Most Important, Unloved Cable...

Wow.  What a disappointment.  I came on this thread to see what the OP found RE which Ethernet cables worked best for him and for other's suggestions, and instead I mostly had to scroll through 10 pages of "discussion" on whether I should care.

While I await further actual discussion and advice on which Ethernet cables perform better, I do enjoy attempts to explain how things actually work to produce a given outcome or experience, rather than passionate recitals of theory for why they should not.  As usual, I do find @almarg 's comments and explanations useful in this regard, particularly this excerpt from his post on 4/20/2017:

"in a post in this thread dated 3-28-2017 I suggested the following experiment to some of the others:

Tune a portable battery powered AM radio to an unused frequency, with the volume control set at a position that you would normally use. Bring it close to an unshielded ethernet cable on your LAN, while the cable is conducting traffic. You may be surprised at what you hear.

When I do that with the unshielded Cat5e cable I have on the LAN in my house, while the cable is **not** conducting any large amount of traffic, I hear increases in static from the radio when it is as far as 2 feet from the cable. Keep in mind that an AM radio is designed to just be sensitive to a narrow (~10 kHz) range of frequencies in the lower part of the RF region (nowhere close to frequencies corresponding to the bit rate of ethernet traffic, much less to the frequency components that constitute the risetimes and falltimes of the signals), and to have a sensitivity measured in microvolts. And for audio we’re dealing with microvolts as well, but without the benefit of the radio’s narrow band filtering. For digital audio if 2 volts corresponds to full scale the least significant bit of a 16 bit word corresponds to about 30 microvolts. And the least significant bit of a 24 bit word corresponds to about 0.1 microvolts! And perhaps more significantly there are jitter effects that will arise as a result of noise whenever D/A conversion is performed, of course. And this experiment just involves radiation of RFI through the air. Not through what would seem likely to potentially be much more significant unintended pathways for digital noise, such as grounds, other wiring, and parasitic capacitances within the components.

Regards,
-- Al"

This has me me wondering if at least part of the issue with Ethernet cable design execution and performance is to curtail the bad things that unshielded or poorly shielded Ethernet cables may do to other low level signals in nearby analog or other digital cables or their connectors in the vicinity of a shared piece of equipment.  Could it also be that the digital signal in the Ethernet cable could be corrupted in some audible way by interference from high current or high frequency signals in the vicinity of your gear stack to the point that it defeats buffering or operates on the signal at some point downstream to inject noise in digital or analog signals.  This may result from a number of parameters including the quality of other critical cables in use, wireless signals in the area, the physical layout of equipment boxes and the cables behind your gear, and as Al notes the design and behavior of the gear itself with respect to external interference.  All this without even invoking the design trade offs and opportunities for noise generated within the connected circuits themselves, as described by Al.

@shadorne it seems you have taken what I have suggested as multiple possible challenges for signals in cables and reduced them to one challenge.  I suggest there are many.  What if the signal corruption is occurring entirely outside of the piece of electronic gear, via interactions between cables in your set, or cables and conditions in the room?  I think the best one can hope for is that ALL the signal processing occurs within your gear and as close to zero signal processing as possible occurs within your cables.  I respectfully disagree that all potential harm can be only be attributed in every possible Ethernet installation (or other cable application) to poorly designed hardware.  

@azbrd I am going to guess that the OP is not using the high quality Ethernet cable to deliver the last few feet of Internet service, but rather to transfer data locally stored on a server to a DAC or some other limited local data transfer.

The same argument has been leveled against power coming in off the grid and how could a high quality power cable in the last couple of feet “rescue” an already polluted AC source.

All that said, I think this logic misses the mark.  A quality Ethernet cable, or analog interconnect, or power cable keep signals intact and in their appropriate lanes in a cluttered environment around your gear, so you deliver as close to the initial output at the other end of the cable as you can get without picking up or transfering interference from or to other cables or gear in the vicinity.  I have found that the better I tame possible problems related to non conservative signal delivery between equipment, the better and bigger difference I notice in the next upgrade in another part of my system cabling.  YMMV.

jinjuku, yes, of course a digital signal is handled completely differently by the sending and receiving device compared to AC power supplies. The analogy is very broadly drawn here. My point is regardless of the type of signal or how the signal is handled at either end, if something bad happens to it in the wire, or it does something bad to a signal in adjacent wire in your system, it can affect the overall sound coming out of your speakers or headphones.

Your point does argue for better implementation of devices and error correction in data reconstruction - and perhaps why optical toslink should not be the first choice for digital data transfer - but I don’t think your point obviates the need for good cabling. Maybe we agree on that.

dynaquest4, yeah, I guess that is why they use $few a foot power cables in all major recording studios. Or maybe not...

http://shunyata.com/2015/04/01/grant-samuelsen-visits-astoria-studios/

and this, referring to a specific Shunyata power cable:

”The Anaconda Alpha wasted little time in becoming a power-line reference used by major music and film studios, electronics manufacturers, reviewers, music producers and mastering engineers. Studios such as Sony Music (Japan) and Philips (Crest National-US) adopted the Anacondas for reference playback and mastering. World-renowned mastering engineers Doug Sax and James Guthrie also endorse and use the Anaconda Alphas, as do Record Producer Rick Rubin and a host of other industry luminaries.”

I realize this statement is part of a sales pitch, but I was in a relatively low rental rate basement recording studio recently and even they were using high end cables. When it matters, at least some of the folks that are laying down what we are listening to at night want every advantage to get the sound they are after in the final product, and $few a foot wire apparently doesn’t give them what they want.  I tend to agree based on my experience that the right premium cables, power, analog and digital, make a positive difference in my playback systems.  Again, YMMV.

Jinjuku, Yes, sound will come out every time you turn it on.  Very reassuring, I am sure.

dynaquest4, I wasn’t being sarcastic.  I was projecting what I perceived as jinjuku’s (and your?) priorities.  Your most recent post supports that perspective.

As for durability, I can and have made power cables with hardware store parts that would pass current after decades of hard use, but did not sound as good as some more exotic designs.  Your statement is sweeping compared to your specific knowledge of recording engineers intent.

So what do you make of this interview, taken from another thread, in the context of the current discussion?

http://www.davidgilmour.com/press/2005/march/TapeOp_March05.pdf

It is a rather long but good read on a number of levels.

Seems the studio manager and engineers are convinced they hear differences related to different signal, digital (even the most important, unloved one) and power cables, different cable orientations and swear by good power conditioning. They apparently determined this through careful listening and experimentation, and it guided decisions on significant investments by the studio owner.

Here is a short video of the same studio space with the owner.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UqP32CeQuUw

Thanks to @maplegrovemusic and @shadorne for bringing these links to my attention.

kn