Moving it all to the basement was better - for those upstairs, anyway - but the noise level was catastrophic for my audio system. Moving all of that to a closet helped the noise, until everything overheated. The “why not” happened sometime later, with family, and the forced-realization that it might not be okay to have Harrier jets on landing approach, continuously bound for the living room. Given my professional history, I got most of that stuff super cheap, so I figured, why not.
Like many IT professionals, I invested significant time and attention in my home network out of interest, and not just because of surreptitious Gremlin activity. At the height of the frenzy, there were racks of Cisco enterprise-class switches, a router, a firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, monitoring and (much later) copious amounts of network-attached storage.
But the problems, though ameliorated, never entirely dissipated. I’ve always had networking issues at home. And while this may seem to be a great time dust off your flame-throwers, I respectfully suggest you hold your horses for a bit. Which is why I recently asked Steve Silberman of Audioquest to send me some network cables. And assuming that it’s not hazardous to do so, perhaps some personal exploration is warranted. Said another way, when a non-zero number of trusted people (that are not cretins, shills, or fools) tell you that a beloved self-acknowledged bias (there’s no way Ethernet cables should matter) is unjustified, the wise course is to - at least - take a moment and take stock. I’ve written about all of this before, so I’ll not re-torch old, burned, salted ground, but the Graham Argument is, perhaps, the most cogent I’ve ever seen underscoring the role of the witness. All three arguments are a little different, and addressing the epistemic (under what conditions we’d know if they’d make a difference), the moral (are these “magic” cables, at best, just bandaids on bad designs?), and the metaphysical (doesn’t physical theory rule out any possibility of any impact at all/aren’t people just “fooling themselves”?) strains individually (and adequately) will require a different, and potentially distinct, approach … even if it’s like using a shotgun to kill ants. As you probably know, there’s a “debate” going on around the world of audiophile cables, whether they do make a difference, whether they ought to make a difference, and most strongly, whether it is even possible that they make a difference.
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