Ethernet Cables

SotM Ethernet cable. Destroyed an AQ Diamond between my MSB Signature Transport and DAC

Sablon is very good in my experience, superior to other more well known brands, low noise floor. It’s only possible issue is it’s extremely stiff.

@lxgreen I read the Nordost paper and it is absolute jibberish. At no point do they mention even one quantitative measure or threshold of impact of any cable characteristic - impedance, capacitance, inductance RF sensitivity or any other measure. Nor do they discuss the fact that TCP/IP and USB are asynchronous protocols immune to timing issues. Or that TCP/IP has bit error correction so that any corrupt or dropped packet is retransmitted. They fail to mention perhaps the most salient point of all: 100% of streaming services are buffered by the receiver and played back out of the buffer after CRC checksums and packet order is assured.  Audio is a very light network load - a few hundred Kbits/sec to a few Megabits/Sec. All the packet buffering, error correction, and re-ordering is happening at 100 or 1000 Mbits/sec - at least 10X faster than the streaming service can throw it at you. So, yes it all happens in realtime and at line speed, and your network, wired or wireless is not breaking a sweat.

And if there is noise, RF (EMI) or whatever, like one might have in an industrial environment, shielding can help, and foil and braided shielding can help a lot,  but ONLY if a proper grounding scheme is implemented, and only if there's noise in the environment in the first place. Pro Tip: Plug&Play is not a proper grounding scheme. And if your line in is carrying RF, the only way to get rid of it is with an optical isolator (not an Ethernet surge suppressor), not a $500 cable.

"If the ethernet cable in your house negate any benefit from the Supra or ViaBlue cables, then all the people that assert that one cable or another makes the music sound better, are wrong. It also brings into question the whole aftermarket power cables industry."

Yes, yes it does...

 

@panzrwagn Well said.

Ethernet is not a waveform, and it cares not what type of copper it’s sent over; if it shows up intact, that is the best you will get. So it’s pointless to buy expensive ethernet cables if you hear a difference is purely confirmation bias.

 

If you want to know how many hops your data takes before it gets to your player, run a Trace Route C:\tracert Qobuz.com (or whatever your service) That data has traveled thousands of miles and run over MANY different networks before arriving at your home. Saying you can hear a difference between a 1' or 100' CAT5\6\7\8 cable is pure confirmation bias. You spent loads of money on it; you can listen to the difference by golly. That is not how ethernet works.