I'm in the engineers camp, 25 years in IT; there is nothing a fancy switch can do to change the packet to make it sound better than an inexpensive switch, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Anyone who uses Qobuz or Tidal, even Pandora, your data has traveled millions of miles and arrives intact and beautiful over plain old enterprise-class switches and routers. If the data was corrupted in the transmission, your receiving device will tell the sender so and ask for it again. Almost everything arrives for the first time in this age, hence the speed we now enjoy—streaming movies and music. I have a Kaleidescape server in my network closet that streams the most spectacular sound and video over the network. I run a Basic Dell Switch. Also, converting Ethernet to fiber and back to ethernet is pointless unless you have long runs, over 300’. In ethernet cables, the standards are based on the number of twists per inch and the RJ45 ends used; your CAT5, 6, 7, and 8 are all IEEE standards. If you have a bunch of old cheap patch cords, it can’t hurt to replace them with higher-spec cables, but it won’t change your arriving data. If your house has built-in Data ports (hard wired), depending on age, you might be saddled with CAT5 or (CAT3 10mps) wiring, which is designed for 100mbps, it doesn’t mean it can’t do faster, but you will start to get data drops and eventually fallback to 100mbps or 10mbps, and yet the audiophile signal arrives just the same.
