Here we go again. The man who thinks he knows everything but has never tried these out.
Not getting drawn into this
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Iāve been running digital audio since early 2000ās. In that time Iāve been though multiple network switches of various capabilities and brands, untold Ethernet cables both purchased and self-terminated and not once have I nor anyone else that has spent significant time listening at my place heard any of the differences you and a few others claim to hear, not once. I have an equally capable headphone rig and it also fails to reveal your voodoo to me or anyone else thatās listened to it.
Perhaps you need to look at the quality of your gear if your kit is so susceptible to all these vagaries you claim. Frankly, if my kit were this sensitive to nonsense Iād toss it and get something decent.
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Well, I for one am not prepared to pay good money based on spurious claims.
OFC copper is OFC copper, you can easily calculate what gauge speaker wire you need for a given run so speaker wires you could use as high tension wires are ridiculous.
Ethernet cable is made out of really thin strands with connectors crimped on. Most standard cables are S/UTP anyway. The outer tin foil shield keeps out outside interference. Thats not really precision engineering now is it? USB cableā¦ same thing. Four really thin strands of copper, two of which only serve for power (USB 2 that is). Whatās in those supposedly superior cables? Gold wire? Precision soldered connections? How do you verify these claims? Has anyone cut open their 250 euro audiophile USB cable to check? Untwisted their Unshielded Twisted Pairs and sent a sample of the copper and the tin foil to a lab to be tested against bog standard cables?
Audiophile switches? Cāmon people? Theoretically you could improve network traffic by using a managed switch but strangely enough you never see that popping up in this kind of discussions. Besides, all those expensive āaudiophileā network gadget manufacturers never claim to improve network traffic, they claim to remove some sort of sonic distortion from a part of the chain that doesnāt even generate sound.
Another one of those strange things: fiber optic network cables are good, toslink cables are bad. And there was me thinking that toslink is fiber optic cableā¦
OTOH, some of my RCA connections are such a tight fit that itās a real pain to remove them (literally - it hurts my fingers). Maybe some snake oil might help. Itās a proven lubricant for wallets and credit cards.
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No need to look at my system thanks, itās pretty much up there. Could be the reason why it can eek out the differences you donāt seem to hear.
Iāve never read anything negative from users about the switch and cables I now have ( reviews and comments read post purchase, so it didnāt skew judgement). Negative comments are always by the non believers, the canāt afforders and the plain stubborn to even contemplate anything beyond what they have in their systemā¦era.
I donāt pass judgement until I try. I find additions/accessories in hifi very interesting and donāt rule out anything until I try them. Iām not blinkered or bloody minded like too many people. Itās a shame.
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The short answer YES
The long one. It depends on how many WiFi nets you can see. The more you can see the more noise will interfere with the music in a poor cable. I started with cat5 cables and later upgraded to cat8. The upgrade had a very positive effect on the music in every aspect.
Havenāt tested switches but I believe they can make a difference.
Itās up to you, but try cat5 and later upgrade to cat8. If you canāt hear a difference, good for you as it will save you a lot of money. If you can hear a difference and you appreciate the difference, welcome to hifi
Best regards Henrik
It screams? Definitely get rid of it 
Reading audio related reviews of network switches and Ethernet cables is the very pinnacle of audiophoolery, what a complete and utter waste of time.
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To be honest, its hard to say with certainty if something makes a difference in others system, but in my system both USB cables and ethernet tweaks have made an improvement.
Upgrading from no-name USB to Supra USB made a small difference for me, and getting rid of the USB cable and using an UpTone Audio USPCB A>B made a bigger difference.
And a tweak like https://www.audiostream.com/content/electrically-isolate-your-networked-audio gave increased details and clarity to the sound.
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On the contrary. Itās easy.
Do the blind test mentioned above.
If you can consistently pick out the āaudiophileā ethernet switch (or cable or whatever), then it makes a difference. If you can only tell which is which when you can see which one is hooked up to your rig, then this is nothing but expectation-bias.
Iāve yet to hear anyone, who claims to hear a difference, actually report being able to do so blind ā¦
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Stop quoting unless you quote the whole sentence at least. I said its hard to know how much of a difference something makes in another persons system. Its easy to know how much difference something makes in my system, I just listen.
And blind tests are a lot of work to set up, and you canāt prove anything with them anyway, at most you can guess with various degree of certainty if something made a difference (you can never show equality).
