my ethernet cable?

I agree about Al. Where do I send my campaign contribution? :)

Thanks so much, everyone. Much appreciated!

Margot & Cymbop, thank you most kindly. If truth be known, though, I would much prefer listening to my stereo system to dealing with the tribulations of serving in that office :-)

Best,
-- Al

I would also suggest taking a look at your network switch/router. Many sold are still 10/100 and if you want maximum network speed with the Auralic you would need a gigabit switch. The sonos only has a 10/100 port on it, so no big deal.

Cat5e and Cat6 can both handle gigabit if installed correctly. Cat6 installed incorrectly (or patch cable manufactured incorrectly) can be worse than a good job with cat5e, so who installs it is almost more important than which cable you choose.

Al's proposal for testing is exactly what I do for my home installs. When I paid professionals to do it for work, part of their deliverables were the test reports.

Also, a last bit of advice for anyone else doing this is to run an extra cable or two. You never know when you may need it. I only ran two to my living room and am kicking myself. You could imagine a tv, home theater, xbox, dvd player, and sonos all needing an Ethernet connection. You could always put another network switch in the living room, but then you are splitting your gigabit home run amongst all of those items, not to mention eating up one more electrical outlet. Best case scenario is that only one is actually doing any serious transfer of data at once, but you've still added one more item in between your source and destination.

Thanks, Kriskdf.

Will the router say 10/100 on it? And what is the designation for a router that is adequate for gigabit?

If I did this --keeping in mind Al's reservations!--how do I go about finding a good cable installer? Obviously the guy who did the TV didn't exactly know what he was doing (because he connected Cat 6 cable to Cat 5e jack. Sigh.)

As for the extra cable, so just having something there unconnected does not affect the functioning of the lines to stereo, tv etc?

Thanks!

Margot

I replaced a 75' run of cheap Monoprice Cat6 that goes from my office router, down into the basement, and up into the living room stereo system with a 50' run of Blue Jeans 6a for the purpose of getting the most out of my TIDAL subscription.

The difference was very easy to detect. I'd describe the sound as cleaner, purer, and better-defined.
01-14-15: Cymbop

I believe you when you say you could hear the difference between the two cables. Blue Jeans' uses Belden cable a highly respected data cable manufacture, Monoprice doesn't say whose cable they use. They just say it is pure stranded copper. The construction of the raw cable can make a difference how the cable will perform.

I would discount the differences in length of the two had anything to do with the reason why you heard a difference, but I would like to know what you did with the additional 25' of the 75' Monoprice cable. Just guessing you coiled up the excess 25' of cable at the switch end. If that is the case, the next question would be how tight, rough physical diameter of the coil of the wire? I have found, and don't know why, that can cause errors on a PC connected to a network in the case of horizontal installed LAN cable. Testing the cable that has the excess cable coiled up in a small diameter coil with a scanner might only pass marginally. Increasing the diameter of the coil would increase the test results of the cable.

Best practices say two data cables should be installed at every work station. If you were to compare the certification test reports of a work station’s two data cables that were installed at the same time, same cable manufacture, terminated on the jacks on both ends by the same person, the cables will not test out the same. One will test better than the other. And sometimes the differences can be quite a lot with both cables still passing the scanner test.
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