AudioQuest Ethernet Cables

Yes, absolutely. The Cinnamon is what I use and it's worth every penny. If you have a switch close to the Hifi, you need only a short cinnamon. If you are feeling flush, you could try the Vodka, though I've not heard it. For me, the sound is smoother and more natural.

There have been a few threads on this, with some vehemently denying that these cables can possibly make a difference, without ever having tried them. 

HH,  notwithstanding the cable debate over Ethernet cables …..

In the not too distant future I will be dipping my toe in the streaming world  & will have streamer, switch & NAS within about 2m of each other – in the short term at least.

Does your advice on the sonic benefits of the AQ cable also apply between switch & NAS ?

Yes. In my system. If you can borrow one or some for a few days you can decide for yourself.

Works here too!

Yes, it does. In fact the improvement seemed bigger from adding a second, from the US to the switch, than from adding the first, which was from the switch to the SU. Maybe the effect is cumulative, because the general advice is that the one from the switch to the streamer makes the bigest difference. I have my switch under the rack, which means I only need 0.75m cables, which cost £65 each. The Vodka equivalent is just over £200 I think. But the long ones are seriously expensive! 

In such case they should make cables like AQ Vodka in 10cm lengths. That, and a little cheap ethernet switch hanging off the streamer's back would be a far cheaper solution than the current shortest Vodka run of 0,75m (215 quid, a bit over my budget at the moment...)

I use AQ Forest cables and they seem ok. Just wanted a slightly better end connection than really cheapo cables. If they do make a difference (see lots and lots of passim) - and people with better equipment and better ears than mine say it's so - should we also consider the wiring inside the router? It must be in the path. So shouldn't we all be buying 'hi-fi routers' too? Or do the people buying AQ Vodka cables stick them into a £100 Netgear router?

Certainly if you are buying more expensive patch leads that are designed to reduce interference and crosstalk, I certainly wouldn't skimp on the quality of the switch and in particular it's PSU. Use a quality switch with a good quality PSU, or if you need to have the switch close by your audio equipment, then use a remote power injector and a power over Ethernet powered switch.  With that then try and ensure you use STP cable (shielded twisted pair) since 100 and 1000Mbps Ethernet can be electrically quite noisy. 

I use STP cable over a 5 metre length with the switch incoporating a good quality PSU in another room to my audio equipment, and is great step forward over using UTP cable from an electrically noisy Netgear switch about 3 metres away in the same room.

Simon

I had the same doubt and Charlesphoto in another thread sent me a very interesting link: http://www.the-ear.net/review-...digital-interconnect. According to this reviewer, the quality of ethernet switches and their number don't matter - they all store-and-forward packets and actually "tidy up" the transmission, so what mostly matters is that "last mile" - the final ethernet cable from the last switch to your streamer.

Hmm - a few years back i tried the Linn recommended method of putting a small switch close to the Akurate DS i was using at the time. Not good - hardened up the sound. Forward a few years and i've got Audioquest Forest patch cables between my Switch, Mac Mini and NAS and an Ethernet isolator at the end of 30m or so of standard CAT5e before it enters my amp. Subtle, but worthwhile to me.

I'm with Simon - keep the noisy stuff (including switches) away from the Hi-Fi. 

It was a small linear supply. 

You mean a heavy one with a transformer? Because if it isn't heavy, it's switching... I think nobody makes home network components like routers and switches with traditional, transformer + bridge rectifier power supplies, because that would double their price. It's all switching mode power supplies now.

Gajdzin, this review would appear unfortunately to be somewhat misleading and erroneous.  Frame propagation  can vary from switch to switch especially with many managed devices where you can control the forwarding characteristics  such that they *don't* all store and forward - one can balance link frame latency against error detection - which means that you can configure switches to send corrupt frames if the corruption occurs a way into the frame - albeit very quickly...

However the point is cheap electronics can inject common mode interference through the twisted pairs. It is this - not the differential signal - that is the issue and can be the cause of cursed RFI as they will encourage your patch leads to electro magnetically radiate. This is what LAN isolators help eliminate as used in controlled industrial/medical environments - these can be very effective in sensitive network setups as well.

Simon

I would not assume that all 'cheap' home switches store and forward. Technically the switch needs to simply decode the frame destination MAC address before it starts forwarding the frame out on the correct port - what is known as 'Cut Through' mode. Cisco switches for example use 'Cut Through' mode by default as opposed to 'Store and Forward'.

Simon

OK, good point. It's just that I am shopping for a new switch and the ones I've been checking out are all specified as "store and forward". I think I'll settle on another D-Link DGS-108. I was hoping for some recommendations from the audiophile community and searched the fora, but no luck - the effects of various network hardware on audio streaming SQ are little known at this time, I think.

Chord and Audioquest were demonstrating ethernet cables at the Bristol Show. I heard the later (Pearl 1.5m for £25) and the improvement was obvious.

Keith 

Gajdzin - if at all possible see if the switch has proper SMPS - or whether it has a cheap wall wart SMPS. The latter I have found notorious - and I even found the power lead from the wall wart to the switch radiated on some shocking Netgears!! I have been experiencing and mitigating the effects of RFI from network devices for a few years now.

Keith - what were you comparing against - a UTP or STP cable? A commercial grade STP cable can be very effective for audio use and 'sound' very good - and is a significant improvement over a commercial grade UTP cable. I try and chose STP for implementations.

Simon

Good advice, although I won't be able to check it before buying nor test it at home (other than "sniffing" around with a sensitive microphone from my recording studio - I've got this old Neumann that produces a loud "warble" in the presence of strong RFI). Do you think those clip-on ferrite beads would help? I've got a whole bag of them, in the past I've put them on every cable in my audio setup, including speaker cables, interconnects and power leads, but without noticeable improvements, so I took them all off.

I'm surprised those "audiophile" twisted pair cables don't come with integrated ferrite filters...

Yes  - As I said a small linear supply. 

Wow - no clue where to get such thing in XXI century, other than building my own... Everything I looked at in the local computer store was small wall-wart type SMPS...

It came with an old netgear switch. A newer switch came with one of the very tiny switching wall warts. As you say very rare to find a linear supply powering anything like this these days. I did try some different supplies on my 8 port switch that sits in the study on my audio network. A switching wall wart, a linear wall wart and a hefty linear lab supply and left each in place over a couple of weeks. Preference was for the linear supplies and in the end I kept the linear wall wart. I wouldn't get too hung up about it, but it's worth trying out if you can.