Most Important, Unloved Cable...

I'll bring some assorted hardware that we can play around with or not. 

Wadia has its own driver uploaded to my PC/Microsoft lap top (HP).

I run Roon and stream Tidal. My laptop actually sits mostly on my lap, so music and internet can be together. I do have an android laptop that controls Roon also if we want to check out some 1M Ethernet.and put the laptop n the equipment rack. Lastly, I put the PC soundcard in 24/96 output as native Tidal at  seems rather blah to me.
/
I had to replace a defective power supply for the right channel in the preamp today. Just one of those little things that don't bother me as said in La Fem Nakita, but the original movie upon which the TV series was based.

@knownothing 

Absolutely agree with you that there are many possible sources of contamination of the audio signal. Designers need to worry about and test for a variety of configurations to ensure noise or any form of contamination/distortion never reaches the analog. 

If noise or anything extraneous detrimentally affects the analog audio signal then the design has failed to deliver the highest fidelity.

@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.  

W: 

What is the player software you are using? What platform Win/Mac?

Thanks,
Mark

J: A Computer/DAC combo. Bring along a streamer if you would like. Bill

@knownothing

Yes of course any differences with digital ethernet cables might be related to a failure of the audio component to screen out interference. It doesn’t really matter how the exact source of contamination or corruption of the audio signal occurs. It is simply a fact that the audio component is inadequately designed as designers should test and anticipate extraneous noise sources from cabling that they typically expect to be used. So the equipment is faulty.

90% of "Einstein quotes" he never actually said, maybe especially the one quoted. The reason I say that is because it wouldn’t make sense to have the sign wrong in his famous equation since the equation represented the equivalency of mass and energy. It would be analogous to saying I got the sign wrong for the expression,

a box of rocks = fire

and wrote,

a box of rocks = - fire

It’s still the same idea.

Also, I probably wouldn’t call electrons that move at the snail’s pace of 1 cm/hour "flowing." Nor would I say they were "emerging" from anywhere. They are already there.

Carry on. Smoke if ya got em.

It’s an odd statement but it is true: ’the ground is the source’.

electronics design textbooks used to (and might still have) two different versions. At least in my time they did. The classical version of calculations..... and the electron flow version. Classic electrical flow in calculations comes from Benjamin Franklin’s works, and he got it exactly backward, regarding what the ’electrons’* are actually doing.

The electron flow version has the electron flow emergent from the ground point.

This tends to illustrate the problem with conceptual and reasoning issues on these heated subjects.

in other news (a little bit of an eye opener)...
when Einstein said ’I could have got the sign wrong’, regarding his famous equation, it is taken in stride as the math works..forward..or backward. No biggie, right? Not So Fast......as his equations are terminated/anchored in unknown infinities, which means infinity’s application may be, in some ways opposite/misplaced...compared to what people think it is. We still wrestle with gravity and time, trapped in infinities of a sort. Perhaps these concepts have been put on totally backward. This would lean to proposing that gravity and time are merely emergent artifacts of present components in interaction.

*Nobody knows what an electron is. No one. It’s a descriptor, a placeholder, nothing more. apparently, everything may well turn out to be built out of electrons...-these things we do not know what they are and can only incidentally describe some artifacts of Newtonian mass interactions. Yes, it’s still turtles all the way down. All you have to do is look at the underlying data you work with, look at it’s origins and meanings and the turtles are very much there and alive. Three-quarters the way through 2017 and that part has not changed one inch. Whatever an inch is, as we don’t really have an anchor for that, either.

All of modern scientific thinking is based on someone ascribing meaning to one point. Or it is at least possible to investigate it and come to that conclusion, in this given unfolding. Descartes saying ’I think, therefore I am’. Sometimes I think that Descartes was an idiot for that one. He is not the problem. The slightly but very importantly misguided scientific mindset that arose from the torch bearing of his statement..~that~ is the problem. All the lesser minds who collectively and over time...decided that all that came before was inviolate and built out of laws. What insanity. What foolishness. The monkey origin as carrier brings it’s instincts and unconsciousness to bear on it’s logic... turns it into doctrine... and makes a mess out of it.

