Hello,
Does the length of an Ethernet cable that connects the Roon Server to the broadband home router affect the sound quality?
I am thinking to install the Roon SW on a NAS that is roughly 40 meters away from the home router.
Thank you.
It doesnāt. End of.
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CAT 6a ethernet cable can carry ethernet signals up to 10Gbps for up to 100m.
If you exceed this length, then you may get packet loss - which will cause occaisional re-transmission and could start interfering with the audio if it was bad enough.
Up to 100m should be perfectly OK.
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CAT 5e or CAT6 can carry 1Gbps ethernet up to 100m.
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Itās data at this stage, not audio. The only way sound quality may be affected is if the packet loss is so bad you get dropouts. Stick to the specifications and everything will be peachy.
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Affect the SQ? No way, no how.
However, if the length exceeds maximum allowed for the category, or, obviously if the cable is damaged or was never actually up to category spec to begin with (unfortunately, often the case with either super-cheap cables or with super-pricey audiophile ones) then it will underperform. That could cause core operations to run slower and, if bad enoughm there could be drop-outs in the playback.
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You can go up to 2.5Gbps and 100m with CAT5e, thatās what Iām using (although nowhere near that long).
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Yes - but I couldnāt remember for sure what the length limit was. 10Gbps for 33m over CAT6 - in which case it would not be appropriate for the 40m run that the op was talking about - so I just quoted the 100m lengths.
And you donāt need any more than 1Gbps (or even 100Mbps) for audio endpoints. 1Gbps or better for the Roon server will be required when using multi-room/mutliple endpoints with high bitrates.
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And the protocol handles bad packages, as I recall from the network development days.
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Only up to a point. TCP/IP will eventually get a packet to the required destination unless packet loss is 100% - but if the packet loss is severe, there is no guarantee that it will be within acceptable timescales.
Protocol handles it in a ādata will get there, eventuallyā sense. If you are playing audio, especially with RAAT which, as I understand does not buffer much, you will get dropouts if the eventually isnāt fast enough.
So how does it work if someone streams over the internet, letās say streaming from a Qobuz server in New York City to a residence in Tokyo? In this case, it is over many thousand miles!!!
But not via a single Ethernet cable 
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Yes, I know, but it is over a long distance, so how does it manage a good streaming without any dropout or retransmission of packets?
In the same way as you can buy something online in the US even if you are in Tokyo. Every individual part of the journey has error correction and buffers, and the information is recreated on every āhopā.
It is just information (i.e., large numbers) and if I transmit a number to you with error checking, then you eventually have the same number, regardless of whether I sent you a letter on paper, told you over the phone, or used smoke signals.
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I suggest you spend a little time with Wikipedia reading about Wide Area Networks and Content Delivery Networks.
Ethernet and copper cables are common in Local Area Networks, but thereās a whole world of different technologies out there being used in the internet as a whole.
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So in a word, ethernet cable length does not matter?
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Only in very, very long runs in Local Area Networks (LANās) where the length may exceed the IEEE Standard 802 for that particular standard of cable.
As has already been said above, I would suggest you do some reading on TCP/IP architecture to aid your own understanding 
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No, because it is not Ethernet anymore after it leaves your local network. Ethernet is the name for a specific technology for transmitting data typically on local networks. (And if it is used for longer distances then the people who do so usually know what they are doing)
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