You have an excellent argument on this topic, yet you feel it necessary to belittle people and insult them? Why?
If you want to insult industry individuals who hang out on whatsbestforum as well, that’s great; I certainly would trust any of them before I trusted anyone at Audioholics, for example.
There’s nothing “belittling” about recommending to not debate with anyone who has implicit beliefs.
Who doesn’t have implicit beliefs?
You implicitly believe your technical knowledge is superior and you trust in measurements.
Even the tenet that everything audible can be measured with tools available today is a belief.
I didn’t personally feel you were being belittling. To the point made by @BillK though, I think it’s important we all recognise that we live in a belief system of our own… “SPF’s vary in sound quality” is an implicit belief but so is “SPF’s all sound the same as long as they comply with the relevant specs”.
Of course I am able to observe this objectively precisely because I have no belief system of my own!
Yes, but there are beliefs systems that are objective facts and science based, and those that are faith based. Thats the differences.
Your faith is in your science.
You know as well as I each “fact based” statement should be prefaced with “As we currently understand things…”
Too often in our hobby, when people say they hear differences, there is no intellectual curiosity to find out why, rather the gut response by many is “no you don’t” or the gaslighting response of “confirmation bias” or “you just want to hear a difference.”
We need tools beyond those we have now to determine why measurements with our current tools aren’t sufficient indicators of “sound quality” and why many listeners can indeed hear differences.
I’ve related before that Boulder for one takes just that approach; they listen to every piece of gear they make, and if it doesn’t sound right despite passing their tests, they go to work to find out why and how to test for that in the future.
Do you have anything to contribute to the topic of this thread at all?
Once again, insults, nice.
At the risk of sounding like a distant echo of @BillK (which I do not wish to, as he and I are also in different places on the objective-subjective spectrum), your belief system is in science and the scientific method. You obviously feel far more comfortable in that belief system than in others, but it IS every bit as much a belief system. Or in your case, perhaps a disbelief system!
Of course the strongest belief systems are those informed by and reinforced by associating ourselves with other who share it, in either a social/family setting or a professional setting or both.
The opposite of your science-based belief system is NOT a a faith-based one, not in this hifi domain anyway. It’s primarily an experiential one. Yes, there is a huge risk that all sorts of marketing, pseudoscience and other factors will affect that experience, we all know this, but to dismiss the experiential approach as invalid is, well, rude at least and crass at best.
Having said all that, I find myself perched reasonably comfortably (it must be my level-matched audiophile grade cushion) on the fence between the camps. I refuse to try cable lifters (“you never know!”) on the basis that I do know and believe chasing “better” SFPs is pointless, but I only appreciated what an ethernet switch can do when I took off my digital blinkers and installed one. I enjoy speaking with, and sharing actual live listening experiences with, both camps and find myself getting equally grumpy with the extreme “if you can’t measure it you’re kidding yourself” and “you’ll never know until you’ve tried it” wings of each.
Peace and love, have a great weekend everyone.
N
In which case, and to amuse your measurement / science based beliefs on this, try measuring the LCR of a cable when it is resting on say a carpet compared to suspended above the carpet.
Although to misquote my favourite Peter Green Fleetwood Mac song, don’t ask if the LCR of a cable can affect sound quality because I might not give you the answer that you want me to.
No, not playing! 
It is not only the “right” SFP that seems to make a different - also OCXO is a hot topic.
Here is a pic of TeraDak T-S212 (SFP) Media Converter TXCO OCXO $258: I don’t quite understand why an FMC needs a OCXO?
Torben
This is the one you mentioned on WhatsBestForum back in May, right? https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/ethernet-tweak.36727/ No-one there compared the OCXO version with the TCXO version. I think we’ve discussed here several times that there are no mechanisms by which clock accuracy can impact sound quality; it’s only after the data packets/frames have been converted to a bitstream that clock accuracy can impact sound quality.
This is probably a decent FMC and the price is excellent; the gushing praise on WBF by Infigo (cables $1200-5500, DAC/Pre $35,000, Monoblock pair $50,000) and Republic seems to come from a parallel world.
Than it is even more strange what reply some users give:
Q: “Why did you order the OCXO version?”
A: “Best performance and frequency stability, extremely low phase noise and jitter.”
Torben
I find it a little sad but not strange:
Perhaps you should be the first to buy both versions, Torben. Get a friend to install and swap them without telling you which one you’re hearing and then you can share your as-objective-as-possible-in-a-domestic-environment experiences and help dispel the myth!
(At the risk of prolonging a debate topic that doesn’t really belong here). It is faith based in as far as some people’s view that that human senses are infallible. Which (some of) us know isn’t true.
For the same reason that they believe jitter on Ethernet transmissions at the physical layer affects sound. 
Or just been paid $29 for a review. Some companies offer that.
Torben
Given a hound can smell most things better than any measuring device we have invented to date, I don’t think we should preclude the fact that our ears hear more than we are able to measure.
If it were possible to measure everything related to sound in the tiniest detail, I suspect Hi-Fi would have progressed even further than it has…
That said, our ears are definitely fallible (or, perhaps, more accurately, our brain can make us think we hear things in a different way than we do).
Sadly true
I can’t argue with most of that.
That said though, in the context of this thread, across the audiophile sphere there seems to be quite a number of people lately trying out optical SFPs.
So many seem to have genuinely convinced themselves, without any objective frame of reference other than their own hearing and the unshakeable faith that if they think they hear a difference, there must actually is a difference.
And once they’re convinced it makes a difference, no amount of explaining the reasons why it cannot actually make a difference, is going to change their minds.