Al's argument would be for not using copper based RJE of all UTP stripes however. 

It doesn't paint a picture for one really expensive, $233 a foot in my case, shielded cable vs $0.90 per foot shielded 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.

Are you using a purpose built streamer or a computer / DAC combination?

If it's a streamer what is it?

Right. T Ramey just wants to throw in the Supra 8, But I do agree that is a "post" evaluation listening. I would like to have a 5 meter Audioquest Vodka to try as I believe this cable is a good representation of the quality of better cables.  But certainly 4 or 5 would be the max as at least I am not doing this as a critical evaluation as much as a personal learning experience. Bill

While I can accommodate any number of cables (actually up to 7) with my switch (I also have 48 port switches with L3) by expanding the LAG group to additional ports I would like to not open this up to a bunch of cables unless wgutz feels that it won’t be a detriment to bias controlled evaluation.

I'm also going to bring some bulk cable and can terminate it on the spot.

Well t_ramey, why don't you send one out to me. As far as I know, we are comparing the Blue Jeans 6A to my home terminated Western Electric 6A, which I like slightly better, even if it did cost me 10X+. 

Jinjuku thinks all similar capacity cables sound the same by a sort of definition of how Ethernet works. 

You guys gonna have any fancy high dollar ethernet cables on the list for the challenge? Or how about a cheaper Supra cat 8?

It is all good, my setup is simple. I'm sending my cable to Blue Jeans to make sure it meets the 6A standard. Not sure if 15 seconds is long enough to figure much out, so perhaps we can do some full tracks too. You want to know the cables are equals in potential performance and this way we can know. Bill

To be clear I'm proposing Source<>Switch<>Client 

That would be like: Tidal<>Router<>Client

Can you give me the current topology of your networked audio?

The reasons for the switch. For one I’m taking a page out of a setup where there is Router<>Switch<>Switch<> Endpoint.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/174991-increasing-the-sound-quality-of-your-music-by-switching...

The Cisco is going to allow me or even one of your friends to swap out just at the endpoint device to minimize error.

Let me firm up my schedule and how much time would you need playing around with this prior to evaluating blind?

I can suggest two methods:

If your player has enough buffer just queue up tracks and the cable can be changed/unchanged(that is same cable removed and plugged back in) out at a random interval.

Or

Setup a looping track or a snippet of a track with a 15 second interval track between and the possible swap would happen then.

Please provide a specific day and time as I would like to invite a few of my friends. I feel a simpler approach is to plug in each of the CAT wires directly and thereby avoid any issues of additional elements, such as the wire from the source to the switch.

Would it be presumptuous of us to expect an apology from jujitsu after his little get together?

Geoff,

Exactly what would I be apologizing for? To date I've at the least used everyone's handle here.

WGutz,

I would like to see if the 3rd weekend in October will work for you 

My plan would be using Rene van Es's exemplar setup when he did a deep dive into the audibility of CAT cabling. I will simplify with a Cisco Switch that takes one input and has two outputs. With the LAG configuration the switch provides a faux MAC address that maps to the ports that are outbound to your Streamer/Computer/Endpoint. 

This will allow the cable to be switched at the Streamer/Computer/Endpoint with out causing an issue from the perspective of the source. 

@geoffkait

I don’t recall ever seeing you apologize. And you probably hold the record on audiogon for belittling folks and calling them sarcastic names. Your standard tactic being to insult the person rather than address the points in a discussion.

So I am not sure why you of all people should be affronted and feel you are deserving of an apology for your wee hurt little feelings 😰😰😰

And I suspect you presume too much that you actually speak for "us" - being I suppose all your wee brothers and disciples here on the Gon...

