What Ethernet cable are you using into you streamer?

You might not care. However, for the sake of transparency and clarity, especially for a company that spends so much effort on noise mitigation, their response is important. Anup’s point would be valid if their entry product also used Telegartner RJ45 connectors, which it doesn’t. “Justification” is not what I or others look for. Any snake oil description a rationale – I want a clear argument based on science as much as anything else.

As for other benefits, on their high end Ethernet (Omega) what I get are more low level details and greater dynamics (contrasting type). Also get a more 3 dimensional soundstage. Everything I hear seems to be more coherent and in phase. Kills that accordion-like effect where sounds seem to get bunched up and you lose a relaxed and smooth flow. Not sure how else to describe it…

By the way, how’s the new master clock doing (post Cybershaft and SRS clocks)?

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It’s easy to test the Shunyata Ethernet cable yourself for grounding continuity; just use a multimeter on the Telegartner’s RJ45 metal housing at both ends.

I don’t doubt you hear what you hear. All I can say is that there are no technical reasons for Shunyata’s Ethernet cables to perform better than properly certified Ethernet UTP cables when using them with dCS systems.

In fact, there’s nothing that Shunyata knows about Ethernet cables that IEEE/ISO doesn’t know or hasn’t already studied. So, I’m curious to see what response you get from them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just going to ignore the question (be sure the answer, if any, comes directly from Shunyata, not some dealer :wink: )

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It all comes down to what you measure. What the IEEE certification, unless I’m wrong, focuses on the function the cable is fulfilling: delivering correct and complete signals across the wire, with the help of TCP/IP ensuring higher level ISO stack function. They likely do not concern themselves with the other factors that we listen for in audio, let alone do they even seek to do so. Hell we don’t know how to measure what the sound/ear/brain is doing as it perceives the world around us. It’s simply magical.

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I think that’s probably true, certainly in the abstract, but what would we measure? We know that impedance, capacitance, and resistance matter for the sound of analogue cables, and perhaps even the metallurgy, but once we get past the “compliance” part of a digital cable, what else should we measure? We’ve been at this for 20-30+ years now with network audio and exceptionally resolving systems and measurements devices. What is it that companies like dCS and Meitner and CH Precision and Benchmark and Berkeley and Chord and MSB and PS Audio don’t know that cable companies do? I’m not arguing that we know all there is to know; I fundamentally believe the opposite. But shouldn’t we have some idea what the questions are?

I can’t quite tell if you’re joking Steve… In any case, if you’re suggesting that Shunyata measures things about Ethernet cables that the IEEE/ISO/TIA doesn’t, then yes, you’re seriously mistaken :laughing:

The IEEE has thousands of member Enterprises and individuals (myself included) who conduct research and testing. It’s infinitely beyond the scope of a, literally, 20 people company like Shunyata.

As a simple example, with respect to your earlier point about EMI, and to Greg’s question about what would they measure; here’s the kind of testing done for the IEEE when it comes to Ethernet cable specifications and standardisation efforts (in this case for the relatively recent IEEE 802.3cg).

Do you think Shunyata has any similar objective measurements to share with you to explain the value of their Omega Ethernet cable?

(By the way, just to be clear, I’m not a “cable denier” or anything, I could actually afford a Bartok for my kitchen with the resale value of my Speaker cables alone :rofl:)

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I don’t have any analogy to provide, but I think the manufacturers of components are not in the business of designing or testing cabling between their products it seems, except putting them inside their speakers. I’m think they aren’t designing against all comers, just validating against common cables, be they interconnects, USB, Ethernet, etc. I’m only familiar with the lengths Spectral goes to demand for MIT specific power, speaker and interconnects for their amps. Another example that we’ve recently discussed is the use of a master clock with the dCS Clock. They offer the option, but tell us very little about their value or what to consider in adding one. As audiophiles I suppose it’s like building a car out of selected parts and hoping it drives worth a damn. Fact is that there are few component manufacturers who focus, much less understand, the power/noise issues for complete systems. And the companies that do sell such products aren’t about to give you any real insights into their “secret sauce” other than reading the patent applications – no ingredients or recipe, however.

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I’m thinking they test to meet spec, and then move way beyond that, into their area of expertise, which is power and noise and other aspects of mitigating whatever issues they believe are important for power conditioners, power cables, speaker cables, interconnects, etc. This applies to their audiophile and medical equipment related products. As for what they’re willing to share, this industry area of product are a bit like Heinz 57 (a way of distinguishing products without revealing anything about the underlying secrets of implementing their patents). It’s a bit like the cosmetics industry which probably has 99% of products that are marketing rather than underlying scientifically based value (maybe Botox).

