Cat6A for infrastructure wiring

Just to focus on my question;

Using Cat6a solid core cable throughout the house … Should I use standard plastic jack plug unshielded sockets or the metal Cat6A (shielded?) ones … or doesn’t it make any difference?

Someone suggested that the patch leads should have metal connectors at one end for earth grounding, but this might be incorrect.

Fibre is very cheap, if anything even cheaper than (non-audiophile grade) Ethernet. Despite Simon’s advice above, I use it to connect from my router to switches around the house to provide a ‘backbone’. Rather than using FMCs, I use Cisco switches with SFPs, which have very quiet built in PSUs. From there, I run regular Cat5e patch cables.
The reason I did this is that our house is very exposed to lightning strikes, and we’ve been hit 3 times so far, always via the phone line. On one occasion this found its way through the router and into the network cables, causing considerable damage. Another benefit is that the cables are thin, and were easier to feed through half metre thick stone walls.
Does it sound any better than copper Ethernet cables? Not that I’ve noticed so far.

Exactly, fibre is significantly cheaper than twisted pair… it’s just less flexible and harder to terminate reliably.
Chris, my advice is fibre can be good to connect switches, especially over longer lengths, which appears what you are doing… so more inline rather despite…
The point I was making was about me not recommending the use of fibre for the streamer segment, as Naim don’t support fibre connections, so a potentially noisy and certainly less reliable than a direct twisted pair connection media converter(s) would need to be used… and one would still be connecting twisted pair into the streamer.

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Yes, my fibre runs are a longer than your average patch cable at around 20m between switches, although of course copper Ethernet cables would have been well up to it. Another reason for the fibre was that one run really needed to go around my consumer unit, and I thought it might have been more resistant to any interference from the big bundle of mains cables that are just a few inches away.

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