I want to know more about upgrading my 20 year old home ethernet connections. I have called in a HiFi installer to look at my aged system and give me options on upgrading everything from the Fiber Connection in the box that attaches to my house all the way to the last cable that enters my DAC. Please share your knowledge in this thread and feel free to put links to vendors that sell stuff I will desire or just good research links. For those whose opinions differ on the fact that a good connection and source makes a difference, I respect your opinion but I don’t want this thread to turn into a pissing match on the value of these items, I just want to know what is out there so I can further research it before I have to start listening to sales pitches. 
I recently did some testing, the best solution I found from a sound perspective was running optical to as close to the streamer (NS1 in my case) as possible, then converting it to copper and running a 6-12 inch cat8 cable to the device.
I didn’t go as far as testing different optical converters, (though when I get a chance I’ll try a better PSU on the converter closest to the streamer), or trying more than a couple of copper cables.
I did try WiFi, it was slightly worse than a wired connection, though I suspect that would be heavily dependent on the WiFi implementation.
My current “explanation” for this is you want optical isolation from the switch, and as little copper as possible to act as an antenna.
I don’t like the fact that my fiber line gets converted to coaxial as soon as it enters the house. I believe there is already a downgrade in signal taking place there. Then my signal is spit 24 times to get to the different rooms in the house on old switches that were installed 20 yrs ago. I want the lines that go to the music rooms to not touch the regular cat6 lines that go to the rest of the house and then further i want to run new CAT8 lines to my dedicated music rooms. I have found spools of Cat 8 and the cost has come down to somewhat palatable costs. The switches themselves i have no idea about yet nor the amount of work to rewire the house
Wait, CAT 8 is more Copper, so you are saying rewire the house with OPTICAL/FIBER instead of CAT6 or 8?
this box here has all the connections in the house. I assume we are going to do the most work here???
I’m not sure most of that matters.
because ethernet is a packet based protocol, and the streamer is just regenerating the clock, it’s very much the signal either gets there or it doesn’t.
The issue I believe, not wanting noise in one part of the system to make it into the streamer.
Using an optical connection to the streamer (since it can’t carry electrical noise) seems like the best way to do that, but given the only streamer I know of with an optical in is an Optical Rendu, if you don’t use one, your only real choice is to convert back to copper before the streamer, then you only have to worry about noise from the converter, and anything the short copper run picks up.
Optical is better here than it is on say a SPDIF connection because it doesn’t carry the clock, so Jitter isn’t relevant, all it’s doing it galvanically isolating you from the up stream connection.
FWIW none of the changes in the sound were earth shattering, which is probably a testament to how good network cabling is at noise rejection.
I do want to try an Optical Rendu at some point, out of interest.
Yes If I were rewiring my house today I’d run Optical in the walls.
Gotcha, good information and I want to see what the installers offer up and the technical sales pitch behind it. yes, exactly the kind of info I wanted! thank you!!!
Speaking of the fiber connection was so helpful, I am now finding further threads and discussions on the topic
I’m going to be a contrarian here, or perhaps simply offer an alternative POV. Granted your house is the size of four of mine so that brings some challenges for Wi-Fi but…
Running ethernet in my new place looked to be 1) expensive 2) disruptive. The building is poured concrete construction and many of the walls are solid and the walls that I could run wire though are all finished. It was either tear into drywall which would add a lot of cost or using those external wire run channels which are ugly AF.
While shopping at Costco I saw this Netgear mesh bundle. Nighthawk Mesh WiFi 6 System - MK62 Mesh WiFi System | NETGEAR and got the three pack.
I have nothing to compare it to since it’s a new build but what I’ve found with Wi-Fi 6 is that it handles gigabit speeds like a champ and more importantly the latency times are reduced to the single digits. I get about 8 or 9 ms latency which is pretty damned close to wired. So it solved three things for me. 1) cost. 2) fear of high latency 3) installed exactly where I want it.
