I recently have moved my system to a dedicated room upstairs. The router is located down stairs in the main room, I want to make sure that I am setting everything up correctly. My plan is to run a long cat 6 cable(about fifty feet) from the router to a Ethernet switch located upstairs. The Ethernet switch would be used for multiple components as well as going to the Roon Nucleus+. From the Nucleus+ I would use the USB port to connect directly to my dac/preamp. Does this hookup sound correct? Any help on this setup would be greatly appreciated. As a side note I have Uptone etheregen and English Electric 8 switch. Thanks in advance, Richard
That would be the right way to do things. Fifty feet is well within limits for Cat 6.
People might argue about the need to use the Uptone etheregen and expensive switches such as the EE 8 switch. Personally I use only cheap unmanaged switches and am perfectly satisfied with the music results.
3 Likes
Geoff, thanks for the reply. I don’t think that I would need to use the Etherregen and the switch together? But I bought the switch for upstairs as I have other components besides the Nucleus+ that require a Ethernet connection.
No, in my opinion, you don’t need to use them together and as I say, I would just use a simple unmanaged switch upstairs.
This should all be 100% fine. If there’s any issue introduced it’ll be because you’ve added a layer of switching vs a “home-run” (which is an ethernet cable which goes directly between a device and your core switch/router). An unmanaged $20 1Gbps switch should add negligible latency.
If I was going to be pedantic / risk-averse, I’d run two (or three) parallel Ethernet cables at the same time. Hook one of those between your core switch and your Nucleus, a second to the switch (which you’d use for other items) and leave the third in case either of the first two ever go bad. No idea whether you’re investing in opening walls or if this is an easy “pull”, but if it’s a challenging pull I always go ahead and pull at least 1 more than I need in case anything ever goes wrong I don’t have to open up walls again. The goal of having the nucleus running off its own home run vs through a switch is that you might have endpoints in various parts of your house, and the fewer switches the audio stream has to run through the less potential for latency and accompanying issues.
All that said, your original plan is likely to be just hunky dory. Just telling you in case you believe that even the paranoid have enemies.