Let me first state that I am not intending to pour water on anyone who claims this type of product makes a difference in their audio experience. If you are happy with whatever gains you think it makes, then great! Having said this, one should keep in mind that no audio signal is being transmitted via the ethernet cable. There are several protocols involved which encapsulate the data. There are even protocols involved which ensure no data is lost in transmission. That is why your music will "pause" when you do in fact lose your signal rather than skip the amount of time the signal was actually down. TCP-IP is even intentionally designed to *NOT* send the data in order. So your device may not even receive the packets in the order they were sent. The claims about jitter, timing, etc., do not make any sense.
The only situation I could see something like this potentially making a difference is if the voltage on the ethernet cable somehow interferes with the functionality of the chips doing the work on the devices through bad shielding/EMI/grounding. For example, if the switch you use adds some extra distortion on the wire (not in the packets, or not bad/consistant enough for the error correction not to work) that somehow interacts with the device processors receiving the transmission due to bad shielding/EMI/grounding which in turn causes something on the device to run out of spec and adds distortion to the output, and this switch does something to fix this, then I could see a gain. Anything other than this simply makes no sense.
|