Audiphile Ethernet cables - advice needed

Posted by: PaulC on 30 May 2015

Hi all,

my streaming setup consists of ND5XS feeing NDAC via Chord Indigo TA cable ( BNC - BNC). High line into NAC282 powered by Supercap DR (NDAC powered by XP5XS), NAP 250.2 and Allaes. Sever is Unitiserve (2TB). House has inbuilt Ethernet (Cat 5E), multiple outlets in rooms going back to central switch (Netgear 724T) via patch panel. Userve is in office and streamer setup in lounge separated by brick / block wall or by approx 50 feet of no name Cat 5.

Here is my question - would I benefit from connecting Userve and ND5 to respective wall sockets via Chord C-stream or similar. I've looked at previous threads and concerns seems to be that audiophile Ethernet has benefits but am unsure if this applies with runs of no name cat5e in between.

Posted on: 14 June 2015 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Graham, Cat 7 has a higher bandwidth than Cat 5 - and so the rise time will be shorter on Cat 7..

However the Ethernet analogue Manchester encodings only works at a certain frequencies - i.e. around 31MHz for 100Mbps. Therefore this higher bandwidth for Cat 7 is largely not relevant or has minimal relevance for Ethernet but could be useful for other applications such as analogue video etc.

The jitter in the cable is meaningless - as the data frames have more variability in how they are timed through a switch, router or through the TCP/IP protocol stack. The most relevant point however is that TCP as used in our UPnP media transfer is not realtime - it builds up over a short time and then passes up the protocol stack of the receiver.. therefore jitter in the TCP transfer is absorbed into the receivers buffer or window and becomes irrelevant or meaningless. Once the data is recreated into the receiver's buffer- it can be read and processed  - and the contained sample data can be clocked it into a timed serial data stream - now jitter becomes important again. Therefore the stability and accuracy of the receiver or streamers clock to create the digital stream is critical.. and that is part of what we are paying with our  Naim streamers and why they sound better than say a Sonos Connect - when they both could be acting  'merely'  as a digital transport on the Ethernet.