, I wouldn’t call that enterprise. Better than consumer, for sure, so a step in the right direction. So that begs to question, what is “enterprise” grade? Gartner defines it as follows: “Enterprise-grade describes products that integrate into an infrastructure with a minimum of complexity and offer transparent proxy support.” 

so what does that mean? Mainly that the products are not designed to operate a single unit, like an access point or switch for a consumer, rather a part of a total solution, solving more than one particular issue. And with the appropriate support structure for this. 

If you want more details on enterprise grade, Forbes defines it here: 

Isn't low line Mikrotik, this ccr1036, designed for business environment  has much capability IMO. Not saying top of line, but what more does one need in home environment. This is all in service to audio and my curiosity, not to providing network to some large enterprise.

@sns  the point why I am recommending enterprise grade equipment is due to consistent and predictable performance. It’s been tested over and over again and the support from the company and reputation of the company is behind it.

but like you said, you don’t need that typically for home use, and your microtik is fine, a bit lower throughput that I would want with 16 ports and only 16gbit throughput, which means it can’t support all ports at full speed, as that requires 32gbit throughput (duplex, each port can transfer 1gbit in each direction). These specs matter if you want to minimize jitter and latency.  

Another concern I have with microtik is the cpu vs asic/fpgu. Also doesn’t promote consistent latency and jitter. And then it is shared data and control plane, which means if you are doing configuration changes, it could impact performance. 
 

anyway, there is a lot to this topic, but in most cases a netgear from bestbuy is fine.