That seems fair enough FR but if I buy the CD, rip it and then stream it back it becomes ‘ultimately less aggro’ and it sounds better, regardless?
Count yourself lucky. The only streamer I have is a Sonos Connect, a relic from my old system. Feeding Tidal mp3 streams in to a XS2 and PMC twenty5.22 speakers it is seriously out of its depth.
I don’t disbelieve you but why would adding a switch make any difference to the sound? After all it is just a stream of bits to the streamer and assuming there’s no packet loss why wouldn’t the sound be the same with and without a switch?
Tidal does not sound better than my locally ripped music via my QNAP.
Getting a Cisco switch will make no difference whatsoever to the sound of Tidal relative to locally streamed music. If you want to improve it, installing Bubble upnp on the Qnap is the way to go. That will get it much closer to locally streamed CD rips, but maybe not quite as good.
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Long term it’s a Bubble proxy that’s needed to lift Tidal to local streaming level. It’s a whole new project though 
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I quite fancied the idea of a ND5 XS2 but reading things like this really makes me wonder if it is worth it? I Can get a LOT of vinyl for £2299!!
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Maybe go to a dealer and have a listen. Hear what you prefer? /seriously, if I was only interested in a streaming service I would stick to just using a laptop.
I can get millions of albums from Tidal for 20 quid a month.
Other half just asked me to put The Police on, nothing but live and compilation albums on Tidal. That was surprising.
Yeah it’s not perfect. Sometimes licence or record label issues can get in the way.
There’s more on Qobuz though. 
yes, if it’s for the same cd, better listen to it locally. I agree Stephen.
But in the time you wait for the cd to arrive, or when you discover new music, you can have better sound quality for no much money, around 50 GBP and a second ethernet cable.
However, personally, i don’t use tidal very often. Around 2 months per year, just to discover new albums.
The switch improves locally streaming music also ( from nas).
yes, like you, i couldn’t believe that first. A switch? what for? i have already a switch in my router. But i tried, bought a netgear gs105 switch , and the upgrade was important. Then, later, i bought the cisco.
i didn’t tried bubble upnp. But i believe you. However, for me, a dedicated switch improved both tidal and local streaming, and not marginally!
I already have a Cisco 2960. With Bubble Tidal is local streaming 
Not sure I follow. BubbleUPnP Server provides local streaming as it acts as a media transfer protocol break for external media. Local streaming affects the TCP flow control dynamics and how ‘hard’ the streamer’s network stack compared to external internet streaming, and the varying EM induced perturbations on the audio is affected by this work… especially with the legacy streamers.
Different media server/OS/hardware combinations can affect interframe timing consistency… again causing affects as above, although less marked. I shared my basic research and findings with Naim in this area a couple of years back when the new streamers were in development.
The switch is mainly about common mode noise, and physical serial layer clock stability. Instability here otherwise known as jitter can produce intermodulation artefacts into the host receiver effectively through its network interface… again producing EM induced perturbations in the audio or clocked digital audio.
I’m put off streaming services by the pittance they pay to the artists. Buying a CD is far better. There are other ways to try before buy.
Phil
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IME streaming from Tidal etc allows you to find things that you might like to buy - you may want the CD, 24bit download, LP etc
Such as?
YouTube. I get many suggestions from the Music Room.
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Also artists’ own Bandcamp and SoundCloud pages.
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