Besides, why bother. If I could select the tune I would pass that blind tests, but people would still believe what they want.
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To ensure that what you think you hear is real, and not just expectation bias.
If I were contemplating spending a lot of money on something that might improve the SQ, Iā want to prove to myself that it really did (and that I was not merely fooling myself).
Not everything is easily amenable to blind testing. For speakers, you need to be Harman Kardon, with a specially-constructed listening room, to blind test those. But for cables and ethernet switches, blind testing is easy.
You can select the tune, you can take as long as you want for each trial, ā¦
The conditions are up to you.
The only thing thatās not negotiable is that you really not be able to see whatās hooked up, that the choice of the latter be truly random (the result of a coin flip) and that you repeat the test enough times (say, 20) so that itās highly unlikely that a perfect score would emerge by random chance.
I would be convinced by evidence.
Conversely, I am inclined to doubt the veracity of claims by people who donāt have the confidence of their convictions to blind-test those claims when it is easy to do so.
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I think statistically valid blind test results would convince most scientifically minded people. One individual saying I can hear a difference will convince nobody except that person.
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Once you learn how you are fooled by expectation bias, its not that hard to compensate for it. No need for time consuming blind tests that typically canāt be done without help. For me, that means listening to a day or two and then switching back. Its not uncommon that I believe I hear improvement the first minutes or even an hour, but it wonāt last unless its really there.
But people who donāt believe in improvements that others hear are usually the kind of people who refuse to believe there is improvements that they donāt understand. The fact that they donāt understand how an improvement can happen is inconceivable, and hence its not really an improvement at all but just bias from sighted listening.
I donāt understand gravity (very few people do), but I still hurt myself if I jump from the roof. 
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You are clearly a better man than 99% of the rest of humanity.
The rest of us need to go to greater lengths to eliminate bias because, unlike you, we are prone to fooling ourselves no matter how much we wish we could avoid doing so.
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Which part? The part about hurting myself if I jump (or fall) from the roof? Because that is true, I know from experience
Expectation bias is just a physiological effect, and if you listen objectively and give it some time, you can compensate for it. I have āprovenā that to myself several times, when I did something I thought would give an upgrade but after a while I notice that it didnāt.
I can take a recent example: I added a metallic plate in my amp (grounded) to improve isolation, and it should have improved the sound. At first, I thought it did, but after about a day I thought it sounded worse, and when I switched back I got it confirmed. I still donāt know why it didnāt improve the sound.
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No. Perhaps you can. The rest of us need some help. Hence blind testing.
Maybe because the engineers who designed your amp knew what they were doing, and its isolation didnāt need āimprovingā? (Also, Iām guessing the plate didnāt cost enough to improve the sound.)
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The #1 consideration is to make sure the cable does not have a sharp bend or kink in it. That will significantly compromise the performance of any network cable. The thicker the cable, the less this is likely to occur.
6-8 weeks ago I read a study done by an expert in acoustical psychologist. He theorizes that the human ear needs a minimum of twenty to thirty minutes to start to reliable hear minor differences, and that because of that, standard A/B testing is not very meaningful, I wish I had the link, but I canāt remember where I read it. But that is something I concluded decades ago.
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Sounds about right to me. I also think thatās the main mistake people do, they listen to 1-2 tunes and then decided how it sounds. To overcome expectation bias I need more than that though, but I guess thatās individual.
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Just moving your head a few millimetres one way or the other can change the perceived sound, air pressure or even a cold or the time of day will potentially change things. There are so many variables from second to second that you will never hear the same sound ever in a lifetime and nor will anyone else for that matter hear exactly what you heard.
what does it matter of one person hears something they like better with one device or another in the chainā¦everyone hears differently, no equipment in one setup will perform the same in another.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions and choices of equipment so comments one way or another gain nothing here.
If I want to put attenuators in my fibre connections because someone else tried it and liked the result better than without why shouldnāt I try that too (yes this is a thing too) or run my ethernet cables through buckets of water to keep them damped (yes I am being sarcastic and funny) then that is my choice.
Remember nobody is forcing anyone to do this or thatā¦there are many ways to achieve many things, and what might work for others maybe not for youā¦get over it, but dont berate or belittle others because they find something they like and happy to use it.
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20 or 30 minutes? @Magnus can remember subtle differences in what the previous thing sounded like after a couple of days. He truly is superhuman!
Mere mortals, like myself, need to be able to switch back and forth in real time to have even a prayer of reliably discerning such differences.
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