[bpcans]

@cpurdy, I live on Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin, which is on located Lake Superior. Just let me know when you plan on stopping by. I’m retired now and my schedule is more flexible these days. If you can’t hear the difference between an Amazon Basics CAT6 Ethernet cable and one that is properly shielded and has good connectors then maybe you should get your hearing checked. I’ve been into high-end audio for over 45yrs, and I’ve heard and seen it all. Unless your a audiologist, an accredited engineer whose designed, built, marketed, and sold, any kind of high-end music recording or playback equipment, or that’s had any experience buying and trying different cables for yourself, I’ll just dismiss your comments as coming from yet another cable denier who has nothing better to do than to troll on the internet.

 

[audiobomber]

Despite there being absolutely zero actual difference in the audio between the $.99 monoprice cable, the $1.99 Amazon Basics cable, the $.37 Alibaba cable, the black one that came for free with some other random device, the $50 Supra CAT8, and the $1000.00 snake oil cable sold by some guy on this thread, here we have the careful and nuanced critique of that $50 cable.

There is a clear and measurable difference between the various categories of ethernet cable; CAT6a, CAT7 and CAT8 allow higher bandwidth than CAT5e or 6 because RFI and EMI are shielded. Your precious 802 standard recognizes this, but 802 standard stops at the "ethernet to USB bridge" input, and certainly contains nothing about digital to analogue conversion. RFI and EMI grunge bouncing around in an ethernet cable matters when it is converted to analogue audio, along with a lot of other factors. That's why there are a bazillion methods for handling and processing audio from a network.

TLDR: you should -- if at all possible -- take advantage of, and enjoy the placebo effect. But speading misleading information is not OK. And profiting from the spread of purposefully misleading information is immoral, unethical, and in most places, illegal.

OH PLEASE! You should report all these audiophile companies for their crimes. LMAO!

 

[cpurdy]

@cpurdy, I live on Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin, which is on located Lake Superior. Just let me know when you plan on stopping by. I’m retired now and my schedule is more flexible these days. If you can’t hear the difference between an Amazon Basics CAT6 Ethernet cable and one that is properly shielded and has good connectors then maybe you should get your hearing checked. I’ve been into high-end audio for over 45yrs, and I’ve heard and seen it all. Unless your a audiologist, an accredited engineer whose designed, built, marketed, and sold, any kind of high-end music recording or playback equipment, or that’s had any experience buying and trying different cables for yourself, I’ll just dismiss your comments as coming from yet another cable denier who has nothing better to do than to troll on the internet.

Ethernet cables don’t carry audio.

Let me repeat that: Ethernet cables don’t carry audio.

If they did, then you might have a point.

 

[bpcans]

Ethernet cables don’t carry audio.

Let me repeat that: Ethernet cables don’t carry audio.

If they did, then you might have a point.

cpurdy, but they do carry RFI and EMI that compromises the music streaming signal before it gets to a DAC. Of course you’ll deny this too because you don’t know what you’re talking about. You obviously have no experience with buying, setting up, or using streaming audio gear. Typing in all capital letters is what children do when they cannot back up their words with experience or expertise. Carry on. You’re absolutely too funny for words. Just like listening to music, you’re nothing more than a short moment of lite entertainment.

 

[bfreedma]

cpurdy, but they do carry RFI and EMI that compromises the music streaming signal before it gets to a DAC. But of course you’ll deny this too because you don’t know what you’re talking about. You obviously have no experience with buying, setting up, or using streaming audio gear. Typing in all capital letters is what children do when they cannot back up their words with experience or expertise. Carry on. You’re absolutely too funny for words. Just like listening to music, you’re nothing more than a slight chuckle to me.

Ignoring for a second the reality that Ethernet cablIng’s built in galvanic isolation prevents RFI and EMI from entering the connected device, please explain how RFI and EMI “compromises the music streaming signal” given that the data is packetized and error corrected before it gets to the DAC.

Since you state you have extensive experience in this, please be specific and detailed in explaining how this would be technically possible considering not only Ethernet’s robust ECC but also the multiple hardware and software buffers that the EMI and RFI would need to traverse within the computer/streamer in parallel with the data before being sent to the DAC.

 

[cpurdy]

cpurdy, but they do carry RFI and EMI that compromises the music streaming signal before it gets to a DAC. Of course you’ll deny this too because you don’t know what you’re talking about. You obviously have no experience with buying, setting up, or using streaming audio gear. Typing in all capital letters is what children do when they cannot back up their words with experience or expertise. Carry on. You’re absolutely too funny for words. Just like listening to music, you’re nothing more than a short moment of light entertainment.

Weird. You and I have a different definition of “all capital letters”, too.

 

[bpcans]

I’ve been listening to music streaming through my headphones with the ENO Ethernet Filter System Ag for some 30 plus hours now, and I’m really beginning to enjoy the smoother more analog sound and the improved instrument separation and dynamics. In two words I’d say that the music sounds more “relaxed” and “natural“. And one of the things that I appreciate most about adding a simple network switch and the ENO is that it was a very easy experiment in sound quality enhancement to try. I’ve done several A/B tests with and without the ENO in the listening chain, and to my ears the music streaming from ROON + Tidal and Qobuz sounds better, which is all that really matters to me.