Would it be presumptuous of us to expect an apology from jujitsu after his little get together? 😛

I only trust what I perceive and hear. If one has been around audio for awhile, you have likely bought, or at least tried, some gear that had amazing specs only to find it sounds like crap. As such, I have very little interest in techno measurements,

Consider that it is a compliment to Blue Jeans that they can make a tested, spec provided  6A Ethernet cable for less than one-tenth of what it costs me to obtain a 2% improvement. I have spent a whole lot more for a 1% improvement. Why? Because if you can get a few percent here and there over a period of years it is a combined 20+% improvement.

As many audiophiles know, improvements in your sound are on a steep exponential cost curve, especially when you have already invested the time and money to have a solid "base" of equipment making excellent sound already. And sometimes this means going in a direction that others consider to be backwards in the areas of technology, cost, design, power, etc.

So, yes, to me a 2% improvement is a "world of difference" because it was an expensive, time consuming and perhaps fun battle to achieve. More importantly, It is more enjoyable to listen,  Is there better sounding equipment than mine? Definitely. But the goal we share is to improve our system within each of our own constraints of time, money, desire, wife acceptance (if applicable), hearing and basic reality.

My associates at work occasionally ask as to what kind of music do I listen. The only answer I have been able to pull together as an honest response is that I look for what is "musical.."  And that defies all the genre categories.

So, enjoy the music and fiddle with your sound quality as you feel is most appropriate. 

willemj, you mentioned on some thread here you had a second system in your study. Can I suggest you might have been better off if you had not listened to quite so much music there and had used that particular room for the purpose it was intended? You might consider adding Little Miss Manners to the library in your study.

Good of you to do this Jinjuku. I have had enough of the abusive spoonbenders and alternative facts here.
I saw your video, and it was fun if it wasn't so distressing to see the dishonesty. Is there a portal or something where I can find all your videos?

@geoffkait 

Glad you are happy and had a good laugh. Life is too short to get worked up over things like this and we can all use a good laugh 😆

I can disagree with people as much as much as anyone but I still respect everyone and their right to hold on dearly to what are often opposing viewpoints!

As I have stated, I do believe some are finding audible differences. I only disagree about the root causes of those differences.

I think I am done with this discussion.  And I will go to bed tonight glad that I am on the right (scientific/common sense) side of this issue.  And I'll wake up in the morning to enjoy another day with my music...knowing that I haven't been scammed into wasting money on useless accessories that accomplish nothing more than making me think that I am cooler than Joe Schmoe because my stereo cables are fat, frozen, battery powered, elevated and shiney.  So funny.

Don't bother, Geoff, I sorta know what you will say.

shadorne wrote,

"My setup isn’t affected audibly by cables but I believe others have encountered this phenomenon."

Too funny!! 😀 That deserves the Laughing Goat Award for the funniest post of the week. 🐐

Cool. I hope you can meet up and above all keep things friendly.

Kudos to wgutz for being willing to try. I know my setup isn’t affected audibly by cables or even an audio bridge but I believe others have encountered this phenomenon. So I believe some gear can benefit.

Jujitsu wrote,

"Have me out and I’ll help you regurgitate them if it already isn’t terminal :-)"

Good comeback. Cough, cough. By the way, congrats on the almost complete sentence. 😛

So we went from:

And cables, including Ethernet (Cat 5, 6, 7 & 8), make a world of difference.

to

3rd, I have two five meter 6A cables. One from Blue Jeans and one home made (with my friends). from Western Electric specialty made ethernet that we subsequently cryo-treated. The Siemens connectors, each end, cost twice as much as the full spec Blue Jeans cable. And I would say the improvement is not "obvious" but more like a 2% improvement

btw thanks for the invite but my RMAF is already booked and I'll be out at another forum members house on Saturday. 

Sunday I fly out from Denver to SLC to visit another friend and then back home Tuesday. Let me look for when I am heading out for Phoenix. I could finish up there, then one way to Denver, then one way back home. 

1st, Jinjuku, please do come to my home in Denver while you are attending the Audiofest in Denver coming up in October. I live in north Denver.

