This paper suggests the use of a prefilter before baud-rate timing recovery [1]. It is shown that the timing phase of the baud-rate timing synchronizer can be set to a desirable timing phase, at which point a digital equalizer performs best, by proper prefiltering. The procedure for the optimal design of such a prefilter is developed under the assumption that the channel impulse response and desirable timing phase for equalization are known. Application of the proposed scheme to the gigabit Ethernet system demonstrated that prefiltering can improve receiver performance.