Naim streamers, and many others operate at 100mbs by design. This is more than enough for any audio stream, including High Res/MQA. I’ve also read that Ethernet connections generate less electrical noise at lower speeds, so there is a potential sound quality benefit.
100mbs is perfectly adequate for streaming, and there is a theory is that gigabit is electrically more noisy than 100mb, so a good reason to avoid it.
And i don’t understand what you mean by unsupportable. The vast majority of gigabit RJ45 switches will autosense the connection speed for 10/100/1000mb/s.
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This is news to me.
When did major commercial switch manufacturers make this change? Any home ISP device supporting only gigabit would fail as most households will be connecting non gigabit devices.
I can’t find any reference to 10/100MB ports being obsolete in IEEE standards.
Latest models seem to support them…
Cisco Catalyst 9400 series:
● 384 ports of non-blocking 10/100/1000M RJ-45 ports
If 100Base-T (the IEEE standard) had been deprecated and not supported by Switch manufacturers then none of the current Naim Network players would work.
A Gigabit switch will not only support 1000Base-T connections but will also auto-negotiate with the connected device to either 100Base-T or 10Base-T depending on what can be supported.
Of course, a ‘Fast Ethernet’ switch such as the Netgear FS range presently on sale, are only 100Base-T so this or 10Base-T is only supported.
the issue is copying files. Streaming should be fine. Nevertheless its not acceptable to only have 100mbps in 2023. WiFi can be much faster though :), but 10Gbps would be much nicer.
I think this answers it well.
I’m sure Naim and others have found for streaming audio 100mbs is perfect and adding a 10/100/100 chipset even operating at 100 mbs is noisy.
I don’t think so. Just because other do something, doesn’t make it ok :). My mom used to ask if your friend jumps off a bridge, will you jump too :).
I tried the gigabit output of the Cisco. It added nothing positive, and was noisier.
There’s a certain amount of nonsense being talked here by people apparently looking for irrelevantly high speeds.
I am reminded of the old adage “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
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Allow me to attempt an analogy.
You’re driving down a 3 lane motorway in a car, in very light traffic, and your friend says to you, “this journey would be a whole lot better if the road had 30 lanes instead of just 3. It’s just not enough”
Do you answer, “You’re nuts, mate, two lanes would be enough,” or do you say, “Yeah! 30 lanes would be awesome. My mate lives in a country where they build roads with 300 lanes, that would be even better.”
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I bet there will still be a queue of cars hogging lane 150 
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Can you copy files to Naim streamers? I’ve occasionally used the USB port at the back, but I don’t remember seeing it presented as a file interface for copying, just for music selection (or serving as a DLNA source for other streamers). I didn’t think you could copy files to/from a 222/333.
There’s nothing to stop me having my NASes connected to GbE ports and serving the streamers on 10/100Mb ports, so I can still file copy from my servers at gigabit speeds.
Why “should”?
A streaming FLAC at 24/192kHz consumes 9.2Mbps, uncompressed.
Plenty headroom on a connection to a streamer running at 100Mbps?
Should that be ok?
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For now not possible. But you can attach storage directly to the unit. So if at some point becomes possible would be nice. I have other non naim streamer with that capability.
Naim use Gigabit Ethernet on their music storage devices for exactly this reason. It speeds up large file transfers which, unlike in their streamers, is potentially useful.
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It should be noted that naim are not the only manufacturer to state 100MB connectivity is to reduce electrical noise.
For example Innuos PhoenixNet:
- Simpler 100mbps network switch chip results in lower operating noise floor compared to Gigabit
Innuos do use Gigabit ports on the Zen series, as these are storage devices and, as covered above, for file transfer gigabit is useful.
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The Melco £2k switch also has two sets of ports, Gigabit and 100Mb, the latter for audio circuits.
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Best of both worlds!
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I’m more suprised at the lack of WiFi 6 (802.11ax) and I think I read in some other thread that IPv6 isn’t supported (might be possible later with a firmware update?).
Considering the longevity of Naim’s devices I would have expected those for future proofing.