After reading this thread I went on amazon and ordered a cat 6 cable by Blue Jeans Cable. The price was $11.75. It replaced a $39.00 audio quest pearl cat 7. Jaw dropping difference and the Blue Jeans cable is staying right where it is. For the low price this is worth trying, what do you have to loose?

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Do I think Shunyata measures things other cable makers do not?

I couldn’t say, though I suspect many of the companies you cite measure for electrical properties and for example think noise below a certain level is OK as it doesn’t directly affect data transmission.

However, Shunyata and other manufacturers may have found it has an audible effect.

As an example, I don’t think Belden has ever given a moment’s consideration as to whether there are audible differences between Cat 6A cables they offer, just whether they meet the appropriate electrical specs.

It’s true that we don’t necessarily know why certain cable changes in geometry and conductor types make audible changes… but they do.

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Bill, seems like you’re unaware that all cable geometry and dielectric difference between cables are absolutely measurable, they manifest as changes to LCR measurements!

Granted we don’t know if certain measurable differences are actually audible or not as far as analog cable are concerned.

But where Ethernet cables are concerned, and the reason why Belden or others don’t care about “audible effects” is because by design, Ethernet (& TCP/IP) has layers of abstraction that prevents physical properties from affecting the bit stream. That is unlike any traditional analog (or even USB cables) where the physical properties could have direct potential sonic impact.

If this wasn’t the case, there is no way you would be able to properly surf the internet, let alone conduct any e-commerce, or even post here! There’s zero chance that Shunyata knows something about Ethernet cables that is otherwise unknown. Zero :grin:

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Affecting the bitstream? No.

Affecting the playback audibly? Yes.

If you measure all cables with a 9v battery and an LED, all speaker cables are exactly the same, differences you hear are all psychological - that is the objectivist point of view, and we’re all idiots as all DACs clearly sound the same, too.

The point is something makes Ethernet cables sound different. IEEE and data cable makers couldn’t care less what that is, audio cable makers do, that’s what it all comes down to. The data is the same and I all gets there properly and in the same manner, yet the difference in sound between a cheap USB cable and my AudioQuest Carbon is plain as day. The data is clearly the same, but something is different. RF noise, ground hash, something.

As always in the world of audio cables, if you try a different cable and it doesn’t improve the sound for you, don’t buy it. As an engineer, I can’t begin it to tell you how much it bothers me that power cables, USB cables and Ethernet cables all have an effect on sound when clearly there’s no way that they should be able to.

The problem is, by listening, it’s apparent they do.

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Rereading this, I specifically wanted to address this.

Shunyata’s people are very specifically focused on a particular arena of engineering, just as dCS’ are, so it’s absolutely silly to state “these twenty people can’t know more than the rest of the industry.”

We see that almost daily as new holes are revealed in software that’s been around for 10, 20 or more years by both black and white hat hackers. Intel employs tens of thousands of engineers who know more about chip design than most anyone else and yet they never foresaw the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. Before 2020 few thought cache timing attacks via side channels could leak data, and yet… they can.

That doesn’t mean all of the engineers in IEEE and affiliated organizations are bad, it’s just they’re focused elsewhere. Many engineers work in the security industry every day, but arguably they may not have the drive and focus of a bored 14 year-old with literally nothing else in their life to focus on for a few months, day in and day out twenty or more hours a day.

From what I understand from those in the high end audio industry, it’s literally a matter of “we have this reasonable understanding of this” but the key that differentiates them is they think "I wonder how the sound is affected if we do this, where most engineers might dismiss that as something that couldn’t possibly have an effect.

What makes this worse is often those effects are system-dependent. What is night-and-day to you may not be to others. If you’ve been a drummer for two decades you are going to pick up in differences in how a snare drum sounds that others would be completely oblivious to. Others are just intensely sensitive to certain things; I really can’t sing well and if asked to play a note on a piano that duplicates what I just heard, I just can’t, I’ve tried.

But though I don’t possess anything close to “perfect pitch” I can instantly tell if a wrong note is played or a guitar is out of tune when playing a song I’m familiar with, it’s just the way my brain works.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that dismissing a company or team by their size is silly. The teams who found many security breaches were perhaps one to a few people, and you would likely get very different results handing code to twenty people working at Facebook than twenty people working in the network threat assessment group at the NSA.