What I’m doing is using the main router module connected to my cable router. Both fed from the same LPS then going into a std. Netgear 8 port switch also connected to the same LPS. It’s worked out pretty well for me with exceptional coverage. Granted two units would have been more than enough, three is overkill but I wanted the option to use one JUST for audio.
For that one I have it powered with a high quality LPS and I’m using a very short 18" unshielded Ethernet cable.
The reason I’m saying all of this is that you might want to simply go this route with four mesh points being more than enough for your home and keep all of your existing wiring etc. The speed is being limited by your old ass switches only fast Ethernet, you can just replace those with gigabit ones and power them with a LPS. Food for thought.
EDIT: not that I’m not all in on @Polygonhell suggestion but you don’t have to do the whole house. Just one fiber backbone to each floor then Mesh out from that backbone. It would be hella cheaper and IMO give you almost all of the advantages.
In the end the ONE connection we care about are the ones where sound emanates or terminates. Those we can treat individually with good power supplies and either unshielded ethernet or if needed a galvanic isolator which go for about $100. Or go whole hog and use and Uptone Audio EtherRegen.
Yes I 100% agree with this, most of any ethernet solution is irrelevant to the problem at hand, as long as you have a run somewhere that isolates you from upstream electrical noise, and you minimize the final run to the component.
All I was saying is IF I was running ethernet now I’d probably run fiber.
Also worth noting that Auralic claim Wifi is the best connection on their streamers, it fundamentally isolates you from the rest of the network. But the device has to contain any additional noise the RX/TX add. My experience on the NS1, was that wired was marginally better.
@dB_Cooper Ok, I’m listening but the point at hand is that when Fios optical enters the house it is then changed over to coaxial and fed that way into my main box. The coaxial is then split off into the 2 old ass ethernet switches and fed via cat6 to all the wall plugs spread around the house. My innuos streamer NEEDS a wired ethernet connection to operate so wifi doesn’t help me there. I assume there is SOME noise injected it my stream bits by the coaxial run. That one main home run is where my OCD has focused, why did they not run fiber all the way into my box in the basement, why make the home run coaxial. How much am i losing there….ackk the OCD has my eyeball twitching… 
Yes, the switches need changing, i can probably do those myself, maybe just one optical fiber run split off the main verizon box outside the house to give me a direct homerun to the main system in the living room? Then leave the coaxial run for the rest of the house? Sheetrock will be patched once fresh paint is applied everywhere, that WILL eventually happen, it’s on the list.
A new router is also needed, i agree, my wifi does need help, yes the house is a bit oversized, i have some weak spots but almost all devices are plugged into the walls where it matters…. 
There’s some OCD to everything in the hobby! lol but I’ll better explain what the mesh is as it’s wireless (not necessarily Wi-Fi) connection between a main mesh router and the satellites. The main mesh router and the satellites all have an Ethernet out so you could attach an Ethernet switch to the satellite and what you wind up with is a hybrid wireless/wired network.
I will tell you though that I’d want fiber to the closest point possible to your main router as well, but it’s not a big deal. Copper is more than adequate for transmitting high speed data over short distances.
The real benefit of fiber is being able to isolate introduced noise or ground loops between two separate points. In data it doesn’t matter since packet switch TCP/IP data is a very robust error correcting protocol so there is nothing to fear in having that data go through an Ethernet or coaxial cable.
But a fiber backbone in the center of your house is a nice bragging right that’s for sure, just don’t throw stupid money at it to do it as a retrofit as you’ll likely see little to no benefit for it. Money you can put elsewhere in the chain.
Ok, that gives me some ideas to work with. I’ve got a HiFi shop custom home installer coming in next week to give me more ideas and actual price quotes on what we can realistically do to clean up power and bit transfers rates, jitter etc to the “nth degree”
Out of curiosity has anyone dabbled in the world of audio grade routers/hubs? My $100 MikroTik router has a $300 power supply attached to it. and it does make an improvement, certainly in the blacker blacks which was immediately noticeable. For a piece of hardware that would generally fall under the bits are bits argument, it was a pleasant outcome. Just wondering if anyone has delved further, clocking etc.
