@pcolvin Thanks for that, it’s not very difficult to measure how noisy something in the network is, and its not hard shooting a space for EMI. You can buy a cheap handheld that will expose nasty behind your audio stack and along various cable runs. So, I think that’s the key, not at the sub-product level. Except for their power supplies... These are likely the worst offenders that we will find at the end of this exercise in cleaning the digital inputs from their analog electrical attached noise.
I think the voltages at the fiber media converter’s ethernet output are pretty limited and small, but yes that perhaps is a place of noise that progress will run up against after this kind of signal clearing becomes something to chase...
Noise isn’t encoded, it is induced into the copper wires that electric voltages transit. The 1’s and 0’s are the data sent via such voltage. The rest of the wires manage the process, more or less at the fabric level -- the physical layer and the data-link layers in the OSI model. The protocols etc sit above these two. It is the electric on the physical layer we get noise on.
The concern isn’t how it might "corrupt" the data because a 1 and a 0 are the only two possible values and should one be zapped into the other, the TCP/IP protocols higher up will detect an error and a correction or retransmission will be guaranteed. It just works like that.
The concern for audio is: Is that attached electrical noise effecting the behavior of the audio device by somehow polluting some internal-to-the-audio-appliance process....?
Thus: We wish to clean the link (not the data) into the audio appliance. The: an audio grade network switch is NOT what is needed. And what we need to do we only have to do the last leg...
It is the analogous problem with noisy interconnects and power cords that are not audio friendly. What’s behind the wall ...who cares? How dirty the power is ...who cares? As long as we can somehow provide clean power TO the audio appliance, "we good baby". (unsolicited plug for PS Audio Power Plant)
Wireless does this to a degree because the noise stops at the radio. But wireless issues are real so it’s not ideal. Media conversion to fiber does it and it is really cheap for what you get.
