Talk to me about CAT 6 in wall cable

Cat6 works just fine. My whole house is wired with that, and I get mine from Blue Jeans Cable. It's Belden cable, properly terminated. The only place I have Cat6a is in-wall running from the first to second floor of my house. I had electricians install that when they were doing a considerable amount of other work.

Decent quality Cat6/6a or above will be fine. Especially for in-wall long runs (I have a km or so in my house) I’d strongly recommend S/FTP rather than UTP. I’m about do do a new build and will be using Cat7 S/FTP LZSH.

Those cables are the future of audio, mark my words.

That said, go with Cat6a, not Cat6.

Why is it that with anything involving audio, for many only the most extreme overkill available will barely suffice? I bought and remodeled my house in 2003. I had the house ethernet wired with Cat 5. I think Cat 6 was just coming out but less available. The difference didn't seem important at the time. Twenty three years later I can say that for sure the difference wasn't important. I have several audio systems and computers around the house, all using the network and have never experienced an issue. There is WiFi too but the wire network is more solid and reliable. There were originally two switches used in rooms that had several devices and not enough wall connections. I still use those switches. They have always worked fine. They are invisible in the network. The network has handled all the audio and video data I've ever sent through it from any point to any point with zero problems. It had more than enough capacity for that purpose when it was set up and still does.

Whenever I put network cable in I always double up. You should really put a Fibre cable in as well. SM or single mode fibre. Cat6 just like the data centres. Armoured SM cable. You just need to make sure the people doing the cable run know what they are doing with data cables. Hope this helps.