Handmade high-end LAN cable

johnmicheal

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I have build this LAN cable 1,5meter length

AudioQuest Carbon RJ/E Cat 7 5% Silver conductors

TELEGARTNER MFP8 CAT.8.1 T568B High-End Ethernet RJ45 Cat 8.1 Metal - highest quality available currently

Final touch with ABS expandable sleeving and AUDIOPHONICS Heat-shrink tubing for direction

All these items purchased from Europe

This cost me around Euro 200

Even Audioquest Vodka and Diamond don't use Telegartner top of line connector.

LAN cable changes sound quality specially Roon +Tidal setup. There was a great improvement in sound quality over the stock cable.
 

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Not sure how but keep in mind though that in 0 and 1, 1 is indicated by electrical voltage.
So, the if voltage is below a certain threshold a 1 transmitted at the source would be received as a 0? Normally there should be error checking mechasims built into digital transmission systems to see what is transmitted is accurately receieved. Or its not the same ? Other wise the whole digital transmission idea itself is flawed.
 
So, the if voltage is below a certain threshold a 1 transmitted at the source would be received as a 0? Normally there should be error checking mechasims built into digital transmission systems to see what is transmitted is accurately receieved. Or its not the same ? Other wise the whole digital transmission idea itself is flawed.

The problem is cable, that together with carrying you 0 and 1s, can carry some impurities too (EMI/RFI). These special cable manufacturers try to minimize this phenomena. A very simple analogy will be - when you open door for guests, together with guests, some mosquitoes too fly in and become nuisance later on.

I too had similar kind of opinion as yours a few years ago but things are different now.
 
The problem is cable, that together with carrying you 0 and 1s, can carry some impurities too (EMI/RFI). These special cable manufacturers try to minimize this phenomena. A very simple analogy will be - when you open door for guests, together with guests, some mosquitoes too fly in and become nuisance later on.

I too had similar kind of opinion as yours a few years ago but things are different now.
That analogy has nothing to do with audio. If the dac has good mechanism to isolate emi, then the cable wont make a difference . I had some issues with chord mojo and that was some static noise along with the sound with a bad cable. But after i bought a audioquest cinnamon (after readig reviews) the static went away, but literally the sound was same except the noise was absent. But on my old cable the static wasnt always there
So at an instance when the static noise is not there, they were virtually identical.

One thing i noticed was a slight increase in loudness somehow with one of the cable at rhe same level. But on a level match they are still identical.

Edit:
Actually your analogy is not bad. you could just install a mosquito net on the door to keep them away.
 
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That analogy has nothing to do with audio. If the dac has good mechanism to isolate emi, then the cable wont make a difference . I had some issues with chord mojo and that was some static noise along with the sound with a bad cable. But after i bought a audioquest cinnamon (after readig reviews) the static went away, but literally the sound was same except the noise was absent. But on my old cable the static wasnt always there
So at an instance when the static noise is not there, they were virtually identical.

One thing i noticed was a slight increase in loudness somehow with one of the cable at rhe same level. But on a level match they are still identical.
I think this means good cable will reduce noise..
Noise reduction will make the apparent volume louder.
 
I have not tried Ethernet and audio quality corelation, and yes it is hard to believe that network cables can matter. however as i read articles about it, i feel i am kind of slowly believing it.

anything connected physically has a effect on one another. if it was wifi instead of ethernet wire, then such differences would not be there. reason is galvanic isolation. read somewhere that even though Ethernet has galvanic isolation by design, it is not 100% immune to it. so there is a impact may be at micro voltage / micro current level and that creeps at the receiving end. and that changes the final sound.
 
I think this means good cable will reduce noise..
Noise reduction will make the apparent volume louder.
And loud is perceived as more clear ..;) or not? .. actually now i am having second thoughts!! I wish i had not sold the mojo and the cable .. serioulsly want to try this once again although back then i was convinced that on same loudness level i couldnt make out the difference between the cables.
 
And loud is perceived as more clear ..;) or not? .. actually now i am having second thoughts!! I wish i had not sold the mojo and the cable .. serioulsly want to try this once again although back then i was convinced that on same loudness level i couldnt make out the difference between the cables.
More clear can be perceived as more louder..
As noise has masking effect..

I'm not sure about this though..
Don't have much cable related experience.
 
Cables are beyond technical logic, your ears are the best friend to judge.

Almost all big brands making LAN cable and USB cable. These are available from $50 - $5000 price range.

My intension was to start this post, LAN cable can be made easily at home, no soldering required and a big amount of money can be saved.
 
comparison method was back to back listening and hear the difference
Did you try to compare with Cat 8 cable on Amazon India??
I found it to be better than Cat 6 cables I was using earlier. Difference was quite evident when the Source (MacBook in my Case) and NAS cable was replaced with Cat 8.

By the way, the most easily audible difference was from adding a LPSU to the Router and Desktop Switch instead of Walmart SMPS they're bundled with. YMMV!
 
I tried Linear power supply with Router,it improves bass response and highs, but you will loose soul/musicility.May be in future I will upgrade stock SMPS with graham slee/IFI smps.
 
The problem is cable, that together with carrying you 0 and 1s, can carry some impurities too (EMI/RFI). These special cable manufacturers try to minimize this phenomena. A very simple analogy will be - when you open door for guests, together with guests, some mosquitoes too fly in and become nuisance later on.

I too had similar kind of opinion as yours a few years ago but things are different now.
Best analogy lol. But yeah into the depths of it, each signal (especially fast switching digital signals) will carry noise on the data line and also the return currents and emi on the ground line. There is line to line, line to ground effects and also emi from external environment. Assuming some random "isolator" at the receiving end is going to eliminate this completely is more fairytale than reality. If you think of transformer coupled galvanic isolation, you cannot guarantee full isolation because Maxwell's 4th law (which by the way has been fairly well established to be a valid model for analysis) ensures things will still creep in through and also the fact that real world magnetic properties of materials deviate a lot from ideality. If you're thinking optical isolation would fix it, you'd again be wrong since photon emission is a probabilistic process and same goes for absorption, it is quite hard to build a high speed optical isolator and even if you build, there is likely to be significant jitter introduced and if you try to cancel out jitter by special electronic design or signal regeneration, it'll yet again be a digital switching logic which will once again spur noise into the stream!

You don't need to flip a bit to cause issues with analog circuits like dacs and amplifiers. Ground stability problems, problems in clocks, etc will manifest in the output fidelity. If you try to make a design insensitive to these changes, more often than not such a design will also be filtering out useful signals along with it which means loss of fidelity. This can be thought of as a case of source insensitivity as opposed to absolute immunity.

And no, sine sweep tests, FFT donot necessarily characterize these effects. All of those are approximations that don't necessarily convey the full random signal performance of any system. They are useful for basic functionality testing, but for proper analysis of fidelity of a system, more rigorous methods may be needed, which may or may not be possible with limited budget, but thankfully we have an amazing hearing mechanism which can be the final arbiter for our choice/preference.

Best place to fix a source of noise is at the point where it is introduced. This is the reason I am more into pc+low noise software+decent cables. Even in this there cannot be guaranteed complete immunity/noise free structure (though better than letting it behave noisy here and trying to filter later, which will always leave residuals) since real world is always random, and what we could do further is try to detune/decorrelate these by specific buffering/cable length/cable shield changing schemes that can be adapted to the particular environment you are in. Ifi gemini cables come with the option to move a slider that can help in changing the antenna effect pattern on the wires. Phasure lush cable has options to change the grounding/shielding patterns on the fly.
 
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