Update on good Ethernet switch

I run LHY-SW10 because it has optical connections and connects directly to My Green Computer optical bundle. Not to mention the external clock connection of the SW10 which connects to the Gustard c18 which takes over the Gustard X26 PRO clock. So my newly acquired Innuos ZENith mk3, which has no clock of its own, is clocked both with the SW-10 and Gustard x26 pro through the gustard c18. The result is top notch. Not a lot superior sound wise to what I achieved with my excellent Node/Pardo combo, but even a more reliable OS. Kudos to Innuos sense. Now using the Node combo in my living room with my headphones system. 

The LHY has been around for a while and is a bargain. 

the lhy is a good one, as is the english electric

I have a question.

If we could get rid of the switch between the music server and streamer, will it better than adding a audiophile switch?

My experience is a high quality network switch is better than no switch and that seems to be the consensus of a lot of listeners.  

My simplified view as a Mechanical Engineer is that unlike the Analog realm where less is more, the digital realm seems to work differently.  As I understand it, the digital signal is a square wave propagated through wiring.  The “ones and zeros” are created by these square wave pulses.  The 16 bit or 24 bit word length is made up of these ones and zeros as pulses which must be timed perfectly as they leave the originator and are captured by the receiver.  I think of it as a Morse Code operator.  If he misses one “dot” or “dash” thereby getting out of sync with the sender, the message becomes garbled.

I think the D/A converter needs as clean a square wave as possible with exact timing in order to produce a good analog signal.  The less well defined square wave causes the D/A converter to underperform or interpolate, ie guess at what the analog waveform should look like at that moment.  At this point the music is compromised.  

Therefore, the cleaner the square wave the better the chance for the music to get through a D/A converter.  Electrical wiring has some level of capacitance, resistance and inductance which can round off the edges of the square wave.  Electrical noise can be introduced into the wiring through EMI that can make it harder for the D/A converter to interpret the signal.  The network bridge, if my analogy is correct, redraws that square wave and sets the timing by its own internal clock passing on a sharp, clean square wave to the D/A converter.  

It’s like reading for us.  If the print is too small or too large, or the contrast is too low, our reading slows down and we might misread a few words, or have to go back and reread a sentence because it did not make sense.  We might even misread the sentence and end up completely misinterpreting it.  Newspapers and book publishers probably spent a lot of effort into researching in the past century the best print font, size and contrast for readers.   Now we are doing the same thing for music D/A converters.