Why do I need a switch?

Hi Curiousjim, your sound will be as good as what is feed to your streamer. Noise is the enemy here.  Reduce it and hear so much more into your music. 
 

Cost for all I mention depending on new or used is $900-$1400 or so.  

@erik_squires 

Are you talking about those things that are @$67 for the pair on Amaz—? Or some other brand? 
 I have never heard of gas discharge surge protection.  What air gap/gas line products do you use?

Thanks

@grannyring ,

But won’t my signal only be as good as what comes out of my router?

@grannyring can you give a rough indication of how much investment is needed to follow your experiment? Thanks!

You will get better sound. Get a decent switch like an English Electric 8 switch. Run your cat6 into it. Place the switch near your rig so you can use a nice Network Acoustics ENO ethernet cable into an ENO passive filter up into your server. Your system will sound much, much better without a doubt. You can try these pieces with a 30 day trial and hear for yourself what you are missing.

You have not heard what your digital streaming front end is capable of yet. One caveat. Your streamer/server needs to be good to realize the improvement. Not sure if the Node is one or not. I have not heard it.

The Network Acoustic products are the real deal and easy to use.  A $40 switch will not improve your sound on its own.  In fact, it may well add more noise and sound worse.  

I don't think you are going to get better sound, but anything with copper that goes through the outside wall of your house can be a surge path.

I use an outside gas discharge based surge protector on the coax and air gap via Ethernet to fiber converters.