Thread: Fiber to Listening Room

I recently had a post to the -Cutting the Cord- thread in the TV section of the site.

In it we dropped TV service and only kept 500 mbs from Frontier.
In doing this I chose to eliminate all of the coaxial cable in the system and replace all but one run with CAT8 for better shielding.

In my listening room I previously had coaxial from the ONT fiber box, to a MOCA switch and ethernet from there to my listening room switch. My belief was that not running through the router was a much better approach. I thought I would have a less contaminated signal.

For all of the cable changes I was going to make I needed to run 1 1/4" PVC conduit along the side of the house under a hallway where the ONT was located. It ended up with a few pull elbows and cutting access panels in storage rooms to get to inaccessible areas to run the conduit to the new Archer router location.

At the opposite end this also gave me the ability to run the conduit into a removable panel I cut into the hallway floor framing space from underneath, outside.

I was then able to drill a hole through the top of one floor joists and through the bottom plate of a wall in my listening room.

One advantage of being able to lift off all of the absorption panels on the walls is I have access to run wires anywhere I want in that listening room and bedrooms on either side at that end of the house. Some of it through the attic crawl space though.

The first thing I did was use one of the runs of CAT 8 and connected it to the NetGear switch bypassing the coax and MOCA switch I had been using. I was instantly stunned at slight improvement in imaging and silence in the background. I never thought the coax and MOCA switch was that bad.

With all the CAT 8 cables pulled to include one to drive the new Router, I moved to the last cable. This was a 25 meter Corning single mode fiber pair to my listening room through the conduit.

This was connected to a new LHY brand FMC fiber-ethernet conversion with built in LPS and OCXO clock. At the other end, in the listening room it was connected to a new LHY - SW-6 switch with built in LPS and OCXO clock. Both ends used a Finisar SFP Transceivers for the fiber.

Again there was a slight but noticeable improvement in the sound. I am very happy with the results with one exception.

My 70 year old body is not happy with all of the crawling under, around and over things to run all the cables.
It is worth it but it added a couple of extra trips to the Chiropractor in the last 2 weeks.

Congrats with your new cabling setup. Next time it may be better to hire a young person for connecting. It saves some trips to the chiropractor.