Interesting.
I am waiting for some Canare L-4E6S cable to make my own balanced set, so essentially like your 4 braids. What is that cable you used?
I’ll have to try it without the shield. What does the shield do anyway, if not reject electrical noise?
I used Neotech SOCT awg24 cables (UP-OCC) which I stripped the plastic from so only cotton sleeves as isolation. Two cables for each signak, and then I used the two + signals on one plane (up/down) and the - signal cables in other plane (left/right) when braiding.
The shield made the sound more dull when I tested with it, but as always I would guess thats system dependent.
Yes offcoarse it dampens the sound. You have just made a cable with four times the capacitance!! Offcoarse that will sound better with the shield disconnected. With shield and even without shield it is a lowpass filter, it’s not related to any ‘noise’. What you are hearing is most propably the filtering effect of the cable.
Are you saying that something like Canare’s star quad cable is inappropriate to HiFi applications.
I don’t believe the higher capacitance is an issue in the short runs typical in home systems.
How would removing the shield relate to the higher capacitance.
I see that @magnus cables used a french braid. Was the shield braided in that way, instead of in foil? Maybe that was the problem?
Not necessarily disagreeing with you. I’m building some star quad balanced cables, for their noise rejection, to run from my upstairs pre-amp to my down cellar amps.
Umm…no. That would be incorrect. Ignore ASR and DAC measurements…
I made the cables from ground up, using bare copper OCC solid wires, cotton sleeves and braided them myself, then soldered into XLR plugs. 2 wires for + and 2 for -. Cost was about $70
A shield will remove some noise, but it also removes some sparkle and liveliness of the sound, so at least in my system non-shielded sounds best.
Thanks for the great explanation as this was driving me crazy. I have recently purchased a Stack Audio Link II transport and compared sound quality between roon, LMS and uPnP servers and to my ears both LMS and uPnP sound much better than roon, as in sound is indeed more open, fluid and natural, it really has a much better flow.
The differences between LMS and uPnP are quite minimal and I can’t hear any differences between different uPnP servers (currently using Asset uPnP, but I have also tested Minimserver, Audirvana and JRiver, they all sound the same to me), however in comparison, roon is way off from all above.
I am running all servers on the same PC running Windows 10 64bit, with an i7-8700 processor and 32GB RAM and streaming through Ethernet to my Link II transport. There are no DSPs or sound processing of any kind in use on any of the servers and I am always playing the same files.
Of course most people said I was crazy and differences are only in my head, but I know what I hear and this was quite annoying as in theory there should be no differences between servers when everything else is the same, but it makes sense to me now and I can live with this explanation. Of course, I will miss roon’s great interface, especially when it comes to Qobuz streaming as there is nothing else that comes near, but in the end it’s the sound quality that matters most 
Roon:
Asset uPnP & Hi-Fi Cast:
LMS & Squeezer:
Why cant you use your end point using uPnP instead of RAAT. This should be in settings of any endpoint.
I decided to test Squeezelite Vs Roonbridge RAAT on my Pi4 with Ropieee the other day, I believe the Stack uses it now as its OS. Noticed zero difference feeding it to my DAC and headphones (SMSL SU9, Meze 99 Classics). So perhaps the server does make some differences but I have never noticed any when comparing UPnP Vs RAAT on my Naim Atom and they used different servers.
I am using now Asset uPnP and LMS as servers a they are sounding better to my ears and are also more flexible than roon (I have the possibility to create menus using any custom TAG, and I have lots of those in my files ) so no need to continue fiddling with roon anymore.
I just installed LMS not used it for a long time. Playing via LMS to Ropieees Squeezelite player and yes there is a difference between playing same material via Roon to the same endpoint via RAAT. It’s not night and day but I would say Squeezelite seems lighter than Roon, less bass weight and a bit more in the treble. Which you prefer I guess is up to the listener.
