I’d also recommend the UK-made Designacable Premium Belden CatSnake cables using Belfen 1305A broadcast cable, which sound significantly better to my ears, with a deeper more solid soundstage, greater bass extension and tonal fidelity and detail.
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Hi Michael
How did those sound when you first plugged them in?
And how long did they take to burn in?
I tried them And they sounded bad at first and I wasn’t patient enough to wait and let them run in and find out how good they really are.
Also, did you compare them directly to the Blue Jeans cables and any others?
Cheers
Jim
Was it the 5e catsnake or the 6? I’m enjoying the 5e very much but with 4 lengths of it in the chain from the Core. It took a week to shed most of the fruitiness from the bass and try directionality, I preferred it with the C of cat nearest the source end throughout.
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Just looked it up.
I got the same length cables, a 1 and a 3 m for 22 squid delivered cat 5e.
So a third of the price, but a lower spec cable, although technically perfectly good for the application.
Now I wish I’d known they do cat 6 and a really wish I’d given them longer chance to run in.
And I wish I’d thought to try em t’other way round.
Oh well.
On the bright side, the Blue Jeans cables are sounding really sweet and have definitely made a nice little improvement in my system, so I’m a happy bunny.
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Not tried those ones. BJC were best of the patch leads I tried. If I’d known they were Nottingham based and had made cables for The Stranglers and Madness then I’d have given them a go.
I have a run of basic cat6 of over 60 feet from my 24 port unmanaged switch in the basement directly to the ND555. I can’t imagine that adding a smaller switch in the HiFi room and then running a short length of “high end” Ethernet to the streamer should make a difference given that the vast majority of the distance is basic cat 6.
Am I missing something?
i think yes. And it would be not expensive way to try. For around 400 euros, a cisco 2960 8 ports ( less noisy than the 24 ports) and 1 m of audioquest vodka. You can even return both if not satisfied.
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I have Connectix Cat 6a around the house. There is only one wall port near my hifi rack and I need extra ports so I use a HP switch. I use BJC patch leads to connect devices to the switch and from the switch to the wall port.
If high end means top quality then my cables are high end, but if high end means expensive then they are not high end. A BJC patch lead is around $10 depending on length. I paid around $30 for the HP switch some 15 years ago.
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No, you should be good to go.
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They sounded crap new, woolly bass and dull midrange, only waking up after a few days and taking around a week to settle in. I’ve compared them directly to BJC Cat5e and 6, Audioquest Vodka, Wireworld Starlight, Sablon Super Pantela and cheapies and prefer them to the lot, especially for instrumental tone and texture.
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It’s the Cat5e in my case, which has definitely bested the Cat 6, 7 and 8 I’ve tried in my system
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Good Morning All,
First observation - BJC are based in the US not Nottingham?
We had the old ‘Dining Room’ ripped out and rebuilt two years ago, out with the lath and plaster and suspended timber floor all back to the 30" granite walls and earth floor. We now have a solid floor with UFH and ‘partition’ walls all around. At this time I ran a dedicated mains spur, Sat TV, BT, FM and ethernet cabling.
I wasn’t even aware of streaming at this point. If I had I would have done some reading and very probably installed the ‘best’ cable available at the time. As it is I ran several lengths of pretty standard cabling via assorted connectors up the wall, across the ceiling up the back of the bedroom wall above and into the roof and then back down and out of the wall on the landing to where the BT phone point is. (We now use an external aerial through ee for a our ‘broadband’ (unto 10Mb) as the BT landline is about 7.8km from the exchange with a rate of 1.3Mb).
This cable is connected to a Netgear GS108T-200 switch as is my recently bought/ installed Synology DS218j NAS.
I’m now wondering if I should have run a single length and can see I’ll need to have a high quality cable made up and run it direct from the switch to the streamer to do a comparison.
Regards
Richard
Kind of what I’d expect… certainly with the older streamers with semi continuous media transfer, the Cat5e cables have often slightly finer conductors, which means the serial switching voltages on the wires are (slightly more) attenuated resulting in potentially reduced coupling noise to the remote host compared to a higher bandwidth cable of the same length.
With the newer streamers with relatively short transfers of media and then relatively very long pauses of media transport activity, this has less of a bearing and is more to do in my opinion of common mode noise and RF stub effect of the cable… ethernet data transmission probably has very little to do with it. With the later streamers I suspect cable geometry/construction coupled with environment has more to do with with any detected differences in sound.
If directionality comes into play, then it’s possible, if screened, one end is grounded and the other isn’t, and/or common mode currents are flowing to or from the host streamer… as far as Ethernet transfer itself on the serial lines, for duplex connections, you have separate wires for each direction and the flow is twoway. Therefore directionality and difference in sound will I suspect largely depend on environment rather than network/Ethernet related.
FWIW I use the AM (or SSB with a bandscope) radio test to try and detect and reduce the effects of environmental interactions, which can otherwise be a bit of a lottery to iron out.
What interesting is that the BJC and Designacable leads all use Belden bonded cables of the same gauge, except that the BJC are solid whereas the Designacable are stranded. In addition, the latter - being a catsnake for broadcast use - has much thicker and more robust sheathing.
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It’s Designacable who are in Nottingham, which saves a pony on the postage from where I’m sitting.
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Yes, that’s why I only paid £22 for the same 2 cables from them (that I returned too early in burn in) then spent £60 buying the same length Belden(/Belkin?)-manufactured Blue Jeans cables from the U.S.
Doh!
You need to read my post in the context of the post from @Michaelb which I replied to. I did not know of Designacable, the company he referred to, but they seem very good and supply cables to well respected professional musicians.
Yes BJC is a US based company in Seatle, but Designacable is based in Beeston, which is about 3.5 miles southwest of Nottingham city centre.
FWIW: I have been buying my BJ cables on Amazon (U.S.). I don’t know if they are also available on amazon.co.uk
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Yes but ‘out of stock’.
G
There is a BJC UK web site but the cables are still shipped from the US. I have some 12G SDI cables (ordered from the US site) I use for SPDIF duties that knock spots off Chords digital offerings at 10 times the price.
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