Shunyata’s people have nothing to focus on other than trying things based on what their particular engineering secret sauce is to see if what they are doing makes an improvement - and yet even the entire staff at Shunyata didn’t realize what effect the noise cleanup of their power conditioners would have on medical equipment until someone in that field decided to try it on a lark, and Clear Image Scientific was born - an entire company resulting from a happy accident by someone completely unaffiliated with Shunyata other than as a customer - and something that you would think would already be known by big medical companies that invest hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D into their products (not to mention the medical industry itself, arguably the target of the most R&D dollars of any industry on the planet) would have already known.

Yet:

Clear Image Scientific

To be honest, it’s actually quite incredible but that’s quite often the way advances in engineering in fact happen; Pasteur was treading ground “well understood” by physicians of the time, and Linus Torvalds was roundly laughed at when he said he was going to release a computer operating system that would be free that anyone could modify and see the source code to.

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I love improving the way music sounds through my system. (It’d be silly to devote the money, time and occasional stress to it otherwise.)

But — for me — life’s too short to try things that don’t come with a rational reason for being better.

I’d have thought the same would be true for the people developing the products that compete for our ears and money.

I’m immensely grateful that some people do try things that don’t appear to make sense, of course. Some of these experiments may well bear fruit. But surely there are plenty of areas that have logical reasons and known limitations at which their efforts might otherwise be pointed.

I’d rather an engineer directed their energy at room/system interactions (for example) than trying different types of pasta as a new type of conductor.

I’ll admit that part of my skepticism is fueled by the new greatest things invariably being more expensive, more closely guarded, and less convincingly explained than the approaches taken by existing approaches.

Sometimes a new discovery is a genuine breakthrough. I’ll celebrate with the rest of you in these cases.

In my opinion, though, it’s more often that new discoveries are breakthroughs only in the brazenness of the assault on my intelligence, my wallet and the clipping level of my bullshitometer.

(I tried Ethernet cables from $13 to $1,200 into my Bartók, and spent $1,187 on clocks instead. Plus a bit more :-))

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Bill, come now, only a child would attempt to use a 9V battery and LED to measure a cable. I’m sure you know what LCR measurements are about, or don’t you?

I already explained that there’re fundamental differences between Ethernet cables and others, including USB and Power cables; the layers of abstraction involved in Ethernet/TCP. So any continued comparisons to sonic impacts from those analog cables are not very useful to the discussion of this thread.

As for your argument about Shunyata being a specialised outfit, well, please spend some time looking at Caelin Gabriel/Shunyata’s Patents; they revolve around AC Power handling, EM fields/EMI/RFI, and Noise. Thats it. Nothing that the IEEE hasn’t looked at and developed into Ethernet for nearly 50 years now. Shunyata is absolutely not doing anything for $2,000 that a simple fiber optic isolation for under $200 won’t do.

As for the rest of your points, well, subjectively, people hear all kinds of things, real or imagined. Theres’ not much point for me to debate any of that. If you have any actual new/interesting objective facts, I’m all ears :grin:

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“Only a child would use a 9v battery and LED to measure a cable” - and yet that may very well be the equivalent of using our best tools today to take measurements of cable and extrapolate whether there can or cannot be an audible difference between cables based only upon those measurements.

Shunyata is supposedly not doing anything that fiber optics don’t - and yet fiber optics have their own issues coming from the transmitters, receivers and the transmission medium. Fiber isn’t perfect either - it doesn’t have electrical issues but it has others.

If you’re such an objectivist when it comes to audio, why own a dCS at all? According to the best signal analyzers and oscilloscopes a Rossini should sound no different than a Sony Blu-ray player.

If Shunyata’s power handling is of little consequence, why didn’t major medical providers that spend billions of dollars on R&D each year realize that cleaning the AC power would result in such major improvements in resolution in electrophysiology labs?

I’m not going to convince you, because obviously at least when it comes to Ethernet, you believe data is data and any differences cannot be heard except due to psychological bias, and yet at least one poster just stated that the $17 Blue Jeans Ethernet cable sounded better than the AudioQuest cable which confirmation bias towards more expensive and audiophile cables states SHOULD have sounded better to him.

If you don’t hear a difference, that’s great. More power to you, use the Cat 6 of your choice, the same advice I give to those who hear no difference between interconnects or speaker cables.

I audition, listen, and purchase what makes an audible improvement to me.

I personally don’t use Shunyata Ethernet cables in my system, but I haven’t auditioned them, either.

I can’t debate patents except to say the lag time between filing a patent and it being published is still well over 18 months, so we don’t know what is in the pipeline.