 

[bluenight]

Facts aren’t biased. That’s the problem with this discussion - one side is based on fact/science and the other is essentially belief/religion/unexplained

No we base this on listening experience. Thats the problem with this discussion one side is baseing this only on reading 802 textbooks. Thats not how you evaluate sound.

 

[daggah]

I've lurked many times on head-fi mostly just reading about headphones, but after reading all 39 pages of this I figured it was time to register and weigh in. Wow. Just. Wow.

First, my background. I've been in the Air Force for almost 18 years doing IT as a server administrator. I've worked in numerous datacenters on three continents and provided IT support on mission critical systems at various classification levels fueling senior leadership decisions on the employment of air power. Never have I seen any sort of high end filtering equipment in use to improve the quality of network connections or improve overall network or system performance in use in any of these datacenters. Never have I heard a single subject matter expert recommend their deployment or configuration in any of these datacenters. In every datacenter I've ever worked in, standard cabling meeting minimum required specifications for networking as defined by the IEEE were used - whether it was needed for a standard unclassified print server or much more advanced servers handling highly classified data.

Coming from that understanding, I believe that the following are completely reasonable assumptions:

None of this "audiophile-grade" network equipment or ethernet cables are in use at any datacenter owned by Google, Amazon, Tidal, or Spotify where streamed music is stored as ones and zeros on their servers. (Such an investment is not cost effective.)

None of this "audiophile-grade" network equipment or ethernet cables are in use at any point in the network infrastructure owned by your internet service providers supplying the ones and zeros that make up streamed music to your playback devices. (Still not cost effective.)

None of the power infrastructure supplying electricity to your playback devices is in any way "audiophile-grade." (Still not cost effective.)

None of the electrical wiring in your house meets any kind of "audiophile-grade" standard. (Again - not cost effective.)

So from these assumptions, IF the scenario that there exists any kind of interference, EMI, RFI, or whatever you want to call it running along your network cables in your home in such a way that the final audio signal you hear in your headphones or speakers is effected, then your "audiophile-grade" cables are responsible for filtering out that interference and that is the difference you hear between "audiophile-grade" cables and regular old Ethernet cables.

If that filtering were indeed possible and necessary, why wouldn't it simply be done at the DAC? Why wouldn't DAC manufacturers simply advertise higher-end equipment with better filtering capabilities?

For that matter, if all this hypothetical interference were effecting the audio signal then it would seem rudimentary to simply record and analyze the analog output of a DAC being fed by "audiophile grade" cables with the analog output of the same DAC being fed by standard cables. If there is a significant measured difference then all of these companies could effectively market and demonstrate that and conclusively end the debate. For good. No (insert banned objective testing methodology) required. Wonder why they haven't gone that route...

 

[daggah]

And one other point. For a couple years of my career, I was an Emissions Security manager. You can search that on Wikipedia for an open source unclassified brief on the concepts. I can't go into full details about what I did because some of the regulations surrounding Emissions Security (EMSEC) and TEMPEST and DoD countermeasures are classified. But the basic idea is that electrical equipment has emanations that, with the right equipment, can be captured and thus the information being processed can be intercepted.

Interestingly enough, it seems to me that if the base ideas used to justify the existence and purchase of this "high end" ethernet cable craziness were true, then those base ideas would interfere with the potential interception of data from an information technology system. The (very real, proven) emanations from electrical equipment would be mixed in with the noise/EMI/RFI that you guys are talking about and make it harder to produce and interpolate the intercepted data.

At no point during any of my training for EMSEC did we ever learn that these electrical emanations also interfere with the data integrity of our systems. We were only taught how to employ various countermeasures (which are actually quite basic, believe it or not) to minimize the risk of sensitive data being compromised.

 

[endless402]

Do your own test instead of complaining ? It’s like any audiophile cable. There will always be a camp that believes in it and there will always be a camp that doesn’t.

this has nothing to do with data transfer.

there are many companies with free trials

 

[daggah]

Do your own test instead of complaining ? It’s like any audiophile cable. There will always be a camp that believes in it and there will always be a camp that doesn’t.

this has nothing to do with data transfer

Data transfer has everything to do with it. In this case, the music is the data being transferred.

 

[endless402]

Data transfer has everything to do with it. In this case, the music is the data being transferred.

it has to do with picking up noise along the path. Either from external or from your router / switch.

they’re powered by cheap switching power supplies and different clocks

 

[audiobomber]

I read about technology and I read audiophile views, then I listen for myself. I suggest you try it. No need for expensive audio cables, try the inexpensive ones I favour from Yauhody, available on Amazon. If you can't hear any difference, then you can continue to disagree. Disagreeing without listening however disqualifies your opinion, speaking as an audiophile.

 

[daggah]

You're almost there. There is noise being picked up along the path. You just have the wrong path.

The real path where this noise exists is the path between your eardrums and your brain, where psychoacoustics are deceiving you into thinking a difference is there where none really exists.

The idea that these "audiophile grade" cables, which, if used, almost certainly only make up less than 1% of the total signal chain from your music provider to your ears, can filter out this unwanted noise, means that effectively a device close to or in your DAC can filter out all of it. And thus the overpriced "audiophile" cables aren't even needed because they could be replaced by filtering equipment placed just before or even IN your DAC.

But then you wouldn't have pretty cables. And without pretty cables, your brain wouldn't be convincing you that you hear a difference that isn't there.