Cat 5 - 6 -7 or 8

Thanks all, one more question: Does the cable need to be shielded through the entire house or is it just the shorter that runs from the wall outlet to the router, switch, audio equipment, etc?

All joking aside, I heard 6 is the ticket, although I can’t say why? Just heard.

erik_squires - Hey Erik, "Whatever works for your length and bandwidth, but I recommend shielded near the gear. 1 GigE is plenty of bandwidth for audio"

Whatever all that means (to techie for me) ya gtta link?

OK, thanks all, cat6 it is!

craig - great stuff craig, thank you!

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!