Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Ethernet switches

Noise on the network seems the most likely candidate for issues here, IMO, although I have no evidence for that hunch except the effort Meridian put into reducing/eliminating it between ID40 and ID41.

I'm not personally taking the Audiosciencereview article to mean that there can be no audible difference using a better/'audiophile' switch, merely that that particular design appeared to achieve nothing under those test conditions. However, e.g., maybe there wasn't anything sufficiently noisy on that particular test setup to mitigate, or maybe that particular design is rubbish, etc., etc. If ears are hearing improvements, particularly if the type of improvement is consistent between those reporting it, I'd tend to assume that the ear is picking something real up and that further investigation is required as to what the cause might be.

Since my streaming setup sounds so good, I tend to assume ID41 does it's job in isolating, but I wouldn't be averse to trying out a better switch if/when funds allow which can't be better spent upgrading an actual component. In that scenario, I'd probably be more likely to try the System Optique for complete noise isolation from the rest of the network and in the hope that the optical/ethernet adaptor Sonore build wouldn't inject noise afterwards, or cause other issues...