Questions about Ethernet Cabling

I work for Broadcom as a senior software engineer and deal with this stuff almost daily.

As long as your ethernet wire is rated for the correct bit rate and length, and you do not live in an extremely noisy (electrically) environment like a factory floor, there is ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT in spending any more on exaggerated and false claims on audiophile data wires.

If you can use fiber optic, even better. But the standard cat5, cat6 or higher wires are also perfectly fine too.

@cakyol You are are not answering my question about analog noise. I am a Senior Software Eng with 30 years of exp too and that does not give me any extra insight into this question. An Electrical Engineer or Scientist should know more about the technical reasons.

I am going by hands on experience where Fibre optical cable was way better than Ethernet, with everything else being the same in my system Now some of that difference could be due to the improvement of the insides of my OpticalRendu vs the microRendu. That is why someone with an Lumin X1 is really the best person to answer this question from a hands on experience perspective They have both the RJ45 and SFP inputs on their DAC.

Your comment about Ethernet vs Fibre being realatively the same could be true in a network that is not very nosiy. My reading on noise leads me to believe that power supplies connected to network devices such as swtiches, routers, DACs. streamers, etc.. add noise. Esepecially switch mode power supplies. A computer connected to a network adds noise. I have about 10 computers in my home office and a PowerLine network too. That must make for some noisy Ethernet wires if what I am reading is true.

In my assumed very noisy network adding the Fibre was a tramsformational change. The Ethernet streaming with the microRendu was good but the Fibre was incredible. I still use a crappy computer to run my ROON CORE as ROON suggests.

@yyzsantabarbara 

"I still use a crappy computer to run my ROON CORE as ROON suggests."

I did that too and finally got a Roon nucleus & a Sbooster PSU. That worked.

In its simplest explanation, analog noise does not matter in digital modulation techniques. They are mostly filtered out simply by the clever modulation methods. All the system needs to do is be able to distinguish between a one and a zero. It is worse in wifi (read about 256 or 1024 QAM). Furthermore, error correction techniques like Viterbi decoding and convolıtional codes take care of most errors without even you knowing about it.

There is obviously a limit. If you detonate a nuclear device, the EMP pulse cannot be filtered out but in 99% of homes and even noisy factories, this is not the case 😄. 

@cakyol I understand the 1 and 0’s in streaming, inclduing wifi. The issue I raise is the power supplies and other noisy elements that people say (I am a believer) add noise to an Ethernet network and that noise propagates up to the network connected DAC. If you think this is not an important issue then your statement need no further explanation.

If the Ethernet noise issue I raise is real then the idea of using a noise optimized music server (such as the ROON Nucleus mentioned above), EtherRegen, audiophile switches, and other noise limiting gear makes sense. My question is why not use fibre at the last point before the DAC and not worry about the noise before the fibre.

When one asks why fibre works you can also question other aspects of the network that maybe trying to do the same thing as fibre.

@yyzsantabarbara,

I acknowledge your concern regarding power supplies but 99% of network switches and bridges use a walwart as a power supply which is pretty far away from where the analog circuits are (usually). The noise transmitted is at worst negligible, at best undetectable.. unless you place your DAC converters right next to the PSU, which most of time is not the case.

And obviously, if fibre is available, it is best to use it in the entirety of the connections if possible to do so.