After removing two small chassis screws, the lid slid off and these were the guts.

"Here you see the upgraded parts.

1. Input capacitor of high capacitance and low impedance tuned for optimal performance
2. Safety resistors upgraded with high-power Vishay/Dale on DC input stage, power regulation stage and isolation transformer stage
3. Re-energized power supply with special tantalum capacitors to reduce noise and interference in/with the processor chip
4. Crystal clock upgraded to high-quality clock from Japan with noise reduction tweaks (all components are soldered with high-quality solder providing solid bass and dynamics)"

The wall wart was a generic 100-240V/0.5A-in/+12V/1A-out job from Taiwan. A white paper sticker with printed Fidelizer name, logo and hand-scrawled serial number on the back was the only giveaway of this not being from our local computer emporium. A nicer sticker wouldn't have gone amiss but with this sitting behind your equipment tucked out of sight, you'd only see it when first installing it. Clocking stock pricing, I found online offers from €51 – €128. That was an unexpected spread but even at max significantly less. Of course with Fidelizer's version you're not just paying for parts and labor and the modman's profit. You're paying for the time it took him to figure out which parts to upgrade with what. In such an equation, that's its very own part and often the costliest.

Streaming uncompressed 16/44 Redbook as 1'411kbps on Tidal's desktop app, I clearly heard that it was fuller, more spacious and less grainy than the same cuts decimated to 320kbps on my Spotify subscription. Yet I couldn't tell whether the Fidelizer was in the loop or not. Whatever HF noise hitched a free ride on our Ethernet cable must have been snuffed out just as effectively by Audiobyte's battery-powered USB reclocker as the perhaps lesser noise from the Cisco. Again, I'd suspected as much going in. To give Keetakawee's mod a fair chance to shine, I had to move the show next door and a further 25 meters down the Etherline pike into the main rig. There I bypassed our regular super-cap'd USB bridge. I put the PC filter burden squarely on our DAC's USB transceiver. Ahead of it, I switched between CAT5 iMac direct vs. first going through the Fidelizer. Obviously that involved an extra short cable.

"As for burn-in, normally it'd be fine to review after 50 to 100 hours but for EtherStream, the before/after difference is a lot. For some people it changes from not so good to most effective. Clients and shops have compared EtherStream to more expensive switches and found EtherStream clearly better after burn in. So getting 200 hours on it first would be safest."