I’m thinking the low hanging fruit is the power, and then it gets more expensive from there.
Sadly I have, sadly it has been worthwhile. My current chain is somewhat now overloading with networking stuff. Currently my chain is going from a cisco nexus switch to an uptone etherregen w/ a mojo illuminati v3 psu connected via sfp w/ commscope teraspeed fiber, then going to an ediscreation fiber box ii extreme over jcat signature lan, then to a ediscreation silent switch ocxo extreme using the same type of cabling, using same type of cable to my antipodes k50
Basically looks like this, then from the K50 to either usb or aes reclocking to the dac
Anyone know how to change the arrowhead color in mermaid lol?
That silent switch looks like SERIOUS hardware… I’m almost afraid to look at the MSRP. lol
How far are you moving the data from the point of the Cisco switch? Also noting that you’re not using the original PS of the Etherregen how much do you think the benefit there is coming from the regen versus the upgraded PS?
I’m certainly willing to hunt down an Etherregen?
Lastly the JCAT cables look like the end all be all, from a low hanging fruit perspective, what does their inclusion in the chain add versus a a plain ol’ decent cat 8 or something like that?
I’ve seen some of the aerospace quality Ethernet cabling in bulk and it was crazy expensive, something like $80 a foot (and you needed specialized equipment to for termination) and I’m willing to bet that’s what those JCATs are about.
Around 1500 + some fees associated, was somewhat a pain to get but got from a friend, 800 base non extreme price
For specifics I’m using Finistar FTLX1475D3BTL transceivers (I previously used some from cisco I had lying around, but these actually sounded better (not joking)), and the cable is Commscope FFWLCLC42 and I think it’s a 25m long cable? I’d have to check when I get back
The power supply upgrade is worthwhile for the etherregen, noticeable upgrade
It’s worthwhile if you can run fiber to it
Personally I think the JCATs have a unique signature, they lend themselves to giving everything a technical boost overall with a more clean leaning signature but a bit of extra liquidity I haven’t found in other cables I’ve tried. I do think that presentation starts to lean more holographic and less organic than I personally like, but that’s somewhat made up for later down in the chain. I have tried other cables that were much less that offered almost similar level of technical ability, but the way these presented what they offer made them more enjoyable to listen to in my own system. Not the best value, but I got them cheaper as they are older (note I don’t have the gold version) so I decided to go with it. Previously I was just using some melco branded cables and also some self terminated cat7a that I previously found more satisfactory than some of the audio offerings I had tried up until that point, but I was experimenting with different switches and networking stuff during that time so perhaps I should revisit other options
Likely won’t really discuss this stuff anymore since it’s a touchy subject and I’m absolutely not going to try and convince people on any of this, I really hesitated to post anything about this as I’ve just been quietly enjoying it and never planned to talk about it. I have worked in networking my entire life, and this literally goes against everything I learned and know, so it’s really somewhat hard to stomach these changes personally. No I don’t know how it works, no I don’t know why, and at this point I don’t care either lol. It passed my blind a/b testing pretty easily so it’s staying for my personal setup. I also don’t really want to encourage people to get into trying this stuff either unless their system is really really high up there, there are more worthwhile things to spend your money on. I had tried audio networking stuff awhile ago, and it really didn’t do much in my setups beforehand, but now it’s reasonably impactful. Guess I’m just at the range where everything matters and I mean everything.
But seriously fucking how, it makes 0 sense. In my setup the quality of power argument is somewhat irrelevant, same with grounding, I can’t explain why the switch matters, the whole timing thing in theory shouldn’t matter whatsoever given the protocols and how the entire fucking internet works, but for some reason it’s mattering here. I don’t really know, I’ve given up, just going to deal with these apparently little fucking magic boxes that I can’t even thing of one feasible explanation how they do what they do.
