Fiber or Eithenet


I need to pull new cable from my router / Small Green Computer Music Server to my DAC (Bricasti M1S2 with nexwork card).  Which should I pull and why?  Differences.  I think about WireWorld for the ethernet. About an 80 ft run.

testrun

No good reason not to try it - you can buy two converters and 15M of fiber cable for $70.  Run it across the floor to try it, before pulling cable through the wall.  Later, even if you choose to use Ethernet cable, you can buy a shorter fiber cable and try incorporating the converters as an optical break at the end of the Ethernet run.  

Fiber when ever possible. It usually has higher bandwidth, is less affected by noise, magnetism, and other interference. Also it has less drop over distance vs wire. 

As a word of caution, most cables that say they are Cat8 usually do not test out that way. It's very important that they use cat8 ends, and install them correctly. 

@testrun good decision. I would also recommend trying a passive filter like the iFi LAN iSilencer between your Ethernet cable and streamer. Depending on the Ethernet implementation in your components and the length of the Ethernet cable, it is possible to get an improvement. If you buy from Amazon and it doesn’t make any difference, return it. 

Don't understand why anyone would convert to fiber at end of chain, converting to fiber should be done at beginning of chain. Cheap fiber converters certainly not optimal, and transceivers do make a difference, industrial grade Finisar 1475 was my choice after trying others. Corning optical cable top level, I use After Dark version. If your going to do fiber conversion cheaping out will result in second class performance.

 

What comes prior to fiber conversion matters greatly, fiber can't bring back what's lost prior to the conversion. Where ethernet remains, isolation and quality ethernet cable a must, entire chain must be optimized.

Fiber when ever possible. It usually has higher bandwidth, is less affected by noise, magnetism, and other interference. Also it has less drop over distance vs wire. 

As a word of caution, most cables that say they are Cat8 usually do not test out that way. It's very important that they use cat8 ends, and install them correctly. 

@mswale Some decent streamers are designed to successfully decouple/isolate the above mentioned making the upstream ethernet/fiber infrastructure tweaks a bit pointless. Some don't and benefit from the same.