Ethernet Cables, do they make a difference?

@jinjuku what do you mean by 60% reliability?
what kind of tests did you run?

@acepilot71:

William chose the testing format. I randomly generated a sequence of cable swap out. William went with either listening to an entire track or part of a track.

He only obtained 60% accuracy of stating what cable was in use. Which means he was also in error 40% of the the time.

No. They work or they don't.  End of conversation.

Just as a matter of fact, ethernet doesn't always use TCP/IP because there isn't really a "TCP/IP" protocol. Those are two different protocols for two different layers of the software interface. In all likelihood, it's using TCP/FTP.

You have a gross misunderstanding. There is indeed a TCP/IP protocol. It's transmission control protocol over internet protocol. UDP/IP is also a protocol. Ethernet isn't any one protocol. It's made up of many moving parts and the abstraction it provides up/down stream layers is why it's so robust, reliable, and elegant.

There is no such thing as TCP/FTP because FTP doesn't live at layer 3. It's layer 7 (application).

It seems to me that what has been largely overlooked in this discussion (with the exception of the brief post by Markalarsen) is the fact that 100% of the energy of an electrical signal, especially one that as in the case of Ethernet contains spectral components at very high RF frequencies, does not necessarily go only where it is supposed to go. Experienced designers of high speed digital circuits (of which I happen to be one) will recognize that.

And given that a number of members here who are highly respected and highly experienced

And I encourage and invite every last one of you to, in your own setup, to evaluate some spec meeting, but very inexpensive, CAT5e/6 to your own esoteric CAT5e/6 cabling.

I’ll provide a client, server, layer 3 managed switch with a LAG setup for dynamic LACP.

Of course you will not be allowed to know which cable is being used.

I love it when somebody wants to convince the world that they are right by stating they talk to an engineer and he said blah blah blah! I don’t give a rats @$$ What an engineer says, if you have to rely on somebody else’s opinion then you don’t know what you are talking about. Also, There are differences in network cables running into your house. I’m guessing you have copper of some sort, which is noisy. I have fibre and fibre is always going to be less noisy than copper. Ask your guru buddy about that.
Everybody on this thread talks about the speed differences between cat5 to cat8 cables, in reality, it’s more than just speed differences, much more between the different cables. Cat5 speed rating is far more than what you need to transfer digital music. Cat5 has much better throughput than the throughput from a CD player. If you check out the cable sheathing and shielding, it is much better on the cat7 and above cables.