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No one is expecting you to try everything, but certainly grabbing a cable from one of the bigger names in the audiophile world and giving it a whirl shouldn’t be beyond your limits of things to try, especially as any dealer that carries them will let you borrow one for a home trial.

It’s disingenuous to give the “pasta” example, but certainly there’s reason for cable companies to try different cable materials and topologies in Ethernet cables to see if any audible differences can be heard.

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This has been litigated ad nauseam, and yet it won’t go away. As Anup wrote, Ethernet is different from all other input types. The data either is coming through, or isn’t. There’s no clocking involved. No jitter. It’s galvanically insulated too, so no actual connection to the switch (hence the recommendation to use unshielded cable to keep grounds separate). Any noise absorbed by the line is regular RF which not only should be rejected by the input board, but doesn’t impact the actual data.

Nevertheless, I’m not to dissuade anyone from spending on whatever it is that makes them happy; God bless for helping the economy.

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That’s not what Ben said. What he wrote, and what I happen to agree with, was:

Because time is precious, I want to have a reason to try something. Why “grab a cable” from any manufacturer that doesn’t have some engineering case for its purported improvement? Over at Iconoclast, ex-Belden engineer Galen Gaeris details why his analog cables sound the way they do. And they do sound great. Based on his explanation, I was an early adopter “ear unheard” of thousands of dollars of his cable, and very happy for it, too. But that’s analog. And as Anup has noted, there are very sound engineering reasons why a properly constructed, unshielded and certified Ethernet cable should not sound different going into a dCS DAC/NB/Upsampler from another unshielded certified Ethernet cable. dCS folks have made similar statements here (and have explained why the unshielded spec matters). I’ve tried some expensive Ethernet cables, and have come to the same conclusion.

OTOH, you say you’ve heard the difference.That’s great: your ears, your wallet. But as an engineer, given the design of Ethernet, what could be the reason? Don’t you want to know why? I’m not an engineer, and I want to know why. In all the words written in this thread (let alone the threads and articles on many other sites), I have yet to see a reasonable hypothesis against which the “why” could be tested that is more convincing than cognitive bias. In order to convince your colleagues here that something you like is worth their time to try, shouldn’t someone be able to articulate “why”? Given that all of us generally have different systems, some common objective information (as in “capable of being mutually understood by different humans”) goes a long way. “Try it, you might like it” is not a reason.

The analogies to power, analog ICs, and speaker cables are pretty meaningless here. There are sound engineering reasons for why and how we can make improvements in those devices, replicate and improve on them, and hear them. Doesn’t mean you and I will hear them the same, but it gives us a common framework for assessing them. But once we’ve factored out the shielding/certification differences, what can be done to Ethernet cabling to change analog sound? Ben’s “pasta” comment isn’t disingenuous; it aptly illustrates the problem. When audiophoodoo companies won’t give engineering reasons why/how their Ethernet cables could sound different, it might as well be GMO-long-grain-liquid-wheat-crystals-suspended-in-vacuum. And 18-month patent timelines are no excuse. Shunyata and others have been at this for a while, claiming to have found ways to make better analog sound with their Ethernet cables. They ought to be able to explain how without jeopardizing their intellectual property. I don’t think small shops can’t make new discoveries (and that’s not what Anup said either). But if they have, let’s hear it! “Give It a whirl”—which is what every single one of these companies and their dealers is counting on—is not a rationale.

I’m not an objectivist in the sense that I think we can measure every thing we can hear. I don’t think acquisition of scientific knowledge ever stops. Pick the right measurements, and one can make an SET amp look just like a class D amp on paper. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore objective information either. And yes, it’s true that many great discoveries are accidental. There are in fact many “”Eureka!” moments in history. Those discoveries all have explanations. Pasteur may have been on “familiar ground,” but that’s with benefit of hindsight. To his contemporaries, he was not. I would argue that scientific understanding of microbiology in Pasteur’s time has almost nothing in common with our scientific environment today. What we know about physics just in the field of digital audio dwarfs the entire breadth of microbiology in the 19th century. One day, our grandchildren may laugh at what we didn’t know about Ethernet. Maybe. But that will be because someone comes up with something that is explainable and reproducible. Not sure what the release of Linux has to do with any of this; the release of open source code is pretty much the opposite of what we are discussing here. And being mocked is not a scientific credential. It may happen, but it doesn’t prove anything.

To Ben’s point, regardless of whether there is a dealer/manufacturer willing to offer a demo with zero financial risk, in order to justify the time spent not listening to music—listening to equipment is not the same thing—to select even five or “grab one” among the hundreds of “awesome” cables, how should a rational person choose? Who the heck wants to spend the time to grab one from a manufacturer without a reason to pick that one? That’s crazier than playing darts blindfolded.

