each time there’s a shielded cable, the sound is rough, stage height tanks, treble splashes, just a disaster.
OK, that is what you hear, and I can respect that. You’ve already determined that shielded ethernet cables are not for you. I’m cool with that. To each his own.
My 3 TV ethernet runs are under 75’, and during their travels to and from, run next to AC power cables, of which I don’t criss-cross at 90 degree angles (which I’ve never done). That is the main reason I went with Cat 8 for those runs (earth grounding on one end only). I’m also used to working in high RF radio station environments, so cable shielding comes naturally to me, and I already know the benefits of it. In the case of my shielded TV Cat 8 runs, I’m more concerned with packet losses, as compared to sound quality. So in my case, I can’t offer much of an opinion when it comes to sound quality involving those long shielded runs.
In the case of my audioquest 3’ Pearl ethernet cable; that has a very short run from the AT&T fiber optical modem/router to my desktop 3’ away. I understand that now to be a Cat 7 cable. I don’t even know if the shield is earth grounded at the component level, so I can’t really put up an argument there either. I do know (which I’ve already mentioned ad nauseam) that upgrading it, made an audio improvement (when streaming) over the standard patch cable I was using.
In the radio station environment these days, studios are now being connected via AoIP (as compared to balanced analog years ago), and many times use shielded ethernet cables to do that. I’m not sure this would be done if using shielded ethernet cables degraded sound quality (but heh, that’s radio, and I’m not sure radio stations are concerned about high quality audio these days).