But regardless of the above the most sane way to start things out is to just go with something like an etherregen or a fiber to copper converter (both with a nice power supply hopefully) to your streamer and go from there. Can be beneficial and at least I can see some of the reasoning behind it with full electrical isolation and less noise/interference (where I’m genuinely lost on other things I’ve tried like running multiple switches into each other for reclocking the signal multiple times and that’s improved sound)
This made me laugh out loud!
It’s nice to get your perspective, I’m very much satisfied with the tangible improvements I experience, life and practicality have to live alongside the hobby. Were I building a home from scratch today, I’d go all in on fiber in the to every room. I was quoted an obscene amount of money to run an Ethernet cable 20 feet through finished walls.
BTW, have you tried Wi-Fi 6 mesh?
It’s leaps an bound mo’ better than everything I’ve experience in Wi-Fi before. I’m specifically using a Netgear Nighthawk WiFi 6 Mesh network and powering them up with quality LPS.
Single digit ms ping rates and all for 1/4 the cost I was quoted for the custom run.
EDIT:
Actually seeing your expanded post, my theory of why it seems like magic that shouldn’t matter but it does is… processing, the cleaner the signal the less processing required to clean it up, the less generated noise. But what the fuck do I know, I’m just rationalizing away. Maybe God is an audiophile? LOL
Yes I just run some of the runs hung from the ceiling proper ghetto way lol, ain’t paying for that
No, only thing I have in terms of wifi is an aruba 310 series access point that covers my whole house no problem, then I have a separate router, switch, and ngfw. But it’s all wasted/crippled by poor provider lol, but I wasn’t going to pass up some of the deals I got from work so might as well have just to have basically
Like most things in audio, it’s best to not think about how and why and more focus on the results, since that’s what actually matters in the end. Doesn’t really matter of something should or shouldn’t work, what counts is if it actually works or it doesn’t. People get too caught up in trying to figure out why and how that they lose site of the real point of the hobby, almost fell for that, but the easiest solution was to stop caring lol. Although still make sure you aren’t tricking yourself or trying to justify things either, sometimes testing yourself or making sure you still care is worthwhile
Won’t be that, I’ll guarantee from tests I’ve run on networks, errors just don’t happen frequently enough to be audible in any way. Even on networks across multiple switches inside a huge building, you’d see much less than one retransmission an hour.
Point to point, I’d expect the time between errors to be days or weeks.
My guess is it’s probably noise, that’s somehow making onto a ground plane, but I’m not even sure how that works because network signaling is differential.
Optical isolation is an obvious win, but when you convert back to copper, the device you use probably introduces noise.
Honestly I’ve stopped trying to justify some of this stuff, I just go with what I think makes a significant difference in sound, though I’ll admit my willingness to pay to try something I can’t justify logically is limited.
And timing shouldn’t matter either, things are buffered and will be correctly relayed regardless of arrival order as well so the touting of better clocking shouldn’t matter in theory either
I mean even isolating the ground on the switch I have (since you can either isolate or connect the ground) does change the sound, but it doesn’t mean it’s always for the better either. For example my setup sounds better with connected ground when the fiber box ii is in front of the switch, without the fiber box I like isolate more. It’s all strange. That fiber box thing is real interesting as well, because I’m basically already going from fiber to copper with the etherregen, then into the fiber box which is basically taking a copper in from the etherregen turning it into fiber then going back to copper on the output for the switch. So in theory it shouldn’t matter since I’m already doing that with the etherregen, but it still sounds better with the fiber box. I will say at one point I had dual melco s100 that were connected together by fiber, and actually doubling up on switches sounded better than just a single switch, and mind you both were connected by fiber so that would mean it was purely clocking/routing making the difference. So pretty lost at this point lol
Just hurts thinking about it