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Totally, Bill — and I did give many of them a go.

At the root of it for me though (and as Greg just wrote rather more eloquently than I will here) is that if we’re not basing our new attempts at “better” on theory, I don’t see how experiments are anything other than a pig in a poke. (I had pasta for dinner — hence my creative choice of conductor :-))

If that’s the case, for me, the very real opportunity cost of both the engineer’s time and my time in auditioning them outweigh the potential benefits.

I’m up for trying things that have worked for other people — as I said, I tried a variety of Ethernet cables to no effect that I could spot — but eventually I’ve decided to narrow down the candidates for my comparison time to the things that make sense to me. There are plenty of those as it is, why throw myself into the ones that don’t make sense until there’s an actual reason for them to make sense or sufficient doubt across a wide sample of people that there might be a not-yet-understood something we’re missing?

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If that’s how you want to cable your system, that’s fine, and I have no qualms because of it.

Myself, though I am an engineer, all I need is to know that a company I respect (like Shunyata) says they find an improvement and I’m willing to give it a shot, as I don’t add anything to my system that I do not hear makes an improvement and one commensurate with its cost. For example, I couldn’t tell you precisely why their AC cables improve the sound of my components, but they do, and they’re installed.

To me it’s much like medicine - and given that we’re dealing with human sensory perception, perhaps that’s a good analogy. If you look at the inserts that come with most prescription medications, they will flat out say that the method by which they work is unknown - but studies have shown that they do work.

That’s how I look at cabling and for that matter DACs and all other components. I don’t care why my RP and RC sound the way they do, I just know they are an improvement over what I had. I know I can use a cheap USB cable or an expensive AQ one and my USB hard drive won’t care at all - but what I hear from my DAC shows a significant improvement with the AQ. As with power cables, most of my house is wired with “something else,” but if changing that cable between components improves the sound, I won’t question why, I will just be glad it does.

That’s of course not a strict engineering approach to things, but I learned at least some of this from long conversations I was able to have with the sadly now departed but always incredible to talk to Charles Hansen of Ayre. He used to discuss not hearing, but smell - how with gas chromatography we can now discern down to the molecular level the differences between two compounds, but somehow the “trained noses” of the scent specialists at perfume companies are more sensitive, and those of dogs and other animals even more so. No one is sure why some dogs can seem to “smell cancer,” but that hasn’t stopped clinical trials from taking place to investigate the issue.

I’m not calling anyone out for being being unable to hear the difference between Ethernet cables, but I have. I don’t know about Shunyata’s vs. say Blue Jeans, but I have between the Belden much of my home network is wired with and Blue Jeans. That doesn’t mean you will or that your system is poorer or not resolving enough if you can’t.

I would like to know why, but not as a precursor to trying it any more than I need to pull up the research from medical journals before taking a new prescription medication.

How do I choose what cables to try? As in the case with a physician, I trust the opinions of those I know - friends within and outside the industry and of course magazine reviewers. Not all reviewers of course, but those whose opinions seem to have hewed very close to what I have heard myself over the course of a decade or more.

I would never buy anything just because a reviewer said it was great, but for example if Michael Fremer recommended something I would certainly give it a try.

That having been said, I also listened to most of the “Class A” DACs in the recommended component listings of both Stereophile and TAS and found all of them lacking compared to my Wadia S7i until I came across the RP/RC combo, many of them DACs that were not just recommended but effusively so. My dealer had me take home and audition the Ayre QX-5 Twenty three separate times, and each time it took me less than ten minutes at home to hear that nope, it was lacking. Same with the Bartok and the RP sans clock. But a friend I know told me flat out - you need to listen to the Rossini with the Rossini Clock and I think you’ll be amazed - and they were right.

I don’t need technical proof before trying something at the recommendation of those whose opinions I trust, and though they’re not always right, it’s worth the time and effort for me to give it a spin.

If not to you, that’s fine too, there’s no “right and wrong” in the world of audio.

I only ask in the face of those who claim that something absolutely, positively cannot make a difference, if they’ve tried it. If they have and have heard no difference, great, good for them, it’s another data point and bolsters their argument.

It’s not immaterial to note that when virtually all of the components you now say there are sound engineering reasons for their differences in sound were once considered components for which changes could not “possibly” make a difference - you can still see that by the many who still consider all speaker cables identical as long as they are of proper gauge to pass the electrical signal from amp to speaker.

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