Hi Ben,
The following paragraph from this paper by Steve Nugent of Empirical Audio may be of interest:
1)Noise or crosstalk riding on the signals arriving at the dac component's input couples around the ethernet interface circuit to the dac chip or circuit itself, causing jitter. The amount of noise or crosstalk conceivably could be cable-sensitive.
2)Differences in the cables resulting in different amounts of rfi coupling through the air from the cable to other parts of the system.
Both of these effects, were they to occur to a significant degree, would be highly system and setup dependent, with little or no predictability or consistency from system to system.
IMO.
Best regards,
-- Al
The following paragraph from this paper by Steve Nugent of Empirical Audio may be of interest:
LAN, Ethernet or Wi-Fi wireless network.... The protocol of this network has inherent in it the flow-control and retry mechanisms that enable the optimum audio streaming scenario, as well as having the advantage of avoiding altogether the sometimes troublesome audio software stack of the computer OS. Using networked devices, either wired or wireless can be no different than sending data to a printer. The only concern is getting the data to the device intact. There is no timing information sent or implied. The data is not contiguously streamed at real-time speed as with USB, Firewire or S/PDIF interfaces. It is packetized and sent periodically in high-speed bursts over the network, whenever the network has an "opening". These packets are then collected in a buffer memory at the destination device where they can be clocked out to the D/A using a local low-jitter master clock. The fact that networked data flow incorporates flow-control and retry, and bypasses the computer audio stack makes it the superior method.Given that the timing of the data transfer has no relation to the audio that is ultimately generated, and that there will be no bit errors on a properly functioning link, there are only two ways I can envision that the cable type can impact sonics:
1)Noise or crosstalk riding on the signals arriving at the dac component's input couples around the ethernet interface circuit to the dac chip or circuit itself, causing jitter. The amount of noise or crosstalk conceivably could be cable-sensitive.
2)Differences in the cables resulting in different amounts of rfi coupling through the air from the cable to other parts of the system.
Both of these effects, were they to occur to a significant degree, would be highly system and setup dependent, with little or no predictability or consistency from system to system.
IMO.
Best regards,
-- Al