@tshark I don’t doubt switches make a difference. The difference though can be either positive or negative. I have a very good dedicated streamer and a dac with a a tried and true network card. The difference between using a dedicated streamer feeding the DAC via a good USB cable and streaming using the network card in a DAC yields different results. And so it should. And I’ll be hard pressed to buy into an idea that a switch or a regen/reckocker between the router and a DAC can bridge that gap completely. Going down the rabbit hole with Ethernet tweaks without adding a good streamer is a waste of time and money. IMO.
This brings us back to the point I was making earlier about investing in components as opposed to tweaks to feed an inferior streaming device.
The OP is using an inbuilt streamer/network card. Ideally to step up in sound quality a dedicated streamer is money better spent than a high end switch. A better Ethernet cable alone can improve things significantly but then again it won’t reach the level of performance you get with a proper streamer. This has been my experience and it’s unfortunately the reality in most cases.
Alternatively if the Elecrocompaniet in question is a streamer with a built in DAC, a dedicated outboard DAC would be the next logical step in improving performance.
