Ethernet

When I first got my N130, I tried the same thing.  I bought a long Cat8 Amazon cable. Yes it works, but the cable doesn’t have a lot of insulation and occasionally picked up noise.  I ended up buying a Netgear Powerline 2000 +extra outlet on Amazon.  Used it for years.

Wow.  I think reading this thread is going to give me an ulcer.  I have no idea what 95% of anything mentioned is except for the word cable...  I will be setting up my new room in our newer home soon after the remodel.  Using Starlink and their router mini mesh extender in the same room.  I reckon I'll see how it works eventually.  I use a Samsung laptop USB to a Benchmark Dac2HGC from a SSD hard drive thru J-River.  -John

@maprik 

I attached an ethernet cable from my mesh router satellite to my Node 130, and didn't hear any difference from my wi-fi, which was usually excellent in strength.

What did make a significant difference was adding a Teddy Pardo linear power supply to the Node.  Unless you're in a really noisy wi-fi environment, I doubt that all the other changes are worthwhile. 

One of the good things about the Blusound software is that you can monitor the strength of the wi-fi signal that gets to your Node.

25ft of Cat5/6 cable is just fine, don't have to worry about it until over 200ft. Would stick with C5/6 cable, no need for anything higher. C7/8 cable is just rated for higher frequency for higher bandwidth. You can not take any advantage for it. C6 is 10gb rated, streaming music takes 2mb. There is plenty of headroom! 

Remember this is a digital cable, it carries packets, not wave form analog signal. EMI/RFI does not affect packet transfer unless it's really bad, like really, really bad.

Best practice for any network is fewest hops as possible, fewest conversions as possible. 

Any consumer cheap mesh setups are garbage, they limit transfer speeds, they have poor handoff, get overwhelmed very easily. You are far better off just getting another higher end router and extending your current network. 

If you have a cable modem, get rid of the rented modem, it's a Toal PIECE OF POO! Just upgrading that will yield benefits everywhere. 

@fastfreight I agree that front end tweaks and power cords can make a difference.  My thesis is that through engineering they should not!  Off the shelf components would appear to be available to solve the problems.