Talk to me about CAT 6 in wall cable

My last house had Cat 5 run to every room except the bathrooms and we never had a problem, so you should be just fine with Cat 6.

 However, I have been told that with a mesh network I risk drop outs and loss of signal! 
 

@daveyf 

I have been using EERO mesh for years. Not a single dropout or loss of signal. Yes there are mesh networks that aren’t great. Eero is no issues 

From the Ethernet perspective either is fine. Any packets lost due to noise or anything get retransmitted and error corrected. Ethernet is not S/PDIF. Bandwidth is several orders of magnitude bigger than ever needed for audio data. Your SO watching Netflix in the next room or kid playing World of Warcraft consume 100 more bandwidth than any Tidal stream.

If DAC is in the same box with the streamer there may be some concern with noise coming via Ethernet leaking into analog stage. But that may be rectified by optical isolation stage.

Thanks everyone. I think i will try CAT 6 and maybe set up my mesh as a back up. I will be using a separate DAC via S/PDIF or coax as the connection to the Aurender server. Should be interesting.

@daveyf sounds like a plan. But in my opinion mesh is the way to go. Gives you high speed internet throughout the house. The inwall cat6 is redundant. I’ve used eero with Aurender. Aurender loads pretty much your entire playlist into a queue that resides on the internal SSD. You can literally pull your Ethernet cable out and it will play the entire playlist. You just won’t be able to control it because the streamer won’t be connected to network. But it will play your music thru to the end