Most Important, Unloved Cable...

 

Geoffkait: Whoa! Easy, big fella. I’m not talking about shielded cables.

to which jujitsu replied,

"If it's not about the shield on a STP Ethernet cable, then it's not going to be anything else.

Ethernet is either wired TIA586A or TIA586B straight through, or 586A on one end 586B on the other end for cross over.

Most horizontal run will be CCA, patch is stranded (for better strain resistance and flexibility). Save yourself the laughable argument with grain structure, crystalline structure, etc...

Ethernet is bidirectional."

>>>>>>All wire is bidirectional inasmuch as one can send voice and data over it in either direction. But as fate would have it wire is audibly better in one direction than the other. Even shielded cable that is "directional" sonically according to the shield terminations points is also "directional" sonically according to the direction of the copper conductor. So, it would help to keep track of both aspects of the cable construction. Follow?

He who laughs last laughs best. 😄

But as fate would have it wire is audibly better in one direction than the other. Even shielded cable that is "directional" sonically according to the shield terminations points is also "directional" sonically according to the direction of the copper conductor. So, it would help to keep track of both aspects of the cable construction. Follow?

Even if I believed there was grain orientation cofounders to SQ... Ethernet is a data cable, not an audio cable.

Are you capable of answering any questions:

If Ethernet cable is directional and I set a 30 second buffer that will allow me to swap the cable around with out a break in play. Will you be able to tell us when I made the swap. Will you be able to tell us the direction of the cable?

@geoffkait   

Ethernet is digital. Digital eliminates small analog differences completely. Unless you think that the shape of the bits (rounder 0 and sharper 1) is being affected by directionality, shielding, resistance and capacitance of wire. (That increasingly seems to me to be your education level when it comes to digital)

Ethernet is digital. Digital eliminates small analog differences completely. Unless you think that the shape of the bits (rounder 0 and sharper 1) is being affected by directionality, shielding, resistance and capacitance of wire. (That increasingly seems to me to be your education level when it comes to digital)

That is just one small bit of it. You have all these different systems in play:
Ethernet, PCIe (or USB BUS if using USB to Ethernet), then the RAM subsystem, then the USB subsystem, then the USB to I2S and local buffer on the DAC.

You have all these clock domain boundaries with FIXED frequency clocks passing data at said FIXED clock. The clock for Ethernet doesn't match the clock on the PCIe bus which in turn doesn't match the clock on the RAM, which may or may not match the clock on the CPU, which won't match the clock on the computer USB side of things and most certainly won't match the clock on the DAC that lines up the samples in it's buffer and finally applies 44.1/96/192/384 or what have you.

Clock domain boundaries are FIFO buffers. Buffers are static areas where any upstream jitter just absolutely went poof!

If you stream from the likes of Tidal, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, etc. use the PathPing command from windows. Count the hops.

Each hop has totally copied the data. When it hits your router, it's copied, when it hits your switch it's copied.

When it hits the input buffer on the NIC, it's copied, when it hits the output buffer on your NIC, it's copied, when it hits the buffer on the PCIe bus, it's copied, when it hits the RAM buffer it's copied, when it hit the buffer set aside from the playback application, it's copied, when it's read into the USB side of things, it's copied, then it's sent over the USB cable to the USB DAC where it's the final copy and clock is applied.

The sound you are hearing was copied many times before you heard it. What you are currently listening to could have been copied 10-30 seconds prior.

You can open up task manager in Windows, go to the performance tab and play back audio over the network. You will see that audio is playing and the throughput on the NIC went to Zero.