Well, it's your right to believe what ever you will...

While I didn't do more that cursorily skim the link you posted, isn't that discussing speaker cables, carrying a speaker-level analog signal? Not terribly relevant when discussing Speakerlink, which is carrying a logic-level, digital audio signal and some RS-232 comms data.

Frankly, I'm a bit shocked that Meridian has concluded that there's a difference in Cat5/Cat6 cabling. At 96kHz sampling and 24-bit (roughly a 6Mbit/sec datarate), the digital audio being sent on Speakerlink just isn't all that taxing of a signal to transfer. Especially compared to, say, 100Mb/s Ethernet, which is a 125Mhz signal. These twisted pair cables are designed for bandwidths in the 100's of Megahertz.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the digital audio is being sent as a balanced-pair, which means it has pretty darn good common-mode noise rejection as it is. Shielding will certainly help with noise, but seems like overkill to me.

Just my $0.02...

Dan W.

Current: Anthem MRX300, B&W Matrix 804 Front L/R, B&W Matrix HTM Center, B&W Matrix 805 Surround L/R, PS3, Squeezebox v3, Popcorn Hour A100

Retired: 568.1, 562v2, 596, 558, DSP5000 Mk1 24/96, DSP5000C Mk1 24/96