Sonore Streamers

[Antoine]

Haha, yes it might indeed seem (or is) overkill to use such an expensive power supply to power a cheap switch but people of course do this not to improve the workings of the switch itself but to prevent using the cheap SMPS walwarts that come with them.

To be fair all PSU's, including linear ones, create noise but in general SMPS supplies are the worst. These tend to throw quite a bit of junk back into the AC and/or leak some of that noise into anything that's connected to it, so getting rid of them from/near your system can be beneficial especially if it's a low noise system already.

I agree the TPlinks are perfectly fine in doing what they have to do functionally. A not very expensive step up may be Netgear who make excellent performing, power efficient switches in metal cases. I myself have two Netgear Prosafe GS-108Ev3's, these are small and run on 12V DC. The non E versions are unmanaged. The E's are "semi-managed" as in they have a limited (compared to a professional switch) feature set.