Ethernet Switch- what's the point?

TCP/IP guarantees delivery 100% error free 100% of the time. No switch or cable can give you better zeroes or ones. Noise, if it exists, is introduced after the fact. Some streaming uses another protocol called UTP which does not guarantee packet delivery, but it is not used in any audio streaming I am aware of, and rarely used any more with video. Differences, if they are perceived, are either confirmation bias or analog perturbations further downstream due to DAC filter design, poor power supply isolation, or induced noise. 

As for the claim that 'streaming fonts is not the same as streaming music'. You are misinformed. At the network layer, wired, wireless, fiber optic, it is exactly the same in all respects. That's the beauty of TCP/IP, it simply does not care about the nature of the payload or the media over which the payload is carried. It delivers packets, error checked, retransmitted if necessary, packets irrespective of the payload. And audio, even 32bit X 384kBits/sec are not even remotely strenuous loads for modern networks. 

I recall how strenuously the "bits is bits' argument was made in the early days of digital. And we know how that played out.

@macg19 nope. Not at all. Qobuz, tidal and Roon use HTTPS, stateful and encrypted.

@carlsbad2 nope. Not how it works.

sure, there are some legacy business applications that still use ftp internally to an organization, however 99.99% use HTTPS for everything. And Qobuz, Tidal and others also use HTTPS. We go through this every time….

A quick primer on HTTPS, it is build on top of TCP, which delivers error free transmissions, and it is encrypted, which means that if you lost one packet, which TCP prevents, you wouldn’t be able to decrypt.

@yoyoyaya yeah, people waste money to satisfy their confirmation bias.