Sound quality differences in streamers

@devinplombier 

Nothing to worry about or disappoint, I didn’t have much of a hope either way : )

@kckrs  After all that talk of streamers, equipment, cables and room acoustics is said and done, it all boils down to the one instrument that everything else is gauged by, your own ears. It has and will always be about the music, but being an audiophile is above all else about the journey of listening. Most questions on hifi forums like audiogon are asked by those who haven’t understood how vital it is to learn critical listening skills - the only means to build a truly high performing sound system. Even if you may not have the means to demo every bit of desired equipment in the specific listening space of your system, you will be able to demo what you can afford. This, together with developing your skills to critically listen trumps almost anything you might want to ask on this forum. 
I wish you an enlightened journey! ; )

In friendship - kevin

@mitch2 If I understand your setup correctly I don't see how any conventional routers will avoid having wifi 'contaminate' your 'clean' side network. Having the three systems interconnected to the one server is your issue. Depending on the quality of the other systems you could segregate the main system from the others by inserting another separate server for the other two systems. I don't know if Switch X will solve your issue if continuing to serve three systems from one server. A 'clean' side network cannot have any wifi interference at any point in the chain. The Switch X goes a step further and stops the constant network activity of pinging, as they mention in reviews and conversation, watch your network LED's on routers/NAS/switches, constantly flashing, sending and receiving network info/addresses, this is completely stopped with Switch X. I don't believe Switch X will solve your issue via three systems running on one server, but perhaps they would have a solution. One experiment you could try is to shut down the entire whole house and the two other audio system part of network, see if this improves sound quality.

Even with my present network solution, I'm thinking the Switch X would be an improvement via the blocking of network activity. I actually purchased a Mikrotik managed switch a couple years ago with the idea of diy modding the switch exactly how Dejitter did the Switch X, couldn't pull it off. As I recall price of switch was around $900 plus what it would have cost to mod it, internal parts upgrades and external lps, so $3500 for Switch X not that bad.

@sns 

Which mods exactly were you unable to perform in order to make your Mikrotek switch into a Switch X?

As an aside, the Mikrotek retails for $270, not $900.

https://multilink.us/mikrotik-crs309-1g-8s-in/

Thank you in advance.

@devinplombier That is not the Mikrotik model I had, can't recall the model but it had dual internal power supplies, I'd have to look back on ebay past purchases to be sure of model. In any case it was both the internal mods and conversion to allow for external linear power supply that complicated matters to the point I thought of the simpler method of adding a second router for 'dirty' side of network.

I've made the decision and have ordered 

Volumio Rivo+ w/Lineo5 power supply.

Will hardwire to a wifi extender with Ethernet 

port into MHDT Orchid. Hopefully this is a cut above laptop

USB to Orchid.

Hell of a discussion this has been -