Cat 5 - 6 -7 or 8

craig - great stuff craig, thank you!

CAT 6, use the best quality connectors and switches .

Don't go crazy!

curlyhifi - Thanks. I found an old roll of unshielded cat6e at work, is that ok? Ans I see Blue Jean cable sells a cat6a, never heard of the "A" before?

Not sure if anyone is still following this thread but I was about to order some ethernet cables from Blue Jeans and Jeff stated this to me in an email this morning:

"The only thing to avoid is mixing shielded and unshielded"

I emailed back and asked:

I just wanted to clarify something, if I have an unshielded ethernet cable throughout my house, running from room to room from my centralized router. I shouldn’t run a shielded ethernet cable from the same router (or switch) to say my music streamer of my stereo. I should keep everything unshielded?

His answer: "Yes, that is correct"

Now, Jeff didn’t explain why, but some here have suggested running shielded RF cable close to the audio equipment itself.

Can anyone elaborate on this?

craig - maybe you nailed it!