"Audiophile Grade" Ethernet Switches - The new generation

[Antoine]

There’s no question bits are unchanged but if a network connection is there, for whatever it is used (control or streaming), there’s an electrical connection and thus noise is passed, ground plane disturbances can happen, leakage currents can happen etc. These can affect, among other things, the DAC clocks and create jitter/phase noise. Of course this is the theory in a nutshell and I have no proof but it’s the only way I can make sense of it all, personally. Isolation transformers in the ethernet connector or directly behind it can only filter out part of the issues.

There’s some interesting findings written on WBF or AS by someone (I believe it was Nenon who actually bothered to test this and share his findings) about how one can actually ‘tune‘ the resulting sound, using the network devices, cables etc. in the chain. Crazy, yes today perhaps, maybe no longer tomorrow when we’ll start to understand better what happens. The best network is no network BTW according to him but initially this did not seem to be the case, only later he found the result more natural without any network connection and network adapter disabled.