Snake oil of the year?

@ilkeresmer 

All the switches are snake oil imo... if you have a good newtwork player that s all...

True that you can end up with a satisfying sound with ethernet to a good network player. But that 'satisfying sound,' can be improved upon.

In small increments with differing additions these (you call them snake oil) pieces add to a greater whole. I have lifted my system performance in this way, one effective piece being a reclocked network switch.

There's no such thing as an audio grade switch. 

This butchered TP Link  that is marketed as one is a bit more snake oily than most. 

actually audioTroy,

people are still laughing at speaker spikes because they don't isolate anything, the vibration is going to the floor and then from the floor they go back to the spikes and into the speaker shaking them, those spikes are useless, decoupling speakers is the only way to go not coupling and the best isolation product for that is the Townshend podiums, maybe you should go look them up.

@urbie you are right the podiums or at least the isoAcoustics products should be used  to decouple speakers.

@ilkeresmer I am going to say you are wrong All the switches are snake oil imo... if you have a good newtwork player that s all...

I have an Innuos Statement and upgraded to fiber using the Gtek Media Converters (a switch) and it was a marked improvement. I also have a LessLoss Echo’s End DAC equipped with the LessLoss Firewall 640X and I added the Gtek based on peoples experiences here on Agon.

Open your third eye, mind and ears to what can be for cheap sometimes.

Now lets talk about $8500 power cords.

@wsrrsw 

I find it hard to take seroiuly folks who haven’t tried equipment they excoriate but haven’t used or been around. Ah the internet.

Well that's good news because In the video, they compared the AQVOX vs. the standard D-Link switch with blind listening tests. Out of two rounds of testing with 10 participants, the AQVOX was selected as the better sounding option once, the standard D-Link switch was selected 4 times, and the rest of the times there was no difference heard. You watched the video, right?

There's no reason why a network switch whose only purpose is to move data without error from point A to point B should change the sound. This is the beauty of digital data. No matter how many times data is moved through the switch, a perfect copy is made on the receiving end. This is fundamental to how digital audio and systems (i.e. PCs, streamers, the internet, etc.) work. Otherwise, none of these things would be usable.

So with that fact in mind, the only way the sound would be different is if somehow the data payload bits were being changed by the switch. That means if you copied a file from one device to another using that switch, it would be different on the receiving end. You can test this yourself with tools built into all the major operating systems in use today. No measurements needed.

Try it with your JCAT switch vs. a normal switch (perhaps on the cable modem or wi-fi router supplied by your ISP).