Watch out for the pitchforks too! 
To be fair, some of the ‘snake-oil’ ethernet cables do have some pretty sexy looking connectors.
If you’re fancy a bit of audio jewellery, then knock yourself out:
A bit of expandable braided sleeving and some adhesive-lined heatshrink, and you have a cable with aesthetics to rival the Audioquest Vodka
Filled with purified hot air!
Yep
“Air heads” perhaps
For the sheep, yes but the shepherds I’m not so sure.
But then there are the sheep who think of themselves as shepherds…
1 Like
Personally, I think hemp string is audibly superior to optical fibre. I recommend it highly!
1 Like
This is up there with crystals.
TCP/IP deals with error correction of data that is being transferred. Its no different to streaming video or copying documents over a network. Yes you can get corrupted data but its extremely obvious when you receive corrupted data. There is no difference in the resulting data between a file copied using cat5 or cat XYZ. The only difference is speed of transmission.
If this logic was true then every piece of data everywhere wouldnt be a true copy and we’d have all sorts of issues. Piracy wouldnt be a thing if we couldnt make perfect copies.
2 Likes
Did you ever try to watch a cam recording of a major new movie release? Sometimes perfection is not the goal.
Other than the above little quibble, I completely agree with you.
2 Likes
I have nearly 400m of fibre in my place!
Mine is all high-bandwidth backbone and trunk link between switches… Transmits ‘music’ data really well 
1 Like
Yeah, I wondered why some random guy appeared and then walked across my TV screen… 
1 Like
I find the whole idea of spending obscene sums of money in the digital domain just ludicrous. Audiophile ethernet cables, audiophile switches, fibre media converters, USB cables, coaxial cables - it’s nonsense. I spent a couple of hours after work today ‘salvaging’ an ethernet transformer from an old switch to break a ground loop on a S/PDIF coax. It worked a treat, but if you believed the snake-oil claims around digital, it should have sounded ‘veiled’, lacking in dynamics, with a narrow soundstage, or worse, I should have gotten no sound at all from it! As it happens, it sounded exactly the same, minus the ground-loop noise…
8 Likes
Since most topics on this community that try to dispel one of the many audiophile myths out there seem to quickly devolve to a pretty much useless back and forth, I don’t see the harm in going off topic with some humor instead.
Not to worry another attempt at myth busting will return shortly!
2 Likes
Out of interest. What constitutes an obscene amount of money for you in the digital domain?
Anything more than the minimum which allows the bits to get from one place to another unchanged.
That’s the beauty of digital - it’s Boolean. True/false, Hi/Lo, 1/0…
It has become the most snake-oil riddled part of music reproduction.
3 Likes
Incidentally, I read an interesting post on another forum last night by an engineer who installs multi-channel AoIP systems for stage and broadcasting - up to hundreds of channels of 24bit/192kHz. His closing comment was - ‘if ethernet cables made any difference, trust me, we’d know about it’
I dont doubt that. I have bad experience with different switches in my house, just breaking after 2 years, after guarantee. I search for reliable, longer than 2 years lasting switches.
With switches, for longevity and reliability, you want SOHO (small office/home office) grade as a minimum or enterprise grade. You can buy top flight enterprise grade switches relatively inexpensively used or refurbished from eBay. A word of warning though - they’re noisier. They have cooling fans to keep them at safe operating temperatures in order to maintain lifespan/reliability. So they need to be located somewhere that’s not near your hi-fi. I have two big enterprise switches at home - one in the house and one out in the office in the garden. 10Gbit fibre capable (4 ports on one and 2 on the other) and each also has 48 X Gbit/Gbit PoE ports. Neither cost me a couple of beers more than £200. My first one has been running solidly for >18,000 hours without so much as a hiccup. Brands such as Cisco, Dell, Juniper are solid and reliable - they have millions of switches running in datacentres all over the world.
1 Like
“, I read an interesting post on another forum last night by an engineer who …”
- now that’s really cool
, having people who know their stuff make such clear statements. Would you have a link to the article (highly appreciated, thx!)?
BTW, I very much recommend the posts from “Dr. AIX” Mark Waldrep, same story and clear statements!
1 Like
Thanks. This helps.
1 Like