u/bfeebabes

I see this constantly. The classic audiophile stack. Turntable on a butcher block or marble platform, platform on hifi stand/furniture, everything spiked at every junction. Looks serious. Mostly isn’t.

Let me break down the actual physics because this matters.

Where spikes have a genuine use case...
Suspended timber floors with carpet. That’s basically it. The goal there is to penetrate the carpet and underlay and find the structural layer beneath, which stops the speaker rocking on a compliant surface. That’s a real problem with a real solution. I’ll give spikes that.

Where spikes are actively wrong...
Concrete floors. Concrete resonates. The frequencies are higher than timber but it absolutely has modal behaviour. Spiking into concrete couples your speaker directly into those resonances with minimal damping. You haven’t isolated anything, you’ve just changed which resonances you’re exciting. Decoupling platforms with correctly rated compliant material is the physically correct approach on any rigid substrate.

Electronics...
No. A solid state DAC does not care about floor vibration. Neither does a power amplifier. There is no mechanism. No studio in the world spikes their SSL console or their outboard rack and nobody in professional audio loses sleep over it. This is purely a consumer audiophile phenomenon driven by accessory manufacturers and confirmation bias.

The one partial exception is high gain valve stages and MC phono stages, which are genuinely microphonic. I run Sorbothane feet under my WiiM Ultra specifically because the MC phono stage is sensitive and it makes a measurable audible difference. That’s physics working as expected. But the mechanism there is decoupling, not spiking.

Turntables...
Yes, isolation platforms are justified. The stylus is a mechanical sensor with zero rejection of external vibration. Acoustic and structural feedback into the cartridge is real and measurable. But the correct interface material between platform and surface is compliant, not a spike. Spikes into marble is coupling into marble’s resonant modes. Sorbothane feet into the same marble is breaking the transmission path. These are not equivalent and they don’t produce the same result.

What spiking actually does when people report it “working”...
It changes the coupled resonant behaviour of the stack. That changes the colouration of the sound. It’s a tone control. If you preferred the result, fine, but that’s a preference not a fidelity improvement, and misidentifying the mechanism matters because it leads to worse decisions downstream.

The tell...
Anyone stacking components with spikes at every junction while claiming physics-based reasoning hasn’t done the physics. The aesthetic signals seriousness. The mechanism doesn’t hold up. Those are different things and conflating them is how this hobby ends up full of expensive nonsense.

Get the load calculation right for whatever compliant material you use. Decouple on rigid substrates. Save the spikes for carpet. Spend your money on things that actually matter.

Anyone telling you different is selling something or mentally inflexible and driven by dogma.

Finally got a measurement mic and REW software. Rather than spend weeks mastering REW i used Claude and CLAUDE MCP interface for REW. Basically that makes it really easy to measure and process without becoming a ninja master in REW. Then i got Claude to make me a report of the whole mornings measurement session. Ace. Thank you kolton and lobehub for the great MCP. Made the whole process much more focussed on solving the problem rather than the tool. It also helped me understand how to use REW more quickly.

I’ve been a Cisco networks CCNA/CCNP, Cybersecurity professional and an audiophile for years. Both communities have their pseudoscience corners, but the overlap “audiophile networking” might be the most entertainingly indefensible of the lot. Let me save you £2,000.

The claim
Expensive switches (Melco, English Electric 8Switch, SOtM, various “tweaked” Ciscos) and fibre media converters reduce jitter, noise, and packet errors, thereby improving the sound of your streaming audio.

Why this is complete nonsense.

1. TCP/IP is a reliable, error-correcting protocol.
   Tidal, Qobuz, Roon — they all stream over TCP. Packets that arrive corrupted or out of sequence are retransmitted and reordered before the application layer ever sees them. Your DAC receives bit-perfect data or it receives nothing. There is no such thing as a “slightly damaged packet” that arrives at your renderer and makes your hi-hat sound grainy. This is networking 101.

2. Buffers decouple network jitter from DAC jitter completely.
   Even if packet timing were wildly irregular — and it is, because that’s just how IP networks behave — your streaming client buffers several seconds of audio and feeds it to the DAC at a precise, crystal-controlled rate. Network jitter and audio jitter are separated by the buffer. They do not interact. Claiming a switch improves DAC jitter is like claiming the roads affect your home’s plumbing pressure.

3. Ethernet is already galvanically isolated.
   Every standard RJ45 port contains transformer coupling that prevents ground loops and common-mode noise from propagating between devices. This is a fundamental part of the 802.3 spec. A £2,500 “audiophile” switch does not add isolation. It’s already there in the £18 unmanaged Netgear you own.

4. Fibre doesn’t solve a problem you have.
   Yes, fibre provides optical isolation. But standard Ethernet transformer coupling already handles that, and TCP error correction handles the rest. Fibre is genuinely useful in industrial environments with serious EMI. Your listening room is not a steel mill.

5. Switches are Layer 2 devices. They don’t touch your audio.
   A switch moves Ethernet frames. It has zero visibility into or interaction with the audio payload inside those frames. Claiming a switch with a “better oscillator” improves your sound is like claiming a posher delivery van improves the book inside the parcel.

The “but I measured it” response
Some audiophile publications have published oscilloscope captures showing “cleaner” signals from expensive switches. These are almost always measuring something real — marginally lower EMI on the cable — that is completely irrelevant after the PHY layer, the transformer coupling, and the TCP stack. None of these measurements have ever been correlated with an audible difference under controlled conditions.

What actually matters for network audio
• Enough bandwidth (10Mbps is overkill for 24/192 FLAC — your connection has this)
• No sustained packet loss (any competent switch does this)
• Stable DHCP/DNS so your streaming client doesn’t time out

A £25 unmanaged switch is audibly indistinguishable from a £3,000 “audiophile” switch because the bits arriving at your DAC are identical. Your DAC doesn’t know which switch sent them. It doesn’t care.

The single most important point
Not one of these products has ever passed a double-blind ABX test. Not one. The entire market is built on expectation bias, sighted listening, and the reasonable-but-wrong intuition that more expensive = better performance.
It’s directional Ethernet cables with better marketing.
Buy a decent router, get an upgraded fasted internet connection, buy a mesh network for coverage, buy a cheap unmanaged switch if you need one, and spend the £2,000 on something your system can actually resolve...like room treatment, or music.

edit: yes I know some of you think you have heard a difference. I believe you heard something. I don’t believe it was the switch.