Excellent! Thank you!
IEEE 802.3az only involves port Tx power-down on idle.
Automatic reduction of Tx power in short cables is part of ‘Green Ethernet’ and is a superset of IEEE 802.3az.
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It is worth considering if the Ethernet isolator is passive it will almost certainly be changing the impedance of the segment, causing reflections and noise to the streamer potentially… a few engineering white papers on that.
The main purpose of medical isolators is to increase the DC and AC voltage galvanic isolation of course.
I played around with some passive ‘medical’ isolators I imported from Japan back in the days of my NDX… didn’t like them at all, and on some devices they interfered with the 802.3u link negotiation.
When I had the Netgear switch, with a linear ps, I bought the Acoustic Revive isolator. I liked what It did, giving a bit more smoothness.
The same with Cisco 2960 after.
But passing then on Audioquest diamond, the acoustic revive did nothing. So was sold.
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In between the switch and the streamer it was definitely NOT good.
However between the NAS and the switch and in the link between that switch and the switch to which everything else on our network connects, they did bring benefits. Some time in near the future we’ll be doing a disconnect test to make sure the result is consistent.
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Will you be disconnecting everything and just running a cable from the router to the network.
Essentially, not including anything that could degrade or improve the sound quality.
I’ve abandoned using switches in my network configuration (but it’s relatively sophisticated, I will need a separate topic to explain). However your message provoked some battle to be done 
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Just bought a couple of cheap GS108Es, so I will see if I can hear a difference. I needed to update the firmware to get access to the low power mode.
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The benefit is only really obtained when a lower noise PSU is also used.
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It took me 10 minutes to realise I didn’t have a low power mode. A firmware update solved that. But it’s a well-built switch with a decent metal case. However, the switches themselves are lackluster and cheap.
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Our arrangement of switches effectively already does that.
The switch connected to the streamer has only three patch cords:
1 The 272
4 The NAS (via an Ethernet isolator)
5 The rest of the system (via an Ethernet isolator)
All links are low excitation voltage, 1 and 4 have higher priority than 5.
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OK, just done the test of removing the isolators and then replacing them. Conclusions:
Removing the isolator between the NAS and the switch makes comparatively little difference. We believe it’s slightly better with the isolator, but not so much of a difference that we’d say it’s definitely better.
Removing the isolator between the switch and the rest of the network makes a distinct difference, the sound is less clean in both amplitude and timing without the isolator in place. Putting the isolator back in restores previous gains.
.
Next test is to move the connection to the NAS to another switch on the main network side of things. This will mean that there’s only connections to the streamer and another connection to a switch that handles the NAS and the rest of the network.
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Well, I should say thank you to @Xanthe and @cb01 who pointed to the difference of basic Netgear 108 vs 108E.
- E version is better right away even with its basic psu.
- Setting it to the low power mode widens that gap significantly, itʼs very much different switch after that.
- Ifi Power X and Elite improve things further. Choosing between them is also a matter of cable available. I found that the best cord/Elite combo I had previously is maybe not the same anymore while using with the E switch.
Overall, to have an improvement at such a moderate budget is something. I’ve tried a couple of switches before but now thinking that all that experiments were compromised (bought and sold them too quickly ). Maybe it’s time to dive again.
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So how does the SQ compare to Wi-Fi now? Better or worse?
for me wi-fi and ethernet are not mutually exclusive, I use both simultaneously
Any update on how the Netgear switch is performing?
Do you hear any improvements?
Thanks
And removed this one also finally). There seem to be more important factors to the overall performance
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Well, thanks for asking. Prior to this i had been having some issues with my ndx2, that required it to go back to salisbury. It is currently still there. So my streaming has been via MB Node 2, that is plugged into my nDac/555. However this combination is very good, but not as good as i remeber the ndx2/555.
With the new switches im not hearing anything i don’t like. Which is good.
I really need to confirm the improvement once the ndx2 is back.
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I now managed to enable the power save mode of my Netgear GS105E. It seemed it was disabled so far.
What do I hear? Is this true or do I just want to hear the improvement so much? Anyway, for now I am sure the music is more transparant, with more depth and details. Not a significant change at first sight, but overall quit a step in experience of the music. Especially when listening for a longer time.
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How did you manage that?
Try as I might connecting my Mac Book Pro directly to it I cant get the Netgear app to find it…