Network Switches

If you are new to digital I wouldn’t be messing with expensive switches.  Get used to what you have before considering spending significant amounts of money on what amounts to the slivers of walnuts placed on an ice cream sundae.

Would an upgraded switch have any sonic impact?

Unlikely, unless the current switch is defective.

Although sometimes we hear what we want to hear.

My issue with switches for anything other than convenience is its simply not accomplishing much. So you have this noisy modem and router upstream of switch, the audiophile switch there to isolate downstream components from that noise. Ok, I get that, the issue is the streaming chain has already been contaminated from the noisy modem and router, you're only treating the symptoms vs the disease with the switch. A much better route is to treat noise at the source, Broadcom chipset vs Intel chipset in modem, disable wifi on router, emi-rfi contamination, power both via lps. Beyond this get rid of router altogether vs something like Dejitter Switch X, this a switch with capability to assign IP address so wifi can be offloaded to second router with wifi enabled to service rest of house. So now you have a 'clean' or audio only network in house, simple and clean setup. And for those who don't believe networks have any sonic impact, you're welcome to your viewpoint, but this not the case.

In any case, the above optimizations come only after first addressing streamer and dac, this for very mature, high resolution streaming chains and audio systems. Many other more important things to address before adding some fancy switch. 

If there is more than 1 source/streaming device in the same room requiring an ethernet input, the case for the switch is even there.

Otherwise, I assume most everyone here does some optical decoupling (pair of FMCs or executed in similar fashion). 

For a single streamer in a room (which is all that most guys have)

Ethernet port on wall ----> [FMC---->optical cable --->FMC with lps]---->’good’ ethernet cable--->ifi silencer inserted into streamers port

No unnecessary switch needed in the chain

my personal opinion based on my personal systems.

Others may have different results .

I have four audio systems in my home ranging from

Let me start by saying that I don't have the strongest understanding of digital audio transmission works and how the information is encoded and decoded at both ends. However, I am in IT and I do have something of it an understanding of how TCP/IP transmission works. Built into the protocol is constant error checking to make sure the data arrives exactly how it was sent. Each packet is verified four times. I don't understand how the quality of the switch will impact the quality of encoded audio being streamed through it any more than it would affect a Microsoft word document that you are transferring from one PC to another. 

There are definitely some gaps in my knowledge, so I'm not going to say "snake oil" with 100% certainty, I'm just going to say that I don't understand how a switch would affect the audio quality of a stream.