Anybody want a laugh?

 If you want to improve your streaming quality set priority to the streamer. One of these   managed netgear switches for $30 will do more than the linked unmanaged switch. 
https://www.netgear.com/business/products/switches/web-managed/GS305E.aspx

Networking is a sea of acronyms. 

Your bombshell is Hans Beekhuyzen ? I missed the bombshell it wasn't where he said this sounds better was it? He may be dry and not prone to hyperbole but I didn't see anything to back up his claim. I can say wow this Pepsi tastes better than this other Pepsi but without a chemical analysis I fail to see why anyone would believe me. He could have shown that this switch performed better than a cheap switch with some basic measurements of noise and jitter. 

It's just a Cisco switch modified to do... well nothing as far as audio goes. 

You think that switch is funny get a load of this thing.

https://www.kevalinaudio.com/product-page/waversa-wrouter

This switch isn’t produced by Cisco any longer, they probably bought a few hundred of these for about $40 changed a few caps and sell it to audiophiles for $450. It’s a layer 2 unmanaged switch that simply forwards to the mac address in the header of the packet. 

Yes we read the ad, yes we know caps,  resistors etc..are standard upgrades, yes we're aware of all this. What's ho ho funny is the ignorant rubes who think doing this to an ethernet switch is going to affect anything you'll hear. 

The notion of these things is they clean EMI and RF noise that can leak in and carry on the wires. They don't really do anything to the digital signal. The wires after the switch to the streamer might pick up more noise which this thing isn't going to help. From there to the DAC which might be USB or coax or optical again nothing the switch can do about that.then I guess if you have a really really bad DAC some might hear a difference. Save your money and buy a decent DAC instead of this switch. 

Not surprising, noone here would consider me a true audiophile and I would probably flunk the test too. 😳

Actually hundreds of reviews could all be wrong. Appeal to the people isn't a very good reason to spend money. 

I read the part about EMI/RFI noise produced.  I paid particular notice to this and what followed.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) publishes specific regulations to limit the amount of EMI and RFI emitted by computing equipment. Each system meets these FCC regulations

It  warns about bad wiring practices. It is talking about installations in enterprise closets full of equipment. Lightning protection , ventilation, humidity  you know thing to worry about in a high traffic business environment not someone's home system with a couple of end nodes. 

This particular switch is nothing but a $40 Cisco unmanaged layer 2 with a couple of meaningless "upgrades"  there is nothing this thing will do to an audio signal that's audible. Evaluating these types of "tweaks" for that's all they are, by plugging it in trusting your infallible senses and saying "wow it's amazing " is a meaningless gesture. It's like eyewitnesses who manage to trust their eyes but usually get something wrong or wine tasters who can't tell red from white when the white is dyed red. People need to get over this hubris that they are infallible and their senses are not subject to normal human biases. 

There is no such thing that a sound without "color"

Which is why I said before the amp. If the signal over noise and distortion on the analog outputs of the DAC is below human hearing then it’s transparent and all those streamers, switches and routers and whatever upstream doesn’t amount to diddley. Now after the signal hits the speaker and how it interacts with the room is a different story.

The white paper linked to earlier is another attempt to wow with nonsense. It talks about line jitter leaking into your DAC and causing all sorts of nasties. So they use very precise clocks to control this. Only problem with this fix is ethernet line uses a 25MHZ clock, yeah megahertz . So it’s "fixing" a nonexistent problem. Not to mention the "line noise/jitter" and clocking doesn’t reach to DAC, the packets are stripped of the outer layers and any clocking of the stack by software, processed by the software in the streamer to retrieve the data, placed in a buffer then the DAC clock asynchronously pulls the data for conversion. The bottom line is with today’s software, hardware, filtering and precise clocks placed close to the DAC the last thing you need to worry about is a switch. I also find it amusing why no worry about the little $100 modem that converted the incoming analog signal to your house and built this digital signal so your devices could read the signal? That has more to with what’s going on with your streaming than any switch you place downstream. By all means decide what you want, buy what you want but try informing yourself as to what you’re buying and use some common sense.

