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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

Various CAT's and wireless devices en route,,, RE: ETHERNET CABLES: I'm losing it

Here's the thing. None of this was blinded (ie. you knew exactly what cable was being used) all those days, right?

Suppose a friend/wife, were to switch the cables every 2-3 days on you without knowing... Would you be able to recognize a difference? Would you enjoy the music any less? Would you be able to reliably go up and confirm with them -- "Aha! You switched in the crappy $5 Cat-5E cable yesterday didn't you?"?

I have tried this back in the day with my Transporter and Touch - cheap Cat 5E vs. Cat-6 (UTP and STP) vs. Cat-7. Never "heard" any difference worth mentioning about. These days, sure, I'll put on my more expensive Cat-6 STP cable for the Transporter and make sure I have at least Cat-6 cables running from my router/switcher to the media room, but I have no concerns that the sound would degrade if (heaven forbid) I were forced to somehow "downgrade" to a reasonable Cat-5E!

As for the wireless devices sitting between or within the network. Seriously, so long as there are no data drop outs and buffer under-runs, it doesn't matter. A robust connection from the server to the streamer is all that is required. Whether I have zero, 1, or 2 decent (and these days gigabit) network switches in between from my server to the final destination (Squeezebox devices in my case), it doesn't affect the sound. I run gigabit throughout my house into each bedroom. Easily copy files > 100MB/second to and from my server/NAS. So long as the network isn't saturated (eg. a number of machines copying big files to/from the server), there's really no problem.

One thing I would raise is that one has to be careful with the speed of the music server or NAS on the network. I run a full 3.5GHz dual core Windows Server 2012 + 16GB RAM machine as the server. I can see people complaining about slow NAS (often ARM-based, low power) devices especially with slower "Green" hard drives inside complaining about poor latency and maybe drop outs on the network if someone else tries to access the server at the same time. All of this is of course not fixable with ethernet cables. It's important to be able to diagnose problems accurately if you're running into performance issues.

(Folks, what's next? Audiophile ethernet switches? Audiophile wifi routers? Stop the madness.)

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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.


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