CN211276 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2020 11:16 pm
I am confused by the Cat specification. Are higher quality routers required to accomodate higher Cat numbers?
For the vast majority of home users, the router will be provided by your ISP. You could buy your own, industrial strength router, configure it and use that instead, but any technical issues and generally your ISP will trouble-shoot it based on you using their router. It's highly debatable if it's worth going down using your own router for home use.
For your internal home network (your LAN), you can use any switch or network of switches you want.
Any network connection between A and B will only go at the speed of the slowest NIC (Network Interface Card) or cable or switch that the signal passes through.
So that for example, for any connection to the Internet, the slowest connection will probably be the line to your house.
I know of businesses with networks of 250 PC's that were running at inter switch connection speeds of 100 Mbps and switch to PC speeds of 10 Mbps where all the internal traffic was lightning fast (printing, saving files to the onsite server, PXE builds etc) whilst anything off site was annoyingly slow (logging on, accessing data on Data Centre servers). All because the bottleneck was the connection to the outside world
The NIC on my laptop will only go up to 1000 Mbps (1 Gbps). That's a typical speed for a PC NIC.
So that in my LAN and the vast majority of home LAN's there is no point in having a switch that will go faster than 1 Gbps.
Speeds of 10 Gbps are mainly the realm of Data Centres. For a Data Centre, think Billion Dollar Brain - raised to the power of 3. A square grid of row upon row of data / server cabinets filled with servers and switches. Servers running internet banking or travel agents with hundreds or thousands of users trying to access their data at the same time. Servers talking to each other in order to handle the business needs.
For cables, Cat 3 and Cat 5 are junk. Bin them.
Cat 5e is fine from a home networking speed point of view. Please note that it's common to refer to Cat 5e simply as Cat 5.
I don't know if there are any sonic benefits to using Cat 6, Cat 6a, Cat 7, Cat 7a or Cat 8.
By all means feel free to try them. Starting with the connection from your music storage device to your switch (or router). And then the connection from the switch (or router) to the streaming device.
If for example you try a 5 metre £150 audiophile Cat 7 cable and you get a sonic improvement, I would recommend trying a Cat 8 cable (for example £18 from Farnells) as well. If the Cat 7 cable sounds good, the Cat 8
should sound just as good or better because it's made to a higher standard (thicker conductors and foil sheathing round each pair), whilst costing a lot less because it's not some audiophile wank.
If you have a gigabit switch (assuming it's properly configured) and Cat 5e cables, you will (very probably) be maxed out from a home computing network speed point of view.
The cost of maxing out is quite modest. Gigabit 24 port switches cost from £10 used on ebay. That'll be for something like a Cisco or HP built like a tank, should last for a very long time switch. Fanless ones from £30. I have so many cat 5e patch leads that I give them out for free to any friends or clients that want one.
