I quite regularly visit with a friend who has an interest in hifi and music, I should really say music and hifi because the hifi is a just a means to an end. Now he has a very nice system but he couldn’t be called a hobbyist because its really just fit, forget and enjoy for him. The time before last when I visited he said he would like to rearrange things to move his NAS from its bookshelf location to free up his shelves for more books. By necessity because he has a poor wifi signal in his listening room he has to use an ethernet over powerline adapter which is also a wireless access point. The NAS was sat on the book shelf nearby the power sockets with the wireless access point which has two gigabit network ports. The NAS was connected to one of these ports with a 750mm ethernet cable and his streamer was connected to the other with a 2m ethernet cable. This worked fine and sounded good. Without telling him of the alleged benefits of introducing a switch just before a streamer my suggestion was to move the NAS to a free shelf on his equipment table and to run the 2m ethernet cable from one of the ports on the access point to an intermediate switch on the equipment table alongside the NAS, from there he could use two shorter cables to connect the switch to the NAS and to the streamer. Of course, he didn’t have a switch handy so on my next visit I took my basic TP-Link gigabit switch and we connected it as described above and the sonic benefits were immediately noticeable to him. He listens to mostly acoustic female singer-songwriter music and the background became quieter, the soundstage expanded and it became an altogether more intimate listening experience. In his ignorance he attributed it to the shorter cables but I said nothing because I really don’t know, I just know it sounded better and he was happy. He has since bought a £12 switch and given me mine back and it is now the new norm for him and it will likely remain so indefinitely!