No one said shielding is irrelevant. In fact its very relevant.Just one last question on this: if shielding is irrelevant, what makes the difference between say CAT5 and CAT8? What makes up for that massive bandwidth increase? Number of wires and copper conductors look pretty much the same to me.
Actually I was mistaken, looking at the specs, cat7 and cat8 include shielding as part of the spec. Anything below cat7, shielding is not part of the spec. Makes sense since they operate at higher frequencies. The cat7 &8 cables are probably either emitting emf and/or more susceptible to interference due to the higher operating frequencies.
As I mentioned, if you have just one port that is not multigig in the network chain, everything will be reduced to the slowest port speed.
I've never built cat8 cables so I'm not sure what the physical differences are.
If you want a yield in sound improvement, better off getting a cable with better connectors, conductors and shielding.
Preferrably something with shielded connectors like this.