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2 min read technology

Connect Your Vinyl Player to Your Speakers Using an Ethernet Cable

Preserve the aesthetics of your setup and enjoy high quality audio along the way by connecting everything using Ethernet to RCA converters.

Vinyl records have had quite the revival in recent years, and many music enthusiasts have rediscovered the pleasure of listening to their (or their parents’) favorite albums on a turntable. However, a turntable can’t play loud enough on its own, it needs to be connected to an audio outlet. Depending on your type of vinyl player, you might even need a pre-amp which increases the sound before it even hits your speakers. This can be done in a variety of ways depending on your unique setup. I have my system set up like this: 

	graph LR
	A[Vinyl Player] --"RCA Cable"--> B[Pre-amp] 
	B --"RCA Cable"--> C[Monitor Speakers]

(If you like these diagrams and use ghost.org as your publishing platform, check out my other post on adding mermaid diagrams to your content.)

Recently, I rearranged some furniture which placed the vinyl player further away from the speakers with a door in between. I researched some possible solutions to get the audio signal to the speakers as my RCA cable setup now was too short (I am aware that all options degrade the signal, but I also don’t consider myself an audiophile so that’s fine to me):

  • Bluetooth: too expensive for my needs, would probably be laggy and noticeably losing audio quality
  • really long RCA cable: most I found were black and rather wide, which would be too noticeable across the door. Also, not too many 3+m cables to go around.

While searching for those flat RCA cables I stumbled upon the fact that Ethernet cables are capable of sending audio signals over long distances (~100m). Doing some more research I found a set of RCA to Ethernet converter boxes. Together with a long flat CAT7 Ethernet cable, they seemed like an optimal solution to my problem.

You'll need to of these Audio CAT5 Extenders (they'll work with CAT7 as well)

Having ordered two of these boxes and laid the Ethernet cable, my new setup across a greater distance and a door is now:

	graph TD
	A[Vinyl Player] --"RCA Cable"--> B[Pre-amp] 
	B --"RCA Cable"--> C[Audio CAT5 Extender]
    C -."Ethernet Cable\n(this is the long distance)".-> D[Audio CAT5 Extender]
    D --"RCA Cable"--> E[Monitor Speakers]

I'm really glad I learned about this aspect of Ethernet cables as it allows me to have a more flexible layout regarding audio sources and outputs.

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