[MAWParticipant]

After looking at the network-packages etc. pp I will write down everything I found out so far. Perhaps it will help someone out there:

1, Has anyone else done this, did they get the same result?

yes. This is more or less normal, if you are using more than 1 Switch.
When using more than one switch and using Broadcast or Multicast (what dsnake is doing) the switch “normally” will do a check, what devices are there in the network.
Also known as IGMP Membership Report.
(also this will happen every few minutes from each Switch that will handle the multicast)
Every time the AR-Systems will receive an Broadcast/Multicast-package which is not the dsnake-protocoll a red light will flash and stay online for a few seconds.
so this explains your observed behaviour:

(basically a red light for whatever device plugs into the switch, but I see channels hear au-dio in limited testing.)

Yes. Each time you plug something in the switch will do the Membership Report.
More sophisticated protocols, Spanning-Tree, whatever else is using Broadcasts – so every time the AR-Systems will receive this package, they will go to error.
It looks like the IGMP is small enough for the AR to ignore it – Though I have to test it with more than a few channels.
Also ARP-Requests seems to be ignored – that’s nice 😀 (only found out, since I mirrored the traffic and my PC was doing ARP-Requests for the DNS-Server :D)

Sometimes you can’t even switch off this behaviour. For example I got a problem that the D’link Dis-covery Protocol of one of my switches was send to the network – this actually got the AR to get a hickup and fail – and i was not able to disable this – so having to change the switch.

2, What is the importance of the red link light? – does this specify error? will audio have jitters/cuts/stutters etc?

The red light only tells you “something is wrong” – ideally it should not be shown.
Thus, many of us switched to a media-converter and a single-line connection.

3, switch speed – I’ve tested with an old 10/100 switch, would using a Gb switch make a difference?

This should already be answered.
At least for me the AR normally get a 100 Full-Duplex on the gigabit-Port.
When you connect your SQ to a Gigabit-Switch, it will change the protocol to gigaACE – thus it won’t be able to communicate with the AR – you have to manually setup the speed of the port to 100Mbps.
Then the SQ will use dSnake.

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