Network Switches

As an electronics engineer, I do believe that noise on the Ethernet connection (really any connection to your audio equipment) could have an audible effect on the sound quality, but trying to fix this at the network switch seems misguided. You're just providing more opportunity for noise to creap back in between the network switch and your audio gear. 

It seems to me that you are much better off investing the same effort (dollars) as close to the final conversion to analog as possible. The DAC and/or streamer is a much better place to eliminate noise from the network connection than the network switch. 

Cakyol, I didn't say there was noise on the switch. There is noise on any signal that is transmitted via an electrical connection. This doesn't mean this will affect the decoding of the digital signals. I completely concur that, with the error correction present with Ethernet protocols, the bits are the bits and they are highly likely to get too the streamer/DAC correctly. However, any electrical noise carried along with the signal has to be filtered out or it will have some effect on the generated audio. Whether it is audible is debatable. 

What I was saying is that, if you believe it is audible, it makes a lot more sense to provide the best filtering close to the digital to analog conversion than to try to produce super clean Ethernet output at the switch, since you're likely to pick up more noise on the way between the switch and the steamer/DAC. 

Again, I don't believe that noise on the Ethernet connection has any effect on the actual digital data that is being transferred. But there is at least a theoretical possibility that noise on the incoming connection could affect the analog output. It's up to the last device in the digital chain to adequately isolate this noise so that it doesn't adversely affect the output.