jamieu
Prominent Member
A new and improved Wi-Fi receiver is one of the many upgrades incorporated into the new Node.
not wanting to open a can of worms re cables, but I recently acquired an Audioquest Cinnamon Ethernet cable and was astounded that the Node sounded even better. In disbelief switched back to the old Amazon cat 6 and my ears had not deceived me. It was bought for a new TEAC arriving shortly. Now I’m going to have to buy another Audioquest. Mysterious business, this digital world.
Well that makes absolutely no sense, ethernet ports are galvanically isolated, there's a whole 50+ year old network stack, the same stack used to reliably transmit banking data and every other bit of data you send across the internet, that deals with retransmitting data should it fail to be transmitted correctly.
Network cables (as long as they are built to spec) transmit digital networking data, they either work or they don't. There is no analog audio component to it. If a network cable is broken/faulty it will cause dropouts which you'll experience in the form of dropouts and pops, not better or worse audio quality. It's like saying your printer prints prettier pictures when connected up via a different network cable.
The only explanation is that your older ethernet cable was causing some kind of ground loop, but given the ethernet ports at both end would normally be galvanically isolated that would indicate some very faulty equipment design at both ends. Standard Cat 5 cables should also use plastic connectors not metal ones, if your older cables had metal connector that might explain why you noticed a difference when moving to a cable built to the proper spec.
If your streaming music think of all the miles of network cables and switches that digital audio data is sent down before it even reaches your house. How is that final ethernet cable going to make one iota of difference, other than looking prettier going into your HiFi rack (admittedly that is a reason why you might want a nicer looking cable).
But this problay isn't the thread to discuss this, nor is it something I really want to debate further. Not wanting to be rude but I have spent a large part of my career working with TCP/IP networks, I know fairly intricately how they work and what can and can't affect them.
If you're happy with your new ethernet cable then that's all good, as mentioned above having a nicer looking ethernet cable running into the back of your HiFi rack may well be worth paying a little extra for, but it can't make your audio 'sound better'. That's not an opinion, it's a simply fact of how TCP/IP networking works.
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