I’ve never heard that before, and these days the cable doesn’t even need to be a cross-over cable. Cat 6 is fine.
As far as your switch is concerned I don’t know enough about it to give advice. The only thing I’ve heard about switches is that so-called “green” switches sometimes cause problems for applications that are streaming high quantities of real time data like audio.
DG
It must be a switch with a power saving mode.
how exactly do you intend to network? are you using VE PRO?
for real low latency sample slave ability you need to have good equipment.
onboard GB network wont cut it unless working @ 512 buffer is ok for you.
you might be able to get away with adding a good (intel) 1GB network card per system and buying a very good switch.
for lowest latency you would want 10GBe cards and switch… now you are talking well over $1000 just for 3 cards never mind the switch.
i do a lot of Vienna systems
FYI anything with the word “green” in it no way… the last thing you want is a switch attempting any power saving.
even with the added intel cards you would have to go into the device manager then power management of the cards and make sure all that crap is off…
no bodies onboard works right massively limited bandwidth and resource allocation. (too many interupts)
For example, if sending midi via ethernet from master is better than 5-pin, yet getting low latencies returning the audio from slave(s) via ASIO sound cards.
thats the old school way worked 15 yrs ago and still works just a cluster of a mess
moving into todays way
VE Pro and only 1 audio interface
but again minimum is seperate 1GB nics and a good switch.
ideal is as i said 10GBe cards (you can run direct without a switch and if you buy 1 card with dual ports then you could use 2 slaves) a swtich is around 3K+