2nd, I am not a gambler, especially since I now make less than I once paid in taxes.

3rd, I have two five meter 6A cables. One from Blue Jeans and one home made (with my friends). from Western Electric specialty made  ethernet that we subsequently cryo-treated. The Siemens connectors, each end, cost twice as much as the full spec Blue Jeans cable. And I would say the improvement is not "obvious" but more like a 2% improvement. So yes, a 2% improvement for 10+X the money may not be a financially balanced investment, but then better audio never made that claim.

4th, I run Teo, Audioquest Sky & Cheetah to my fully custom tube based pre-amp and amp. Disruptor USB from my laptop back to my Wadia DAC. I make minor changes to my equipment monthly. This month was gold pin tube sockets for the pre-amp tubes (just as an example). Last month was single resistor ladder separate mono volume controls, the 6th set of pots in my pre-amp.

5th, Al Stiefel, who started Audiofest, was my mentor taught me a bit about high end audio.

So, come on out and we can decide together if there are sound improvements in Ethernet.

I don’t know anything about yellow paint but can I suggest someone has been sneaking from the bottle of stupid pills? 💊

Did someone forget to put out the Roach Motels last night?

I don't now about the Roach Motels, but the can of yellow paint has been clearly opened and copiously used.

Did someone forget to put out the Roach Motels last night? 

jinjukuI’m telling you it’s 100% delusion regardless of listener or system when I have two same constructed, both pass spec, Ethernet cables

Yes, we get it, you've made that point a few times here.

I’ll do this in your own system with the same class cable ...

No, you won't. My house isn't child-proof, so you wouldn't be safe here.

The next to last comment on the 1st page of this discussion by Milpai is the straightforward truth. Just because you or your equipment can’t hear the difference in quality cables doesn’t mean the difference doesn’t exist for others. I’ve had systems in my home from peanuts to $100K+, And cables, including Ethernet (Cat 5, 6, 7 & 8), make a world of difference. In fact, I don’t ever remember when changing a cable didn’t either improve or degrade what I experienced in my not so humble opinion.

And I know how Ethernet works. I’m telling you it’s 100% delusion regardless of listener or system when I have two same constructed, both pass spec, Ethernet cables.

I’ll do this in your own system with the same class cable, equivalent construction, and 300% longer than the current esoteric patch cable you are using.

We'll post the session on YT. 

@wgutz   

Clearly you can hear differences in all manner of cables in various systems and cannot remember not actually hearing a difference when changing any cable.

So when is the session with Jinjuku to be held to prove your point?

Or when pressed do you only have excuses why it can't be done?

The way you described things - a test with Jinjuku should be a walk in the park for you as you can hear differences with any cable...

+1, @wgutz

The next to last comment on the 1st page of this discussion by Milpai is the straightforward truth. Just because you or your equipment can't hear the difference in quality cables doesn't mean the difference doesn't exist for others. I've had systems in my home from peanuts to $100K+, And cables, including Ethernet (Cat 5, 6, 7 & 8), make a world of difference. In fact, I don't ever remember when changing a cable didn't either improve or degrade what I experienced in my not so humble opinion.

The trouble with pseudo skeptics is they’re not equipped to deal with reality. It’s all about attention, you know, like the YouTube video currently under discussion.

I'm willing to deal with the reality of showing the community at large, via a YT video, on your own setup you crashing and burning.

Whatever your current RJE is, I'll make one 300% longer, same construction (shield etc). Put it on Periscope in real time. 

Let's see how well you deal with reality. 

Everyone understands here how music is being streamed off Ethernet and played back.

That’s news to me.

I have a simple question:

When you are playing back music and the Ethernet cable is disconnected and you still hear music. What happens to the SQ?

When you are playing back music and the Ethernet cable is disconnected and it’s going to play for ~ another 30 seconds and I place a different Ethernet cable back in what happens at the point I plug it back in and what happens at the point the Application calls on the OS to prefetch?

You are a computer audio luddite.