Effect of Internet Service Quality on Streaming?

Thanks All - New Router, CAT-8 Cables, Grounding Boxes, and THC - Got It!

These are all great ideas that will likely improve sound quality (esp THC - what is that, “Total Harmonic Control” or something?  Sounds promising.

But none of these will fix the dips in quality, which in case you haven’t read my post above, I agree with everyone that has said it’s not my network.  Because, playing an equivalent local file is also bad when quality is bad.

That leaves noisy AC power and RF as likely culprits, but probably AC.  And as above I’ve tried many conditioners and isolation transformers.  It may be that my only solution is a Stromtank, one day down the road.

@nyev If you play an equivalent local file at the same time you have bad internet quality and it’s bad too, then it’s definitely something internal. Whatever’s causing it will be between the source and the receiver.

In normal circumstances if your source and receiver are both connected to the same Enet switch then you’d troubleshoot by swapping ports, that is moving the devices to a new port, one at a time, and seeing if the problem clears up, because ports on switches can go bad. However, you may have a problem with doing this if both the server and receiver are on your Innuos switch as it’s only got 3 ports. In that case you’d swap in a temporary switch to see if the problem clears up.

I then ask, since it appears that you have more devices then the 3 on the Innuos, what are you using in front of it as your main switch, how is it connected in circuit, and are your server/receiver both on the Innuos?

I have observed degraded streaming from time to time. I have a well isolated setup with 2 of the Jcat M12 switches cascaded into an Uptone Ether Regen w sfp to my server. 
While I do not see the daily fluctuations I do notice a degradation over time and found that a hard reboot of my router gets the sound back to where it should be. 

The scripted  "Perform a hard reset" is what they always say to do when we call for internet problems, even though it usually has nothing to do with service being out.
From what the internet people say, the reset will reset the connection on their end as well and there is a whole host of things that they are doing in the background that can effect the network connection. We were being throttled frequently and once we were told that there was more than 1 person on out IP address. 

Who knows what is really going on on the provider side however for me I will reset the connection at least once a week.

I once had a modest system that would pick up noise and talking whenever a local radio operator was active and even do so at lower volume when the system was off! You might ask your neighbors about HAM radios or look for towers, and try some shielding on your speaker cables. An oscope might help in determining if it’s power or RF. Just use a short wire as an antenna for RF. I'm really looking forward to your impressions of all the NA stuff, esp the Tempus.

It is hard thing to A/B test.  I am not about to rip out my cabling that runs in walls and drop ceilings and replace it with newer digital cables and then go back again, and even expect that an aural memory from one listen to another is reliable.  I did some testing between bog standard cat 5 and the most expensive alternative at the time, by running wires directly from the router to the streamer of the day and couldn’t perceive any difference.  I split the difference and bought something costing in between just in case I was wrong but I’ve been happy with the results.

  I also tried a fancier router and didn’t perceive any improvement.  Recently ATT changed us to fiber and again I don’t detect any difference.

YMMV.  I would just comment that if your system is so fine tuned that changes in digital cables can sound very significant, then I congratulate you on the excellence of your gear