Most Important, Unloved Cable...

Wow.  What a disappointment.  I came on this thread to see what the OP found RE which Ethernet cables worked best for him and for other's suggestions, and instead I mostly had to scroll through 10 pages of "discussion" on whether I should care.

While I await further actual discussion and advice on which Ethernet cables perform better, I do enjoy attempts to explain how things actually work to produce a given outcome or experience, rather than passionate recitals of theory for why they should not.  As usual, I do find @almarg 's comments and explanations useful in this regard, particularly this excerpt from his post on 4/20/2017:

"in a post in this thread dated 3-28-2017 I suggested the following experiment to some of the others:

Tune a portable battery powered AM radio to an unused frequency, with the volume control set at a position that you would normally use. Bring it close to an unshielded ethernet cable on your LAN, while the cable is conducting traffic. You may be surprised at what you hear.

When I do that with the unshielded Cat5e cable I have on the LAN in my house, while the cable is **not** conducting any large amount of traffic, I hear increases in static from the radio when it is as far as 2 feet from the cable. Keep in mind that an AM radio is designed to just be sensitive to a narrow (~10 kHz) range of frequencies in the lower part of the RF region (nowhere close to frequencies corresponding to the bit rate of ethernet traffic, much less to the frequency components that constitute the risetimes and falltimes of the signals), and to have a sensitivity measured in microvolts. And for audio we’re dealing with microvolts as well, but without the benefit of the radio’s narrow band filtering. For digital audio if 2 volts corresponds to full scale the least significant bit of a 16 bit word corresponds to about 30 microvolts. And the least significant bit of a 24 bit word corresponds to about 0.1 microvolts! And perhaps more significantly there are jitter effects that will arise as a result of noise whenever D/A conversion is performed, of course. And this experiment just involves radiation of RFI through the air. Not through what would seem likely to potentially be much more significant unintended pathways for digital noise, such as grounds, other wiring, and parasitic capacitances within the components.

Regards,
-- Al"

This has me me wondering if at least part of the issue with Ethernet cable design execution and performance is to curtail the bad things that unshielded or poorly shielded Ethernet cables may do to other low level signals in nearby analog or other digital cables or their connectors in the vicinity of a shared piece of equipment.  Could it also be that the digital signal in the Ethernet cable could be corrupted in some audible way by interference from high current or high frequency signals in the vicinity of your gear stack to the point that it defeats buffering or operates on the signal at some point downstream to inject noise in digital or analog signals.  This may result from a number of parameters including the quality of other critical cables in use, wireless signals in the area, the physical layout of equipment boxes and the cables behind your gear, and as Al notes the design and behavior of the gear itself with respect to external interference.  All this without even invoking the design trade offs and opportunities for noise generated within the connected circuits themselves, as described by Al.

Al's argument would be for not using copper based RJE of all UTP stripes however. 

It doesn't paint a picture for one really expensive, $233 a foot in my case, shielded cable vs $0.90 per foot shielded cable. 

It’s an odd statement but it is true: ’the ground is the source’.

electronics design textbooks used to (and might still have) two different versions. At least in my time they did. The classical version of calculations..... and the electron flow version. Classic electrical flow in calculations comes from Benjamin Franklin’s works, and he got it exactly backward, regarding what the ’electrons’* are actually doing.

The electron flow version has the electron flow emergent from the ground point.

This tends to illustrate the problem with conceptual and reasoning issues on these heated subjects.

in other news (a little bit of an eye opener)...
when Einstein said ’I could have got the sign wrong’, regarding his famous equation, it is taken in stride as the math works..forward..or backward. No biggie, right? Not So Fast......as his equations are terminated/anchored in unknown infinities, which means infinity’s application may be, in some ways opposite/misplaced...compared to what people think it is. We still wrestle with gravity and time, trapped in infinities of a sort. Perhaps these concepts have been put on totally backward. This would lean to proposing that gravity and time are merely emergent artifacts of present components in interaction.

*Nobody knows what an electron is. No one. It’s a descriptor, a placeholder, nothing more. apparently, everything may well turn out to be built out of electrons...-these things we do not know what they are and can only incidentally describe some artifacts of Newtonian mass interactions. Yes, it’s still turtles all the way down. All you have to do is look at the underlying data you work with, look at it’s origins and meanings and the turtles are very much there and alive. Three-quarters the way through 2017 and that part has not changed one inch. Whatever an inch is, as we don’t really have an anchor for that, either.

All of modern scientific thinking is based on someone ascribing meaning to one point. Or it is at least possible to investigate it and come to that conclusion, in this given unfolding. Descartes saying ’I think, therefore I am’. Sometimes I think that Descartes was an idiot for that one. He is not the problem. The slightly but very importantly misguided scientific mindset that arose from the torch bearing of his statement..~that~ is the problem. All the lesser minds who collectively and over time...decided that all that came before was inviolate and built out of laws. What insanity. What foolishness. The monkey origin as carrier brings it’s instincts and unconsciousness to bear on it’s logic... turns it into doctrine... and makes a mess out of it.

90% of "Einstein quotes" he never actually said, maybe especially the one quoted. The reason I say that is because it wouldn’t make sense to have the sign wrong in his famous equation since the equation represented the equivalency of mass and energy. It would be analogous to saying I got the sign wrong for the expression,

a box of rocks = fire

and wrote,

a box of rocks = - fire

It’s still the same idea.

Also, I probably wouldn’t call electrons that move at the snail’s pace of 1 cm/hour "flowing." Nor would I say they were "emerging" from anywhere. They are already there.

Carry on. Smoke if ya got em.

@knownothing

Yes of course any differences with digital ethernet cables might be related to a failure of the audio component to screen out interference. It doesn’t really matter how the exact source of contamination or corruption of the audio signal occurs. It is simply a fact that the audio component is inadequately designed as designers should test and anticipate extraneous noise sources from cabling that they typically expect to be used. So the equipment is faulty.