Cable vs fiber for audio quality


I was considering switching to a new fiber company offering service in my neighborhood. Tired of the price hikes and bad service of my old coax cable provider that I’ve  been using for many years.
 

Will I hear a difference between the two?

paulcreed

If you are referring to the conduit your internet service provider uses, any differences would be based on speed (based on your service plan) and reliability, and not whether they use coax or fiber, although fiber can provide faster speeds overall, but those are well above what is required for music streaming.  I found this:

Fiber can comfortably deliver symmetrical gigabit speeds (1 Gbps down and up) to your business. The fastest speed coaxial cables can achieve is typically around 1 Gbps down and 35 Mbps up. However, you're likely to max out at 100-400 Mbps for your download speeds, depending on your provider.

20Mbps

You don’t need a lot of speed to stream music from the internet. You’ll sip just half of a megabit per second from most music streaming services like iHeartRadio, Spotify, and Pandora. Any internet plan with speeds of 10Mbps or more can stream average-quality music.

Some music streaming services like Apple Music and Tidal offer high-definition “lossless” audio, however. These streams can reach just over 9 megabits per second (Mbps). You’ll need an internet plan that’s at least 20Mbps to handle these streams.

To see how much speed you need to stream music from your favorite service, just select it below.

Spotify | YouTube Music | Pandora | Amazon Music | Apple Music | iHeartRadio | SoundCloud | Tidal | Deezer | SiriusXM | TuneIn Radio | LiveXLive | Idagio | Primephonic

 

vendors speeds chart, updated march 2024

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What is the speed of a wireless network?

The main difference is speed.

Under ideal conditions, 2.4 GHz WiFi will support up to 450 Mbps or 600 Mbps, while 5 GHz Wi-Fi will support up to 1300 Mbps. But be careful! The maximum speed dependent on what wireless standard a router supports — 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, or 802.11ac.

If you are just asking if there would be an audible difference between fiber and cable to the house, I think the answer is no.

Once they provide fiber to the house into the ONT, will you be using the same RG6 within the house you had before, or will it be a new ethernet cable(s)? or fiber to the modem/router?

The difference in sound will be achieved by the last connection(s) before the streamer, or some have noticed differences by isolating the hifi with a fiber connection into their renderer.

 

 

You have the deets on what factors a change in cable platforms may provide for you:

- speed

- reliability

I just changed over to fibre optic service provider  for these reasons ( mostly the latter)

As far as impact on my audio performance goes, there is nil / zippo,/ nada differences in my audio streaming performance in a $50K system,