Cat 8 Ethernet Cables?

Sonnie, I did try some low priced Cat 8s over Cat 7 Audioquest Cinnamons and the was no difference to my ears. I choose the Cinnamons over the Cat 8s. Finally I did settle for Cat 7 Audioquest Diamond. I think it is more the material they´re made of what makes the difference. Cheers

Thanks for the recommendation Sebastian.

I use some Audioquest HDMI in my setup, albeit the lesser priced model.

Regards,
Sonnie

In your hi-res audio digital audio setup the weakest point is the slowest chain, that has the worst latency…
I would recommend to store your music on local harddisks/SSD and not on NAS storage connected over ethernet
Because ethernet has a very bad latency

It’s better to install Roon directly on your NAS, so from the point of view of Roon now the music is stored directly DAS = Directly Atached Storage)
this will benefit a lot, also when browsing through your music collecting, from this you can use ethernet over Cat 6 or 7 cables, and you also need a fast switch! otherwise the cables are overkill… to connect to your Roon endpoint which is connected to your DAC

It is a guy thing. Sort of like making sure your guitar amp goes to 11.

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Yes, I get it :joy:

Correction: Not needed in ANY system. Not even Enterprise uses this garbage.

Anything above CAT6e is pointless. They are a solution looking for a problem. They don’t get your any extra distance or speed for Ethernet. Past CAT6e, fibre interconnects are way cheaper and can go longer distances and do much higher bandwidth. It’s just the copper companies pandering to the “bigger number is better” folks that don’t actually do any research to find out the cable offers zero advantage over what they already have.

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Even if it sounds better.

Presumably this would involve listening to it before dismissing it?

If anything, it will sounds WORSE, since people at home don’t know how to properly ground the shielding for these cables.

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Reminds me strongly of the earlier discussions about speaker cables…

There the signal was transmitted analog and had a big influence on the sound quality. An Ethernet cable transmits digital signals via the IP protocol. If the connections on layer 1 to 3 are clean, there are no problems with the transmission of digital audio signals. Even with old unshielded Category 3 cables, 10 Mbps can be transmitted without any problems. Category 6 or higher are designed for bandwidths of 2.5 Gbps and higher. I use older cabling in my house with a category 6 cable. Even 10 Gbps works without any problem.

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I use CAT8 but the difference with my previous CAT7 are minor.
The switch to the JCAT femto network card was a bigger step.

I believe that UTP/STP cables have no influence in the digital domain when used correctly within specifications.
However, in the analog domain they can have influence, causing distortion etc.
There is no such thing as digital audio*, there is only digital transport of audio information.
At the end of the digital transport a DAC is used to transform the digital information to an analog signal.
How the DAC converts the digital information to analogue will have influence on the analogue information, that is amplified by an analogue chain of devices/circuits.
In the end a mechanical device will transform the analogue electrical information to a mechanical analogue motion making waves.

My view on the subject is that there is no way the digital domain is causing audible differences if all is within spec.
On the analogue part there is a lot that can go wrong or right influencing the audible outcome we know as music or noise or whatever is coming out of the speakers.

My two kronor (we do not have cents).

  • i can apply a 1 and 0 signal to my speakers but the result is not what we are after. This principle is used to reproduce sound/audio and functions, but SQ is low.
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Yep, Supra CAT 8 and very satisfied. Immediate improvement.

Of course.

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The short answer, yes .
I started with cat5, but shifted to cat 8 because of fall out when playing hd tracks. And not only did the fall out stop, but the music just sounded better. But then again , I guess it all depends on how noisy [ethernet noise] your environment is

Interesting… we’ve gone from they do more harm than good to immediate improvements.

lol… I guess the only reason to ask these kinds of questions is to get fifty-eleven different conflicting replies… and a little bit of “I can’t help myself” sarcasm from a few who belittle others.

Charming to say the least.

In summary… if you want you can try it, and if it works and you like it, use it. If it blows up your system, burns your house down, or causes a divorce, might be best not to continue using it.

Regards,
Sonnie

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Music data moves around at way less than 100mb/s so cat8’s speed capacity will have zero bearing on sound quality. Cat8 plugs have double the bandwidth of cat6 plugs in their pcb board. I have made cable using both telegartner cat8.1 and cat 6 using a 4 wire 100mb/a solid core pure upocc silver cable architecture, the 8s bring a noticeable increase in stage depth over the 6. This is clearly audible and doesn’t not require a-b’ing and we have blind tested with a panel of 5 listeners all of whom picked the cat8 terminated cable as better most siting staging, inproved layer separation… I await my lynching for mentioning such heresy :wink: but I’m also happy to lend said cables to anyone UK to put my claims to the test in their system.

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Don’t forget that the analogue signal only goes from the speaker to our ears. After that it’s converted back into an electrical signal so that our brain can decipher it. :slightly_smiling_face:

The brain is an interpretation machine able and willing to fill in blanks, alter or replace truth.

*** Wrote this on the trigger words “brain” and “deceipher” in a comment.

Yes, but how is that relevant to my comment?

The process of hearing and especially about hearing or deciphering differences in eg. CATX cables is very unreliable.

Brains fills inn blanks, expectations and what not to get the desired result, even if everything only occurs in the digital domain and has no effect on the analog outcome.

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