Better sound with ethernet cable?

Doug, purchase a Mesh Router and position it close to your system. Run WiFi to it. Then run a short, good quality LAN cable from the Mesh Router to your Yamaha receiver. The Supra CAT 8 will do fine and doesn't cost much.

No point going to the effort of fishing the cable and a long run. It will not be better and likely worse as you will be using a more basic LAN cable to save on the cost of the 50ft run.

hardwired is good.....suggest using a quality shielded ethernet cable as well

What Ethernet gives you: Absolute reliability, less radiated noise near your music.


Will you hear a difference? I'm not sure. It depends a great deal on your Wi-Fi environment. Like here I'm near 20-30 other Wifi signals all competing for the same bandwidth. That can absolutely have an effect, and my Squeezebox Touch doesn't have 5GHz so it is really not very reliable at all on wifi.


I would say, if possible, use Ethernet to stream to your main devices (TV, audio) and Wifi to get to the not so important places.


There are good apps for your phone and maybe PC that help you see your Wifi neighbors, and pick out less used channels.


Best,

E

It shouldn’t matter. In either case, wireless or Ethernet, you’re sending just data (no real D/A timing involved). Both can produce electrical noise, radiated or coupled, that might affect the sound but it’s hard to tell which one will sound better and I bet you have/use wireless router anyway. I use wireless (Airport Express) and had dropouts on 2.4GHz. I switched to 5GHz and had no dropout since.

Whoa, oh my...I see no gurus when it comes to wireless vs hard wired. I could copy/paste all day why hard wired is better.