This is about amplifiers but it's applicable to everything in audio. It's from Bruno Putzey paper 'The F-word or why there is no such thing as to much feedback" whether you agree doesn't really matter to the quote.

The avoidance of feedback, specifically global feedback, also meant that longer signal chains quickly accumulated distortion products. A relentless drive for minimalist design ensued. If everything one adds to the signal path detracts from the result, only the smallest number of components will do.
This resulted in the ludicrous situation where fantastic sounding recordings were made with signal chains numbering up to a hundred amplifying stages and replayed on audiophile systems where even a transparent buffer proved an impossibility.

Hi-fi review is a complete shambles. The few magazines that do measure are capable of reprint-ing the most frightening distortion spectra from amplifiers and actually call them good. “Objectiv-ity” got downgraded from “independent of who’s doing the observing” to “not favouring particular brands”. For me personally the affair hit rock bottom when in 2009 two reviewers, one Dutch, one British, independently remarked of the same amplifier (a reasonably priced product with exemplary performance) that it sounded surprisingly musical for an amp with such low distortion. In the 21st century audio engineers build equipment while actively avoiding two of the most powerful tools available to the whole of science and engineering: measurement and error control. The damage to the audio industry and its reputation in the wider engineering world will remain immeasurable until we decide to take control.

Don't think so. Once something is transparent it can't get more transparent. I could add things to color in different ways but not me . Streaming over ethernet isn't rocket science and as long as you have good basic components and your noise floor before the amp is -118 no need for these tweaks that can't be heard except by my dog. 

I stream all my music from either services or ripped files. I have a basic Netgear modem and router. I network a NUC running roon in my office to a raspberry pi4 running Ropiee with RAAT roon's transport protocol on my network. I then connect the pi4 to my integrated amp with the USB cable that came with it, the cheap black one. I use basic canare 4s11 speaker wire. I have wall warts connected to my panamax surge protector on different banks with my integrated.  This is plugged into a basic industrial grade receptacle on a regular 15 amp circuit. Pretty much everything you're advised not to do. Yet I have a noise floor so low I never hear any, the quiet parts of a song are dead black quiet, no harsh female vocals.no hum or hiss.  Excellent timbre and separation of instruments. At least as good as my speakers allow. How is this possible? 

But for me to increase the positive change i must know where and how and what i have done

The it isn't a blind test. A blind test and passing would be removing one thing without your knowledge and you can tell a difference more times than chance. 

Unsubstantiated claims and tomfoolery costs a lot of $$$ in this hobby nowadays. 

I thought those things were simply "art" but it seems they are claiming something about acoustics of your room? Tibetan meditation bowls? Just buy those they're cheaper and they sound nice. 

https://www.amazon.com/Tibetan-Singing-Bowl-Set-Handcrafted/dp/B01A6B0ICC/ref=asc_df_B01A6B0ICC/?tag...

Anyone read that drive by advertisement by a shill? 

I don't see anything wrong with the 6moons article as far as it goes. Where it needs a bit of clarification for me is when they talk about "timing jitter". I agree there is always room for improvement. If they're talking about jitter in the signal the timing is controlled by the DAC clock not the source in asynchronous transfer. In older DACs when isynchronous transfer was used jitter was more of a problem. If they're talking about line jitter,  that's divorced from the DAC clock by the DAC software and buffer. In well designed DACs USB jitter is actually handled better than SPDIF jitter. 

Then once again my last post leaves me with the problem I have with these expensive audiophile switches. No matter if they do clean the signal of some noise actually doing what they claim it’s not really important. For instance you take two equally dirty shirts, you prewash one then wash both in your washing machine they come out equally clean. What good did prewashing do? If you have an older washing machine it might help it’s basically the same thing here you have a good measuring DAC well engineered with isolated USB these switches don’t really matter the DAC is going to clean the signal.

These cheap off the shelf made expensive switches are layer 2 you can’t do any priority with them. A $50 netgear managed switch would do more for a busy home network.