I just built the Ferriet core solution for that last meter ethernet. I hear a difference 🙂
best thing since sliced bread!
About the Wifi extenders. As I mentioned I don't use Wifi in the first place, because I lived near a 4G transmitter until I became hypersensitive to radiation. So I can't use that. Besides this I think the lack of Wifi in my situation could be the reason I have trouble with my ethernet. As I mentioned, adding noise to my ethernet system prevents crystal sync. Probably the distortion of Wifi radiation could do that same trick.
Reviewing an ethernet system became very difficult, because what is happening. Is it the signal and the sound that became better due to a powersupply. Or is it the other way around is it the signal that became better and crystal sinc made the sound worse. Adding Wifi could make the signal worse but also unsinc crystals with the end result better sound. The question is what do we review when it comes to a certain balance.
My opinion is that the only thing that matters is the noise floor in the DAC. Everything else is irrelevant. The challange is how to get to that low noise floor.
I was skeptical about having a WiFi extender next to my streamer since all i could see was that it radiates noise. But for some reason it seem to work. This is mainly not my own conclusions but rather numerous of people that has replaced VERY expensive ethernet stuff with this simpler setup.
If you can´t use the WiFi part then maybe fiber can be a similar (breaking the noisy connection) but from what i read you always come to a point where that fiber signal needs to be converted back to "ethernet" again (or whatever it is called), which caused noise when converting that signal.
That the noise floor in the dac would be the only thing that matters can't be true in my opinion. I think the shape of the bits is an important factor as well. These bits are actually analog sine waves representing 1 and 0's. When they are buffered they seem to keep the shape they are in. When we take away the connection to the dac and play the buffer from that point the sound will be as worse as it was. This is something we were trying to solve back in 2012 when I was a beta tester for the PS audio PWD2. They had built a buffer so the DAC would always play from the buffer and ethernet noise wouldn't be a problem any longer, unfortunately it didn't work.