Yes, it’s likely even more important where dedicated media converters are in use with their own PSUs, as opposed to integrated fibre ports where the audio manufacturer may have taken steps to mitigate issues. Higher drive currents will also be present as I think Toslink is ~ <10m whereas SFP+ is designed for much greater distances.
Not to knock any approaches as they can of course provide excellent results, it is more to identify that all solutions are a compromise and just because it’s optical it doesn’t make it immune.
So you are saying the noise is generated in the DAC.
The question is, is this noise an issue and actually relevant in the real world.
If it’s present in a £300 dac, there will probably a load of unsuppressed noise in there to make it inconsequential.
If it’s in a £5000 dac, any noise in there will heavily suppressed including any noise generated by the opt/elec conversion.
Is it just another irrelevant factoid?
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I couldn’t find the article you mentioned on Alpha Audio, but I did find a page discussing digital audio interfaces.
Their assessment of toslink is a bit strange. They think toslink doesn’t sound as good as coax because MOST toslink cable has a plastic core and poor quality connectors and that leads to jitter.
Most often it is plastic. The quality of the core and of the connector itself is extremely important, because scattering or reflection of light quickly occurs. And that, in turn, can introduce jitter.
So would we be save in assuming, they would have a different opinion regarding SQ and jitter of toslink cable with glass core, good quality connectors and a lens on end of the cable to prevent scattering or reflection of light.
I would suggest you sell all the network paraphernalia, buy a good quality streaming bridge/toslink cable. With the money left over buy a better dac or buy yourself a nice lunch each day for a few months.
I have 25 m distance between router and streamer. So in my case fibre optic definitely solved noise issues and dramatically improved sound. But I also realise that converters make a difference. Strong Multimode converters sound much worse than a 1 Gigabyte single mode converters in my setup
Not afraid to eat my words here, but I retrieved the White 2960 GC from storage and connected it up with a BJC 6a to the 333:300…hmmm. Liking what I hear.
Another Shunyata Sigma V2 here! Just ripped out Farad Super 3 with level 2 copper lead, EE8 switch and Shunyata Theta ethernet lead.
What can I say ! …..to quote Boz Scaggs.
. Happy days 
